Your team works hard—but without strategic direction, their efforts will lack impact, and your company will not move closer to its long-term vision.
How can you ensure that they’re on the right track quarter after quarter? Hold a quarterly planning meeting! This meeting will empower you and your team to build a plan that supports strategic goals. It will prepare you for steady, confident execution. With a detailed quarter plan, everyone will remain on the same page and be aware of what they should be doing not just during the quarter, but each week of the quarter.
During your quarter planning meeting, you will review the company’s past performance, define needed outcomes for the upcoming quarter, and align all team members on the “how” of execution. This “how” of execution is often the part that is missed and is the critical step to achieving success. These are essential but sometimes lengthy discussions that often cannot be covered in a standard team meeting. This is why you’ll need more time than usual to cover key content.
Key takeaways from an effective quarterly planning meeting include:
Holding a quarter planning meeting may take time, but it’s simpler than it seems. Use this guide to understand how you can start laying the groundwork for quarter planning today!
Successful quarterly planning meetings take time, thoughtful preparation, and involved team dialogue. If your team isn’t used to these types of sessions, they may not grasp how important it is to step away from their daily work and engage fully in the meeting.
To get your team feeling excited and bought in from the start, communicate clear objectives for the meeting. What is the “why”? Write a purpose statement. Consider including language about how designing a quarter plan will help the team achieve their annual goals and will save time later on by providing an execution roadmap. Circulate and repeat your purpose statement several times to encourage team understanding.
To set the stage for an informed discussion, prepare data from the previous quarter. You may consider having metrics on hand like financial performance, employee engagement, and customer NPS (Net Promoter Score).
If other team members own some of these metrics, ask them to come to the planning session with the data prepared to avoid slow-downs. If you would like visual representations of certain metrics to be shown, provide your team with time to create graphs that can be presented during the meeting. Remember that not everyone on your team is an expert in finance, people metrics, or other areas that you might be discussing. Work to communicate the data in a way that is accessible for everybody and doesn’t leave room for misunderstandings.
Without a structured agenda, you risk spending too much time on certain topics, which can ultimately prevent you from establishing your plan. Develop a meeting agenda that includes key focus areas, like…
(For a comprehensive quarter planning agenda, go here!)
Finalize and share the agenda with the team before the meeting so they can come ready to participate in these conversations. Don’t forget to set time limits for each item to keep the meeting on track and ensure you don’t run out of time before designing the plan.
Decide who will keep the team accountable for sticking to the agenda. Most of the time, this is the facilitator—but you can also assign another team member to run a timer on their device and give reminders when each topic is approaching its time limit. If there is a non-urgent discussion that needs to be continued later, stick that topic in your Parking Lot and make a note to revisit it at the next weekly team meeting.
We recommend hiring an outside facilitator to help keep the meeting running smoothly and to ensure the CEO and other leaders can fully participate in the meeting. The facilitator is a specific and valuable role that is not able to fully participate and engage in the discussions since their mind is on keeping the agenda on track and achieving the desired outcomes of the meeting.
The team leader should begin with opening remarks to set the tone of the meeting and emphasize its importance. Even if you communicated the objectives and desired outcomes before the meeting, restate these so that they’re top-of-mind. Encourage a collaborative, positive atmosphere—remember, it’s about winning as a team!
One helpful prompt for creating a positive, engaged meeting environment is: “Share good news.” Each team member is prompted to share something positive, related either to the business or to their personal life. Allow room for celebration and laughter. A morose team is not going to have a fruitful planning session.
Revisit the past quarter’s goals and outcomes, discussing bright spots and challenges that the team encountered. If you’ve documented any end-of-quarter reflections, display these for the team to see. Drive the conversation with specific prompts: What lessons were learned? What should you do differently this quarter to achieve greater success?
This exercise will help you identify focus areas for the upcoming quarter. Consider assigning a notetaker to capture key takeaways from this conversation. You can review these later on when you’re setting new goals.
As a team, identify and articulate 3-5 goals for the upcoming quarter. You will be tempted to add more—but don’t let yourself overeat from the buffet of opportunities. Maintain focus so that you don’t overload the team and strain their ability to deliver. Isn’t it better to accomplish a small handful of high-impact goals rather than miss the mark several times on a long wishlist of goals?
Ensure each goal is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Every goal should have an owner (the person ultimately accountable for the goal’s achievement), as well as start and end dates. Yes, these are high-level goals for the company, but they do not all need to be owned by the CEO. It makes sense to distribute ownership to different departmental leaders, depending on the focus of each goal.
Make sure to also define what success and failure look like for each goal. Be specific, and use numbers and percentages when possible; if it’s not possible, use descriptive language. This practice will help you avoid confusion down the road around what “complete” really means.
As the plan is being written, invite team members to contribute their thoughts and call out any problems, gaps, or dependencies they may see. Having multiple sets of eyes on the plan increases the likelihood that you will catch and correct issues early. Ask everyone to participate in the conversation to encourage buy-in and help them feel excited about the plan!
To do this in a practical way, pause after each goal has been written. Ask team members to think about the goal’s impact, how it aligns with company strategy, and what it will demand from the teams they lead. Provide time for some back-and-forth dialogue among team members. Don’t shy away from conflict—when communicated respectfully, disagreements can be great catalysts for helping your team refine the plan and make it the best it can be.
Once quarterly goals are set, work together to establish action steps to move each goal to the finish line. Assign tasks to the most relevant team members and set logical delivery dates. If you’re setting action items for team members who aren’t present, send them a note or schedule a sync-up to explain their involvement in the project.
Remember that the most effective quarterly plans lay a clear and detailed path for execution. Think about where each goal’s progress should be every week of the quarter to ensure timely delivery. Establishing key milestones will help the team avoid falling behind.
Once the meeting is finished, record all meeting outcomes, including goals, tasks, and key decisions made for the quarter ahead. If you’re using software like Rhythm, showing the plan to the rest of the team will be easy. If you’re using a spreadsheet or document, send a copy of the quarterly plan and meeting notes to all participants and relevant stakeholders. Being able to repeatedly reference the plan will help everyone stay aligned after the meeting has ended.
Make sure everyone on the team is on the same page regarding how goal progress will be tracked and discussed during the quarter. For example: Will you be using a status on a forecast approach to predict issues and solve them quickly?
It’s best to check in every week about the plan’s movement. This practice will provide the team with 13 opportunities every quarter to make adjustments that will steer the plan toward success.
At the end of the upcoming quarter, remember to reflect on the plan’s outcomes during your next planning meeting. Document your learnings and use them to fuel discussion.
Adjust your approaches as needed for continual improvement. Remember that planning and execution are muscles; you need to continually work them to get stronger. Stay committed to sustainable improvement, and your planning and execution habits will become more refined and effective with each passing quarter.
Make the next 90 days count! Holding an effective quarterly planning meeting takes dedication to the objectives, careful preparation, and active team engagement—but the outcomes will speak for themselves.
A well-thought-out quarter will yield far more impactful results than a haphazard quarter. By designing a thorough plan that supports the company’s strategy, you can grow your business and get closer to achieving your most audacious goals and dreams.
Elevate your quarterly planning process by starting with clear objectives, gathering essential data, and crafting a well-structured agenda. These steps lay the foundation for a productive and collaborative meeting that will drive alignment and deliver an impactful plan.