Do you run a regular strategy meeting with your team? If you do, one of the things that can really help is having a set framework of measures that you use to review the past and to plan forwards in the business. I’m going to share with you how I set this up with the leadership teams I work with so that you can implement it for yourself.
Create Measures
If you’re going to have a regular ongoing meeting, you need something solid that you can use as a benchmark to be able to review your starting point, but then you finish point. And one of the best ways to do that is to create some measures that you can use to determine are we on track?
Three things to consider in setting up these measures, they need to come from your strategy and where you’re going. Once you know your destination, which I obviously help teams with first, then you need to think about the right measures, and I usually advise five key business measures that determine whether that team is on track or not.
- Do you want to set up measures that are leading or lagging? Are they measures that will tell you about future success or are there measures that will tell you about past success? And you may want a combination of the two.
- Are you looking at ones that measure the front end or the back end of the business? Are you looking at ones that measure growth and revenue or back-end delivery inefficiency? And either one of the two, the balance will determine on what your strategy is and how you want to change and grow the business.
- Selecting the right instrument for the measure, and the key thing here is cost and accuracy. You want to make sure it’s the right measure, but it’s not going to take you too long to implement.
Five Key Business Measures
In my business, I have five measures that every single quarter I look at, past where are those measures at for the last 90 days and then going forward, what is my targets for those five measures?
For example, I look at revenue and profit. Then I look at number of clients that are hitting their three key measures. Then back in, I look at number of clients in my 12-month programmes, which is a lagging indicator, but leading indicator is number of leads for those programmes. Then fifth one is work for me is definitely about clients, but not just about numbers.
I measure the number of free days I have. It’s the days when I’m not at work to get a sense of my balance between work and life. And I also measure the days that I work in my genius. It’s a bit of a wonky term of how often am I working to my strengths, right? So, it’s a measure of am I outsourcing the right things, and that if I can measure it on a 90-day basis gives me a sense of “have I moved my business forward in the last 90 days and what strategies could I put in place in the next 90 days to move it forward so I could change those numbers?”
What I do is I review the exact numbers each quarter and then I’ll plan my target for those numbers for the quarter ahead and that will drive my activity.
Your leadership team questions:
- Have you got something like this in place?
- Are you using it the right way to galvanise the team around what their job is in the next quarter?
Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch
If you don’t have something like this in place or you want to use it differently, talk to me about a specific strategy for your team. If you go back to the email or you look down below, you can easily find a space to book some time with me and we can have a chat about your team. Hope these measures are something that you can use to get 90-day clarity with your team. Talk to you soon on The Reason & The Road.
