Team Planning: How to do Team Planning for Team Focus & Alignment

It’s time to slow down and develop a world-class team execution plan for next year. When we don’t slow down to plan our execution, our teams don't end up being focused on the right things, leading to mistakes and rework, and ultimately smacking our profit with a 2-by-4! How strong is your execution this year? I get asked every year how to do team planning, and I am sharing some of my insider tips with you.

Team Planning Process

Does your team know what the company is supposed to achieve this year?
If your team does know what the company is focused on, do they know their roles in making that happen every quarter?
Do they have clear success metrics so they can tell if they are on track or not?

Communication Gap

Creating a Team Plan:

Great communication between your teams to avoid a communication gap as pictured above.
Strong cross-departmental alignment, meaning that departments arent' competing for the same resources as they work hard to achieve their priorities.
Leading indicators to let you know that you and your team are on track.

What is team planning?

We sometimes confuse execution planning with the common term strategic planning. That is why I prefer to dissect the common practice of strategic planning into two separate and distinct parts: strategic thinking and execution planning. Strategic thinking is about figuring out what you should do. Execution planning is about figuring out how to get it done. It’s your “doing plan.”

Oftentimes leaders focus only on strategy during annual planning sessions and forget to take the important step of working through an execution plan. It is easy to forget. After all, it is more fun to work on strategy. It’s hard work to think about how to get the strategy accomplished. It is even harder work to hold your teams accountable for doing the work that achieves the strategy and drives team accountability. This hard work must be done if you want your strategies to give birth to rewarding results. Planning together with your teams is part of the formula to achieving strong organizational alignment.

So if you have not already done so, it is time to schedule your annual planning session so that you can go into the new year with a strong and confident execution plan.

Here are 9 tips to help you in your team planning session:

Tip 1: Begin with the end in mind. Be clear, be focused, and be successful! Successful planning is a process and everyone should know their part. Let people know the ground rules at the beginning of the process: treat others with respect, keep track of the time and avoid going too far off tangent, cell phones off, and any other rules you'd like to run the best strategic planning session.

Tip 2: Create a great meeting agenda. Your agenda drives the success of your meeting. Let everyone know ahead of time what topics will be discussed so that they can come prepared to engage in the discussion. Ensure that you leave plenty of time for action planning, a key to achieving your team goals. You might want to include action items for your team, such as bringing their 3-5 year team goals to the strategy meeting. Is this the right time for a team-building activity? If so, make sure it makes it on the agenda.

Tip 3: Come prepared. Every executive needs to come prepared to participate fully in all the discussion topics. Team leaders are often extremely busy, so make sure that you get the successful planning agenda out to the team at least two weeks prior to the event. Be prepared to speak about the strengths and weaknesses of your team. What key questions do you need to be answered by other members of your team?

Tip 4: Use a facilitator. It is very difficult to participate and facilitate, especially if you are the CEO. Ask yourself, “Do I want to facilitate, or do I prefer to participate and engage strongly in the discussions?” If participation is more important (and it usually is), bring in an outside facilitator. I have often found that CEOs who facilitate their own planning sessions unknowingly intimidate their team members and limit their participation in the discussion.

Tip 5: Set the right tone. Begin every session by having each team member share good news or appreciation. Beginning on a positive note will improve participation. If you don't set the right tone for the meeting, you aren't likely to set goals effectively and in the right spirit. Make sure that you have the most recent SWOT Analysis available when planning to make sure you are leveraging your opportunities and squashing your threats.

Tip 6: Be effective versus efficient. Spend the time necessary to have the right few discussions. Don’t rush your planning session by focusing on getting through all the topics on your agenda. Instead, choose to be effective. It is better to have fewer discussions, with the entire team understanding clearly what the decision and outcome is for each. Make sure that you cover the primary strategic objectives at the top of the meeting as everything should flow from that.

Tip 7: Use a parking lot. Tangents to important topics are inevitable. Use a parking lot to log these tangents for a later discussion. It allows the team members who bring them up to know that they will not be forgotten. Then their brains are free to focus on the topic at hand. It is often a fine balance between discussing the long-term strategy and the day-to-day performance measures. Utilizing a parking lot can help keep the discussions on track.

Tip 8: Eat the baby elephants. Every company has elephants in the room. The fewer the better! These are the topics that the team tries to avoid because they are afraid to address them. Lots of emotional energy is wasted over the years skirting around these topics. Once upon a time, these were baby elephants. If you see a baby elephant surface during your sessions, take the time to address it. Eat your baby elephants before they grow up into big seven-ton elephants! Spending a little bit of time in the short term can save you lots of time in the future.

Tip 9: Cut it off when the team is tired. You won’t get good decisions when people are too tired to think. If you have had intense discussions, everybody will be exhausted toward the end of the day. End the meeting on a victory. Don’t “power through” the agenda. Have a backup plan to spend some time the following day finishing up if necessary. And if you are making big decisions, think about them overnight and have a brief discussion the next day to finalize them.

One more thing… one extra tip for CEOs. Spend more time listening than speaking. Be truly curious and use your listening strategies actively. Be the last one to provide input in the discussions. Follow for more planning tips.