Let your business go faster and achieve more.
By creating the conditions for consistency, clarity and focus.
Happy start to the new year! I hope the holidays were everything you wanted them to be. I primarily used mine to recover from a rough version of the big C and now feel rested and energised for the quarter, with full immunity!
Good thing as it’s kick off season! All my clients are aligning, debating, challenging each other (in a good way) to set this year up for success.
For many of us, the end of year can be a bit bittersweet; despite our efforts we may not have achieved everything we had intended. This never feels good. So we try to come into the new year with better plans, and clearer focus.
If you’re looking set things off with a good start, this post is for you.
What I’d like us to avoid this year is this:
Using up lots of energy and time in Q1 to align and plan to then,
Taking our eyes off the plan in Q2 and,
To find in Q3 ‘we’ve been sleeping’ so,
We use pressure cooker tactics to rush things over the line in Q4.
This is not a strategy.
If you want your teams to get things done this year consistently over time, here’s what you can do as leader to create the conditions for them to thrive:
Priorities:
As a leadership team it’s your job to align on what you believe are the - “pillars” or “levers” or “bets” - that you will make in the coming 12 months that will hurtle your organization towards the strategy. (NB - making money is not a strategy it’s an outcome of a strategic practice). These priorities should be locked in and show up in all actions and decisions. The best way to make a clear message that you are not messing about when it comes to business priorities - kill an initiative publicly. You want to rally your whole org around these prio’s, everything and everyone from ground up should in someway support one of the 3 prio’s.
Alignment:
Alignment is hard, and it’s rare. Most of the time our ego’s dominate and we push for initiatives that support our discipline. It’s not wrong, it’s human, the more you say you’ll be able to do, the more budget you’ll get. The system at it’s core is broken and it unfortunately hinders organizational alignment. The ideal state is getting a leadership team that thinks “we” first over “me” first since being in collective service of the greater good of the company, benefits everyone around the table. Once you’ve aligned on the 3 priorities for the year, rally your leadership team around how they are going get get their teams to influence those prio’s.
Story Time! A first hand experience of trying to get a team to lead with ruthless prioritisation and upsetting a key leader in the process.
It is not prioritisation until it hurts.
Context:
Great comms is the key to this whole process. Like in the story time above if you want to actually prioritise you are probably going to piss people off but it’s also essential to get your leaders on your side (or the side of the business). Context is key. When launching new years plans and ambitions take the time to capture and share they backstory, the logic. It’s on you to connect the dots for your leaders and their teams as they will primarily think about themselves first.
Numbers should be backed by rationale and not feel like they have been plucked out of thin air.
Some of the leaders I’ve worked with have tried to ‘protect’ the team from realities that end up shaping key decisions. It’s a tightrope of a balance but give enough context that it demonstrates rationale and gives folks a sense of comfort that you ARE synced up to what’s going on across the company.
Consistency:
To avoid the trap of taking out eyes off the ball and ending the year with a mad rush of initiatives and burn out, keep your organisations pace consistent. This looks like staying on top of quarterly retrospective and planning rituals, have the headspace to understand what’s getting in the way, facilitate (or mediate) cross functional dependencies that are slowing things down, and keep your organization on track by being adaptive and responsive to what you learn week on week. Most importantly, hold people accountable to what they said they were going to do and lean in to understand what’s holding them back.
A consistent organization gives people the sense that they can ‘win’.
The Playbook -
Here’s what I’m using stress teams the leadership teams I’m working with.
Fill in the gaps, and make sure your leads are onboard to a level they will actively advocate, defend and plan against the priorities:
You got this!
It’s so disheartening when you get to the end of a hard year and your efforts don’t correlate to your achievements (you did a lot but can’t cross of the goals set in Jan). This causes burnout, low confidence and hopelessness, which is a excellent breeding groud for a cynical and ‘blamey’ culture. We want teams to feel they are empowered to own, push and deliver their goals. Therefore as leaders we need to fuel them with confidence, clarity and possibility. I know first hand how much energy it takes to keep teams on track, but it’s worth it and it’s your #1 job. Take care of your resilience so you have the headspace to do this all year.
Here’s to a productive 2024!
G