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Five Step Simple Process for Delivering & Executing Effective Quarterly Plans
Your quarterly plan aims to drive your annual and long-term strategies forward. Many companies create winning annual plans to help you achieve your BHAG or Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, but you need to take the time to create an executable quarterly plan that lays out the path of progress to achieve the targets. The secret to a winning quarter is to focus on your top 3-5 company priorities or rocks. Create an executable 90-day quarterly plan, finalize it, and say no to the things that aren't as important. Then, take your Main Thing, cascade it to all departments, and transform it into a daily question that everyone uses every day to maintain focus on the priorities that are important to your business.
STEP 1: Good preparation is critical
Good preparation is critical to ensuring you create the right strategy and execution for your quarter (we call it a 13-week Race, and many call it a 90-day plan) to stay on track to hit your annual goals. You should consider prepping for the next one as soon as every new quarter starts.
You should set the date, place, and time three months prior. Determine who should come and secure a facilitator for the quarterly alignment meeting. The facilitator can be the CEO or any team member. We strongly advise companies larger than $10mm in revenue with 50 or more employees to use an outside facilitator; your team will have a more successful session with an impartial view at the helm.
One month prior, you should hold a pre-planning meeting with a core group to review your Annual Plan and determine the meeting objectives. Discuss strategic and operational topics that might be useful during the session and gather as much employee and customer feedback as possible.
You must send the agenda for the quarterly team meeting one week prior. Also, give the team homework and create a place to state what they think the company should Start Doing, Keep Doing, and Stop Doing to be successful. Make sure the meeting room is stocked with all your facilitation tools.
STEP 2: Appoint a Professional Quarterly Planning Meeting Facilitator
The best companies never use the CEO or an executive team member.
When designating a facilitator, consider this: when senior team members facilitate your essential planning meetings, it can cause participants to withhold agendas or thoughts, to resist challenging others, not to be challenged in their thinking, and not to be fully engaged. If you are the CEO, it is almost impossible to participate and facilitate your planning session simultaneously. Your team is already used to giving your opinions. Couple the power of being the CEO with the power of being the facilitator, and your opportunity to listen, learn, and get the best ideas from your team falls dramatically. Instead, pass the facilitation duties to someone else and immerse yourself in the meeting. Your thoughts and contribution to the talks will be much more than you're facilitating the discussion.
STEP 3: Develop a Quarterly Agenda
STEP 4: Hold Quarterly Planning Session
Welcome(15 min)
Begin with the end in mind. The first step is ensuring everyone knows what a successful session looks like and what part they need to play. Confirm objectives. Review agenda.
Quarter Planning Opening Session
Set a great tone for the day. Start by having each member share good news or victories and then share learnings. Make sure to remind the team of your Annual Plan so you can confirm that Quarterly Goals are helping to move the Annual Plan forward.
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Check-In and Good News (15 min)
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Review the Ending Quarter (1 hour)
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Review Prep Work (1 hour)
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Review Annual Plan (1 hour)
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Lunch (1 hour)
Quarterly Execution Plan
It’s time to get the detailed work. Focus on being effective, not efficient. Take the proper time to get your team involved by discussing, debating, and agreeing on decisions. Make sure to test that your Quarterly Plan is helping you drive your Annual Plan forward.
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Main Thing and Critical Numbers (30 min)
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Company Top 3-5 Priorities (1 hour)
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Individual Top 3-5 Priorities (1 hour)
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Test the Plan (15 min)
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Communication Plan for the Rest of the Company (15 min)
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Wrap Up (15 min)
STEP 4: Cascade Quarterly Plan Across the Entire Company
Communicate the executive plan so each department can align to the goals.
For each department to align its goals for the quarter to the company's, they need to know the plan. Sharing plans across all departments can be challenging, especially when you have ten or more groups, geographic disbursement, and/or the inability to pull a whole team at once (like a 24-hour support team). For CEOs to close the strategy execution gap, they need to take this step to get everyone on the same page.
STEP 5: Adjust Your Quarterly Plan in Your Weekly Team Meeting
The only way to know if you need to make adjustments is to track your quarterly planning goals weekly. Your weekly meeting should drive accountability and engage your team to focus on working on solutions rather than spending the time giving status updates. Weeks 4-6 are the most important, avoid being blindsided by missed priorities and KPIs (check out our 25 KPI Examples For Manufacturing Companies for some industry leading KPI examples) by using the collective intelligence of your team to make critical adjustments during the quarter to achieve success. We also love to do lean quarterly planning to help systematically drive our waste in your organization.
Weekly Adjustment Meetings are a key part of an overall strategic meeting rhythm that helps grow a company toward excellence. Your Annual Plan is important, but the degree to which you can up the ante on the content of your Weekly Meetings is the degree to which you can build a great organization.
