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Make This Quarter Count
Every new quarter brings another opportunity to advance your strategic initiatives and get closer to your ultimate vision for your company. Without a detailed quarter plan, your team will lack strategic direction and may spend their time in areas that don’t yield the right impact.
Hold a quarterly planning meeting to determine the company’s top priorities and align on key details for successful execution.
This Guide Will Help You:
- Understand the importance of clear objectives, structured agendas, and collaborative goal-setting to enhance the effectiveness of quarterly planning meetings.
Define Clear Meeting Objectives
Quarter planning takes time—time during which leaders will be pulled away from their usual activities. Defining and communicating the “why” around this meeting is essential to ensure complete buy-in from your leadership team. Emphasize the strategic importance of setting clear deliverables for the quarter. The team should also understand how getting aligned on the “how” of execution prevents confusion and waste.
Help the team understand the cost of a misaligned quarter that fails to hit the company growth targets. A bad quarter or two can result in a bad year for the business. Missing your growth goals could cost you your business. Your objective is to create a plan for the quarter that provides focus and alignment to the organization. That plan should be action-ready and enable you to hold each stakeholder accountable to their goals.
Invite the Right Stakeholders
A successful quarterly planning session must include the company’s leadership team and any other stakeholders whose voices will be essential in determining high-level goals. Consider who might contribute valuable insights and/or be responsible for delivery. The more diverse the perspectives are, the richer the discussion will be, and the more angles you will be able to see your business needs from.
A team size of 5-10 people is optimal for these executive sessions. The more people you have in the room, the less likely you are to get full participation. Usually, the session involves the C-suite and could include other of their direct reports for specific conversations that need their insights. Resist the temptation to include all executives and their direct reports. Group sizes of 10+ diminish overall participation and are less effective.
Develop a Structured Meeting Agenda
Without an agenda, discussions tend to wander off-track and burn time without producing an actionable plan. An agenda will help you recall and focus on key topics, balancing your time appropriately so that you can leave the meeting feeling ready to execute.
Typical agendas include:
- Welcome and opening engagement activity
- Confirmation of objectives and reviewing the agenda
- Reflect on the past quarter
- Review of prep work submitted by the team
- Discussion topics on items relevant to the growth of the business
- Review of your annual plan to determine where you are in achieving your goals
- Set your financial targets for the quarter
- Determine your company's top 3-5 goals for the coming quarter aligned with your annual plan and targets
- Determine each leader's top 3-5 goals for the coming quarter aligned with the company goals for the quarter
- Test the plan to ensure it has focus, meets your financial targets, has enough resource energy to be successful, and has clear success criteria for each recorded goal.
- Determine your communication plan for the rest of the company
- Wrap-up
This typical agenda will take most teams two days to complete. We recommend hiring an outside facilitator to help you keep these discussions on track and follow them through to completion.
Keep Core Values at the Heart
To kick off your meeting, review the company’s core values, and invite the team to share stories of how they saw these demonstrated in the past quarter. This will help the team feel inspired and enlivened to have a great quarter ahead. Everyone should keep these values top of mind and call out anything oppositional as you design the plan together.
If you are finding you come up short on this discussion, then add time to the agenda for a review and perhaps revision of your core values. This could come in the current meeting or a future session when more preparation time is available.
Reflect on the Past Quarter
Before you set goals for the upcoming quarter, discuss how the last quarter went. What was successful, and what was not? Did you advance your long-term goals?
Identify key learnings with the team, as well as projects or numbers that have fallen behind and need an adjusted approach. With these lessons in mind, you can design an achievable plan that plays to the team’s strengths and bolsters any areas where results have been lagging.
Using a strategic planning and execution platform like Rhythm will increase the effectiveness of these conversations. Review each goal and how it finished the quarter. For each goal that finished green, what did you learn? For those that finished red or yellow, what adjustments could/should you have made to achieve success? Record those learnings on each goal as a note for future reference and consider those learnings as you approach goals for the coming quarter.
Write Focused, SMART Goals
Revisit the company’s annual goals and overall mission to ensure that your quarter plan will advance these long-term objectives. In collaboration with the team, write 3-5 goals that support your strategy. Don’t create an excessively long list of quarterly goals, or you will risk overloading the team, losing focus, and dropping commitments. Stick to what is highest-impact and most urgent; other ideas can be revisited in a later quarter.
Make sure to write all your goals as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Each should have a clear definition of what success and failure look like, an owner who is ultimately responsible for delivery, and start and end dates that account for dependencies.
Once you’ve written your goals, prioritize them based on their impact and feasibility. Allocate energy to each company goal by assigning sub-priorities and actionable steps to team members. Ensure that no team member is overloaded and that everyone’s time is being used appropriately.
Use a strategic planning and execution platform like Rhythm to record these goals for focused execution after the session ends. This step is critical to the successful execution of your plan. We’ve unfortunately seen too many scenarios where a team has a great planning session and everyone is excited about the quarter plan, but they fail to execute it. The goals were put on the shelf and everyone got back to business as usual and dealing with the tyranny of the urgent. Don’t let that be your experience.
Don’t Set Goals in Silos
As you craft these goals, avoid having each person return to their desk. Keep discussion flowing and work on developing priorities together. Pause periodically to ask for the team’s input: Do they have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about the goals being written? This approach enhances team buy-in and leverages the team’s expertise to identify opportunities, dependencies, and gaps.
Search out ways for departments to work together cross-functionally. A siloed set of goals results in a siloed company. You won’t achieve greatness that way. Work to integrate the work of your departments and strive for their interdependence with each other. Sales, Marketing, Customer Service/Success, Product, Production, Operations, and Talent must all be working together in alignment and harmony to achieve your aggressive growth aspirations.
This is where you will need a software platform like Rhythm to take your planning to the next level. Spreadsheets will not get you the cross-functional plan execution visibility you need to coordinate the many people and goals across your diverse teams.
Measure Progress and Make Adjustments
Once the team has agreed on the plan, commit to a system to track progress and make adjustments throughout the quarter. By convening weekly to discuss the goals and redirect off-track projects, the team takes advantage of 13 opportunities to push the plan to success by the quarter’s end.
Every quarter is a 13-week race. You don’t get time you waste back. So make the most of each day and keep your teams focused on plan execution every week through a weekly adjustment meeting. These meetings are vital to successful plan execution and to maintain organizational alignment. Discuss goals that are red status and what it will take to get it back on track. Discuss learnings from goals that are ahead of their success target. Review each team member’s victories from the week and prioritize work for the week ahead. Discuss any items a team member is stuck on and needs help with.
Every week of your quarter counts. Don’t waste a single week of precious time to execute your plan.
Have Your Best Quarter Yet!
Following structured planning processes will help set your team up for success. You’ll begin the new quarter already aligned on what you need to do and how you’re going to get there, empowering team members to confidently execute their goals and work together for organizational victories.
Start Today
The next quarter will be here before you know it! Set the date of your quarterly planning meeting, establish your objectives, and build your agenda. A collaborative quarterly planning process will facilitate continuous improvement and inspire a “win as a team” mindset in your organization.
Don’t forget about your annual plans, either. Check out additional resources for both quarterly and annual planning.