The Planning & Communication Rhythm
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"It's when your business is stressed that you need that planning and communication rhythm more than any other time."
–Mike Goldman
Unlocking Team Success: Mastering Three Key Disciplines
Overview of the Three Disciplines
1. Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Analogous to monitoring vital systems like blood pressure in the human body, ensuring the business operates healthily.
2. Aligning Around a Small Number of Priorities: Compared to exercising for strength, focusing on a few priorities strengthens the business.
3. Planning and Communication Rhythm: Essential for maintaining the team's operational flow, likened to the human body's need for consistent breathing.
Exploring the Human Body Metaphor for Team Execution
- KPIs represent the vital systems necessary for daily operation.
- Priorities are the exercises that build strength and resilience.
- Planning and Communication are as critical as breathing for survival and stress management.
Deep Dive into Planning and Communication Rhythm
- Described as foundational, akin to breathing for the human body, it becomes more crucial under stress.
The Essential Eight Meetings for Effective Team Planning
1. Annual Planning Retreat: A two-day offsite meeting to outline long-term vision and immediate goals.
2. Quarterly Planning Session: Focuses on the past quarter's review and plans for the next quarter, emphasizing adaptability to change.
3. Monthly Check-ins and Education: Half-day sessions for tracking progress on quarterly plans and incorporating educational elements.
4. Weekly Accountability Meeting: Centers on progress and accountability for quarterly priorities and KPIs.
5. Daily Huddle: A quick stand-up meeting for sharing updates and addressing immediate concerns.
6. Ad Hoc Meetings: Scheduled as needed for urgent discussions on opportunities or issues.
7. Quarterly/Monthly Town Hall Meetings: Aimed at communicating with the wider organization and fostering a two-way dialogue.
8. Weekly/Biweekly One-on-One Meetings: Alternates between feedback/accountability and coaching, emphasizing direct report development.
The Power of Consistent Planning and Communication
- Emphasizes the importance of not canceling these critical meetings, even under stress.
- Consistency in these meetings fosters a stronger leadership team and, by extension, a more successful organization.
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There are three key disciplines of great execution, and if you want a team that has the ability to commit to the right things, get those things done, hold each other accountable, and just increase the chances of succeeding day after day after day with less drama and not more, As a team, you need to master three disciplines.
We're going to drill into one of them on the show, but I want to tell you what the three are and, and, and I want to use the human body as a metaphor. For this, and the three disciplines, number one is what I call measuring what matters or measuring key performance indicators, understanding how to measure success. Two are aligning around a small number of priorities and the three disciplines.
Number three, and this is the one we're going to drill into today is what I call the, the planning and communication rhythm.
Now, the human body metaphor is that I want us to think of.
Key performance indicators, measuring those things that matter. The first discipline, think of that as the major systems we need to keep running within our body.
Things like the nervous system, the digestive system. That's what KPIs are all about. It's just making sure that, you know, day in and day out. Things are running as they should run. Kind of like we talk about working in the business or working on the business. Your, key performance indicators are measuring that you're working on the business.
So like the human body measuring, you know, your blood sugar level or measuring your blood pressure, measuring that your systems are working. Right. And in a healthy way every day. So, that's, key performance indicators or measuring those things that matter.
The second is aligning around a small number of priorities.
Think of priorities as, exercising to get stronger. Aligning around a small number of priorities usually means focusing on working on the business rather than in the business, making your business stronger.
And then the third discipline, which is the planning and communication rhythm. I want you to think of that as the, the most foundational part of the human body.
Think of it as, breathing. And what happens is just like when you are stressed out, It impacts your breathing. You may not be breathing as deeply, or you may stop breathing, you know, for 10 seconds and you know, to calm down, you've got to start breathing again. That's what the planning and communication rhythm or the meeting rhythm is like.
And what happens is when a team or a leader or a company gets stressed is going through some drama. They, wind up. Canceling meetings or having the meetings, but focusing on the wrong things, not following the agenda that needs to be followed on that meeting.
Just like when your body is stressed, you need to keep that breathing going.
It's when your business is stressed that you need that planning and communication rhythm more than any other time. And that's the time. People start canceling their weekly meetings. We're too busy. We're not going to have our weekly meetings. You know, one person is out. We're not not going to have our weekly meeting or we normally have our weekly meeting where we're going to hold everybody accountable, but we're not going to do that today.
We're going to focus on something else. Stop doing that. So that's the one we're going to focus on today is the planning and communication rhythm, and I'm going to share with you.
Eight different types of meetings slash planning sessions that I believe you need to be having. It may not be the only eight, but I'm going to cover what I think is the most important eight.
And, and I'm going to start with the, the longest meetings and the, the most infrequent meetings and then get kind of shorter and more frequent as we go down.
So the first one is the annual planning retreat for my clients. We typically do those annual planning retreats over two days, two days of full, you know working.
It's not two days. And one of them is we're out hiking and doing a lot of fun stuff. If my teams want to do fun stuff, they'll add a third day, but we've got to focus two days on the business. And we normally do that somewhere offsite. And the reason why we do it offsite It's really twofold. One is getting off site, just changes the scenery, gets you thinking a little differently, makes you more creative.
offsite typically means you're going to spend more time together having lunch, dinner, whatever else you're doing. So you bond as a team. It also means being offsite is you have less interruptions. I find when I do meetings with clients on site, every 10 minute break turns into a 20 minute break because people are getting hijacked in the hallway.
So. We want to do it over two days. We want to do it off site. The point of the annual meeting is to think both long term and short term. It's to discuss, review, create the long term vision of the organization. Things like, making sure you've got your core purpose of the organization accurate. You've got your big, hairy, audacious goal that everybody's behind.
You've got the three year vision for your business with the strategies behind it. So it's longterm view. It's short term view. If that's where we want to be three years, 10 years, 15 years from now, it's that's, if that's the purpose we've got to live every day, what do we need to do this year. What are our top priorities?
What are the major targets we've got to hit? What do we need to do over the next quarter? Who's accountable? How are we going to measure and hold people accountable for how it's getting done? The annual planning retreat is also a time That you're going to look at talent. How are we doing on talent? Where do we need to strengthen our talent?
Where do we have superstars that we need to challenge or re recruit or give more responsibility to, do career planning with? Where do we have underperformers that we may need to make difficult decisions on, or at least understand how we're coaching them. It's also a time for maybe some, some, education on some new tools.
It's certainly a time to brainstorm new ideas, new issues, new opportunities. It's also a time to make sure you're bonding together as a team. So number one, the annual planning retreat.
Number two is the quarterly planning session. Now the quarterly planning session is also two days. But as opposed to looking long term purpose, big hairy audacious goal, three year, we may do a quick check on those in a quarterly planning meeting.
But the goal of the quarterly planning meeting is to say, how did we do last quarter? What did we learn from last quarter? What are our new opportunities? What are the issues we need to brainstorm, discuss, decide upon? All so that we can create the plan for the next quarter. Now, quarterly planning is such an important part.
I think, the philosophy, every, company needs to have some companies, man. I remember my old days back in my days, management consulting.
Every three years or so a company would do a three to five year strategic plan, and then companies got a little smarter and said, well, every year we're going to do, we're, we're going to do that every year, not every three to five years, but the problem with just doing that, and of course, I guess, talked about the annual planning retreat.
So, of course I'm going to suggest you do that. But. The problem with it is three to five months after the annual planning retreat is completed, the world has changed. New issues, new opportunities, new ideas, economic differences, whatever it is, your competition changes. The world changes. so quarterly planning is a time that you're going to look back at the annual plan and say, that still makes sense.
And if it doesn't, let's change it. If it does, let's figure out what the next 90 days looks like. So we're going to look at the year. We're going to look back at how we did last quarter. We're going to plan the next quarter. What are the quarterly priorities? What I call rocks. What are the KPIs? How are we going to hold people accountable?
What issues, opportunities do we need to talk about? And again, every quarter we're going to assess talent within the organization. Who's performing at an A level, B level, C level, toxic C level. What action do we need to take to improve our organization's talent density? Percent overperformers minus percent underperformers.
That quarterly planning session is also a time where you may introduce some new tools, new techniques. I have clients that read a book together every quarter and talk about what from that book
what are they committing to inject into their DNA as an organization? That's such an important part of continuously improving and developing the leadership team.
So, so number one part of the planning and communication rhythm was the annual planning retreat. Number two was your quarterly planning session.
Number three, I call the, the monthly check in and education. Session. So where is the annual plan was two days. The quarterly plan was two days, the monthly meeting, maybe a half day.
Some of my clients have that as much as a full day meeting, but normally it's a half day meeting I've seen it. Run two to three hours as well. I like a half day. The reason I like a half day is the purpose of the monthly check in and education session.
As the name implies, it's a monthly check in on how we're doing on the quarterly plan. We don't want to wait to the end of the quarter to, to realize that we're off track. Or to realize we've got the wrong plan. Maybe in this case, the world changed in a month, not three to five months. So we need to create some different.
Quarterly priorities, or we need to measure things differently, or we've got to change our plans. So, in the monthly check in an education, one of the things you can do is make sure that your quarterly priorities, your rocks, are still the right rocks. They're still prioritized in the right way. They, the way you're, planning to get them done.
The measures you're using to track whether they're getting done. So all that makes sense. You're also going to use that as a time to hold folks accountable for making progress on their rocks, on their KPIs. You're also going to use that as a time as you would in annual planning and quarterly planning, it's called monthly check in and education, because again, you may be.
Experimenting or learning some new tools, new techniques, talking about some, education that may be important to continuously develop and improve the leadership team. So that was number three, annual planning, quarterly planning, monthly check in and education.
Number four is the weekly accountability meeting. The weekly accountability meeting. Is where accountability lives or dies. Notice what I did not call it. I didn't call it the weekly status meeting.
It drives me nuts to hear weekly status meetings where I will listen in. And I do sometimes, listen in to a weekly accountability meeting for my clients to help them improve it. And what I hear is. So Susan, what do you have going on? Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. I did this. I did this. I didn't do that.
I meant to do this. I tried to do this. Joe, what do you have going on? I didn't get a chance to do this, but who cares? We all have work to do the weekly accountability meeting should be about 45 minutes, maybe an hour at the most. And the focus of it is very specifically holding folks on the team accountable for making progress on their quarterly priorities or rocks to meeting their weekly key performance indicators for getting done those tasks.
They committed. To get done and may also be a time to identify issues that are standing in the way, but there may not be time in the weekly accountability meeting to brainstorm all of those issues. Some of my clients have an hour long meeting and they've got the accountability part down so well that 30 minutes.
And by the way, having a tool, a lot of my clients use something called metronome growth systems. It could be a Google sheet for all I care, but having a tool where you could see. Your, quarterly priorities and your KPIs, red, yellow, green, you know, up on a screen for all to see is a key part that's going to allow that meeting to go faster.
So you can only talk about those things you need to talk about, and if you do it right, that may take you 20 or 30 minutes, and then you could use the remaining 30 minutes or so in the meeting, maybe to brainstorm some issues, some opportunities. Make some key decisions. That weekly meeting is the one that I see either Totally bastardized and screwed up where .Leadership teams don't talk about what they're supposed to talk about.
They get together and they say let's talk about what's going on And they don't focus on what most what's most important the quarterly priorities the KPIs Those priority things they committed to do the weekly meetings.
They totally lose focus as they just go off on tangents for 45 minutes or an hour.
And then everybody goes back to work and says, I'll never get that time of my life back. So I've seen people screw up the weekly accountability meeting that way. The other way I've seen it screwed up almost as often is they just cancel the damn meeting. It's an easy one to cancel because things get in the way just like we've got to keep breathing in and out you've got to have that weekly accountability meeting if you want to have great execution and great discipline So that's the fourth the weekly accountability meeting.
The fifth is the daily huddle. The daily huddle is a stand up.
You know, or phone in, but it's a stand up seven to ten minute meeting, check in normally sometime in the beginning of the day, although it could be the end of the day. And it's just a way to speed decision making, build relationships, get a better idea of what's going on just by having people go through and round robin format, you know,
Let's everybody share. Good news. Good news. Good news. Good news. Good news. What's your,you know, what, where are you challenged? Where are you stuck? And again, you're not going to solve it there. Just like you may not solve everything in a weekly meeting in a 7 to 10 minute meeting. You may raise an issue and then say, okay, you know, who do you need to solve that?
Could you solve that on your own or do you need anyone else to sell? Well, I need your help on it later. Great. Let's get together later. All right. You're just uncovering that. So it's typically good news. Round robin. Where are you stuck? Round robin. And then what's your top priority for the day? Great information.
If it's not happening in 7 to 10 minutes, you're doing it wrong. That's number five.
Number six are ad hoc meetings. You don't want to wait until a quarterly meeting or an annual meeting or even a monthly meeting to discuss key issues that need to be discussed. And as I said, there may not be enough time in a weekly meeting to do the brainstorming you need to make the decisions on key opportunities, key issues.
So there are times where a major opportunity or major issue comes up in a weekly meeting or, or in a daily huddle. And the answer may be to create an ad hoc meeting, you know
Hey, let's get something on the schedule for first thing tomorrow. We need to spend 90 minutes and hash that out. So those are meetings.
Those ad hoc meetings are meetings that will happen from time to time. Then I want to talk about, about two that are a little bit, a little bit different because the first six annual planning retreat, quarterly planning, monthly check in and education, weekly accountability, daily huddle. Those are all what I would call leadership team meetings.
Now, by the way, once the leadership team gets it right, those same meetings, maybe shorter versions ought to cascade down the organization, but those are all kind of within the leadership team. The last two, number seven and eight that I want to talk about are a little bit different.
The seventh is the quarterly or the monthly town hall meeting.
The rhythm within the leadership team is a beautiful thing if you do it right, but if you don't cascade that information out and down, or some of that information out and down throughout the organization, you're going to be stuck. And you're going to wind up as a leadership team being very frustrated that no one else knows what the hell is going on.
So having a monthly or a quarterly town hall typically run by the CEO and different members of the leadership team to communicate out. Now, major announcements here are the priorities for the next quarter. Here's some of the things going on. Here's people we want to recognize for the great work they did.
Here's some things we ought to be thinking about moving forward, taking questions from the group, allowing people to ask the tough questions, seeding. Tough questions in the audience where you need to until people feel comfortable enough asking those tough questions on their own. These town hall meetings monthly or quarterly are so important to make sure the rest of the organization understands what's going on.
And also for you to hear that feedback coming up. So it's not just top down, it's bottoms up as well. You're hearing some concerns and questions from the group. So that's number seven and number eight. So critical.
Number eight is the weekly or at worst biweekly one on one meeting for leaders meeting one on one with their direct reports.
I did a whole other podcast episode. called Let's Dump the Annual Performance Review, where I get into the, the details and nitty gritty of the weekly, of the weekly one on one meeting. But I'll keep it high level here. The weekly, I believe there are two different types of weekly one on one meeting.
And if you do it right, you alternate these odd and even weeks. One type of weekly one on one, I call the feedback and accountability meeting. In the feedback and accountability meeting as a leader, it's your agenda. You're meeting with your direct report one on one, you're spending 30 or 45 minutes for the sole purpose of giving them feedback on what they're doing.
Well, feedback on where, where you need to see them improved and you, and you're holding them accountable for the things they've committed to. Moving priorities forward, tasks, projects, KPIs, whatever it is you need to hold them accountable to. And you're also setting some goals for the next time you get together.
Here's what I want to see from you before we get together next. So there's the feedback and accountability meeting as the leader, that's your agenda. The second type of one on one. Again, you alternate these even and odd weeks, second type of one on one, I just call the coaching one on one in the coaching one on one.
It's not your agenda as the leader. It's your direct reports agenda. They are coming to you with something specific that they need to know. that they need help with your job is not to solve their problem in a minute and give them advice. Your job is to ask them questions so they could surface the right action for them, which may be different than what the right action would be for you.
And also so you could ask questions that help them model a way of thinking. So the one on one meeting is critical and if you don't have the time to have effective weekly or at worst biweekly one on one meetings with every direct report, then you should not have anybody reporting to you. That's how important those one on one meetings are.
So quick review.
We've talked about eight different parts of the planning and communication rhythm. Annual planning retreat, number one, number two, quarterly planning, number three, monthly check in and education. Number four, the weekly accountability meeting. Number five, the daily huddle, number six, ad hoc meetings, number seven, the monthly or the quarterly town hall meetings.
And number eight, The weekly or at worst biweekly one on one meeting when you are stressed, when your team is stressed, when your company is stressed, you need these more. So stop canceling these meetings as a first line of defense. When you get busy or when you're stressed, you need these meetings more.
When you're busy, when you stress, I promise you, if you keep this rhythm, you make it a habit, you get better and better at having these meetings. I promise you, it will take you miles to creating a better leadership team. As I always say, if you want a great company, you need great, need a great leadership team.
I hope this planning and communication rhythm got you a little bit closer to that today. Talk to you next time.