Podcast Ep 91 | The Quarterly Execution Planning meeting

The Quar­ter­ly Exe­cu­tion Plan­ning meet­ing is one of the most impor­tant meet­ings because it is where a lead­er­ship team decides the pri­or­i­ties for the com­pa­ny and the pri­or­i­ties for each depart­ment for the fol­low­ing quarter.

The quar­ter­ly meet­ing takes the strat­e­gy from the annu­al meet­ing, and trans­lates it into prac­ti­cal, exe­cutable goals for the team to focus on in the next 90 days — ensur­ing every­one is crys­tal clear on their march­ing orders.

In this episode, Brad and Kevin dis­cuss why you need a Quar­ter­ly Exe­cu­tion Plan­ning meet­ing, what a quar­ter­ly meet­ing agen­da must include, and tips for a suc­cess­ful meeting.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:00

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies — that is com­pa­nies that will endure, com­pa­nies that will be great. Every week, Kevin Lawrence, and I talk about this. And here he is the man him­self, Kevin Lawrence. G’day, Kevin, how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 01:57

I’m doing great, Brad. I’m real­ly enjoy­ing the series that we’re doing around meet­ings, because we spend so much of our time, you know, help­ing to dri­ve these meet­ings. And we also know peo­ple get dri­ven crazy by an inef­fec­tive meeting.

Brad Giles 02:11

Indeed. And so we always like to start with a word or phrase of the day, what have you got today?

Kevin Lawrence 02:19

Chal­lenged is the word, chal­lenged. It’s inter­est­ing that we take things for grant­ed in where I live in Van­cou­ver. I live between two places, Van­cou­ver, and anoth­er place called Kelow­na, and all the roads washed out in a big storm. And there’s four major roads that go from Van­cou­ver, back and forth. And I’m hear­ing that we might not these are high­ways, that these high­ways may not be a viable, unless it’s essen­tial use for months. I used to dri­ve back and forth every week between these two areas. And so now I got to fly. Because I actu­al­ly can’t, I could dri­ve once I could bring one vehi­cle through because it could be head­ing to my house. And they’re try­ing to make it for all the essen­tial goods, includ­ing, you know, fuel because one of the pipelines I think was shut down. So it’s, it’s wild. It’s just it’s, it’s, you know, you dri­ve these roads all the time, you nev­er even con­tem­plate them not being avail­able. And so it’s real­ly so I would say, logis­ti­cal­ly chal­lenged myself, I guess would be the best way to put it. It’s as I was look­ing at my cal­en­dar for the month of Jan­u­ary for every March. I just start­ed going. Okay, I real­ly got to think about this. How is this gonna work? Yeah, it was inter­est­ing. First world prob­lems. But prob­lems nonethe­less, in my mind?

Brad Giles 03:44

Well, mine is, you know, you’re only as good as your weak­est part. And so I had a flat tire in a car yes­ter­day, some­thing that I haven’t had for a very long time. And I’ve got a Ger­man car, and I won’t name the make. But yeah, get­ting a flat tire. A few hours from home in the coun­try was not fun. And it just rein­forced some of the frus­trat­ing things about an exot­ic car or, you know, a car that’s not real­ly built for these con­di­tions, I guess, is what I’d say. And that made me think that you’re only in our offer­ings, you know, peo­ple see all of the parts, and you’re only as good as your weak­est part.

Kevin Lawrence 04:36

Right? Right. So we both have some­thing in com­mon Brad, if we sew these togeth­er, you know, our logis­tics sys­tem is only good as the weak­est part of the road. And so when part of the road wash­es out, the roads use­less. When part of the car does­n’t func­tion. It’s use­less. So you’re and hence why air­planes and many things have back­up sys­tems, redun­dant sys­tems. So if one goes down, you’re still good to go. So quar­ter­ly meet­ings, the quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan­ning, meet­ing, a crit­i­cal meet­ing, one that you know that we’ve been part of hun­dreds, I’m pret­ty safe to say if I did the math, it’s 1000s of these that I’ve been involved in, they can be incred­i­bly effec­tive, they can be incred­i­bly inef­fec­tive if you’re not care­ful. Nor­mal­ly, when they’re inef­fec­tive, it’s because the agen­da has not been well designed. And or peo­ple aren’t well pre­pared, or the per­son sup­posed to be run­ning the meet­ing isn’t that effec­tive themselves.

Brad Giles 05:38

You know, we oper­ate on 90 days sprints. This is the sec­ond in this five part series talk­ing about the meet­ing rhythm. Last week, we did the annu­al strate­gic think­ing meet­ing, which is, you know, two to three day typ­i­cal meet­ing. But this is about the quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan­ning meet­ing. And so what­ev­er our strat­e­gy is, that’s been deter­mined from the annu­al meet­ing, this is where we get down to the real exe­cu­tion plan­ning, this is where we get to iden­ti­fy what it is that is wor­thy of effort in the next 90 days for the com­pa­ny, for the depart­ments for the indi­vid­u­als, so that we can give our­selves the best chance of success.

Kevin Lawrence 06:29

Yeah, it’s an absolute­ly crit­i­cal meet­ing and a crit­i­cal, crit­i­cal dis­ci­pline, to take time every 90 days to reset the plan. Because the annu­al plan you have is a great hypoth­e­sis, things change, you learn new things, nev­er mind, mar­ket con­di­tions might change, or inter­nal fac­tors would change that might need dif­fer­ent types of atten­tion. So yeah, crit­i­cal meet­ing. And you know, the key things is, it’s one to two days, every 90 days, it’s a seri­ous com­mit­ment. But it’s the time when you bring every­one back togeth­er, you take and are held account­able or hold your­self account­able for what you com­mit­ted to last time. And then as a result of those learn­ing and improve­ments that will come out of it every sin­gle time if you run the meet­ing, right?

Brad Giles 07:12

You know, it’s not very often that I go New Age. But I’ve got a the­o­ry about the effec­tive­ness of quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan­ning meet­ings, and why they’re quar­ter­ly. And that is that the our body, our mind has evolved over mil­lions, if not 10s, of 1000s of years. And every 90 days, the sea­son changes. And so, you know, spring, sum­mer, autumn win­ter. And so my the­o­ry is that at a bio­log­i­cal lev­el, we need to oper­ate in these types of 90 days sprint, and that’s why it’s not 60 or 70 days, and why it’s not 110 days. That’s why because at a bio­log­i­cal lev­el, it feels right for us to have change after 90 days. And it feels like that’s some­thing that’s achievable.

Kevin Lawrence 08:10

So the biol­o­gist and Brad says it’s because the chang­ing sea­sons. And you know, some­one tried doing it twice a year, and it was­n’t enough. So they said, well, let’s do it twice more. So what works? Are they your sounds much more intel­li­gent. The fact of the mat­ter is that there’s a point of where we just need to recal­i­brate, we’ve got some com­pa­nies who do many ver­sions month­ly, you’re real­ly mov­ing quick­ly, peo­ple can drop it down to month­ly. The thing is, it takes time to real­ly reflect prop­er­ly. So the more fre­quent­ly do it, it’s it can be ben­e­fi­cial. It also can be chal­leng­ing. So let’s look at the key things that we want to do. First of all, ide­al­ly, you’re off site, not in your office, again, just like with an ani­mal, and you will you get dis­tract­ed when you’re in the busi­ness. So ide­al­ly, get­ting out of the busi­ness. Now, many peo­ple are also doing a lot of these vir­tu­al­ly over COVID peo­ple fig­ured out you could we run so many meet­ings vir­tu­al­ly on a quar­ter­ly basis. And many com­pa­nies are going to con­tin­ue to keep them vir­tu­al, because it’s very effec­tive and effi­cient. You just don’t get all the rela­tion­ship build­ing piece and the bond­ing that comes out. But the idea is it aside from it being a crit­i­cal and a reset that the first point, though, is that it mat­ters because it real­ly helps us to be account­able to what we did. And then to iden­ti­fy what our next set of pri­or­i­ties are, what are our next march­ing orders, what are our next set of goals or pri­or­i­ties for the next 90 days? So we’re all crys­tal clear and aligned on that. So that’s num­ber one. The most impor­tant out­put, what are we getting?

Brad Giles 09:51

Stuff hap­pens between the annu­al and the first quar­ter­ly or the first and the sec­ond quar­ter­ly? That stuff means that pri­or­i­ties that we thought we might have 90 or 190 days ago, when­ev­er it is, they will change. And so this answers the ques­tion, what are our pri­or­i­ties? Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 10:13

The sec­ond major point is, is the, the meet­ing starts, it’s a look back. It’s a review of how we did it’s an account­abil­i­ty ses­sion, we com­mit­ted to these things, how did we actu­al­ly do? And then eval­u­at­ing both the finan­cials, how we did, how we did on our goals, a review of our peo­ple, how our peo­ple were per­form­ing, and what do we need to adjust with our peo­ple? And just tak­ing a look at these dif­fer­ent aspects of our busi­ness? And see­ing what is real­ly work­ing? And what we know, Jim Collins calls min­ing the bru­tal facts, what are the real­ly good oppor­tu­ni­ties or the things that are maybe chal­leng­ing and not work­ing? Inter­est­ing­ly, in that review, we often have peo­ple do a tal­ent review of their key seats or key lead­ers that they present, and what they’re going to do to strength­en that team. We also do a bit of a cul­ture review, we have a mini pulse sur­vey that we do either one, two or three lay­ers deep in an orga­ni­za­tion to see what’s going on and how the oth­er peo­ple are think­ing and feel­ing at this time, so that we’re not caught by sur­prise, or we’re not think­ing that we’re lead­ing the teams well, but real­ly cre­at­ing prob­lems. So it’s, you know, you some com­pa­nies get deep­er, some stay a lit­tle bit more sim­pler, but the key is a true reflec­tion of how you’ve been performing.

Brad Giles 11:31

And so you touched on the bru­tal fact that we’ve done an episode on that episode 59. Con­front the bru­tal facts, Jim Collins Miss method for Team hygiene. So you can refer back to that. And what that means it’s such an impor­tant part, con­fronting the bru­tal facts, every sin­gle quarter.

Kevin Lawrence 11:50

Say it’s an agen­da point on mur­al dig­i­tal­ly, or a flip chart on paper where we make a list every sin­gle meet­ing? So I brought a jump, I jumped in there too quick­ly. And you’re in the mid­dle of say­ing something?

Brad Giles 12:00

No, no, no, no, that’s exact­ly what we do. You’ve got to have it as a part of your quar­ter­ly agen­da. Yep. And so we move on to we’ve got the quar­ter­ly review, the pre­vi­ous quar­ters review, we move on to the core ide­olo­gies. So what are the core val­ues? Sto­ries? What are the core pur­pose sto­ries? Peo­ple aligned? What are the actions to live as we would say? So how do we get more peo­ple to under­stand the val­ues and the pur­pose and the BHAG more deeply?

Kevin Lawrence 12:29

Yeah, and there’s a piece of that, that we do when we do our cul­tur­al review that pulse sur­vey, it gives us some oth­er things that we actu­al­ly mind the bru­tal facts and a few oth­er things. But just know­ing that we got to keep breath­ing life into this cul­ture and these core ide­olo­gies, because if not guar­an­teed, they become cor­po­rate wall­pa­per, just blah, blah, blah, up on the walls and posters that aren’t being lived and breathed and felt in the orga­ni­za­tion. And we got to keep help­ing it along.

Brad Giles 12:55

Mm hmm. And so then once we’ve cov­ered off the core ide­olo­gies, we move to the next point that we have to con­sid­er in a quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan­ning meet­ing, to review and test the strat­e­gy. Remem­ber that we’ve set the strat­e­gy at the annu­al, and we’ve evolved the strat­e­gy at the annu­al strate­gic think­ing meet­ing. And so how are we per­form­ing in con­text to that, or maybe we’re going to test some aspects, per­haps we’re going to dig into the five forces or use anoth­er tool, per­haps we’re going to evolve. If we’re a bit ear­li­er in the pro­gram, let’s say, or the jour­ney, per­haps we’re going to evolve? What is our under­stand­ing of the fly­wheel or what­ev­er con­cept or tool we’re using? So there’s some time that’s allo­cat­ed in there, to review and to test and to ideate.

Kevin Lawrence 13:47

Yeah, and then the next piece is, is to resolve big issues. We call it strate­gic dis­cus­sions, hav­ing time when we’re all togeth­er, to debate real­ly, real­ly impor­tant things. So one of the last meet­ings where I was in with this, we were debat­ing the COVID pol­i­cy one, what was the pol­i­cy, but to how do we roll it out prop­er­ly, being mind­ful of our own val­ues and the respect that we have for peo­ple on our team. But it could be that acqui­si­tion that you want to do, or it could be a new type of cus­tomer that you want to open up and start work­ing with, or it could be a new strate­gic part­ner­ship or piece of who knows. There’s always debates that that core team needs to have to help us to get clear on what we need to do to con­tin­ue to win could be around strat­e­gy exe­cu­tion, does­n’t mat­ter what time to dig in. And you know, in some one of the com­pa­nies I work with, we spend of two days a day and a half just debat­ing key strate­gic things so we can align and decide and move forward.

Brad Giles 14:46

Think about it this way. If you’re going to reset it, we’ve cov­ered off what hap­pened last quar­ter, and there are some things in the busi­ness that we have to incor­po­rate into our quar­ter­ly pri­or­i­ties. So we can real­ly set our quar­ter­ly pri­or­i­ties until we’ve cov­ered off debat­ed, argued, decid­ed on a few items. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re talk­ing about.

Kevin Lawrence 15:12

It’s crit­i­cal. And it’s the time when we’re togeth­er, we can do it, often some­one will make a pre­sen­ta­tion, my rule of thumb is 10 min­utes, you got 10 min­utes to present. And then we can debate it, but it’s debate, get the best ideas and align and make a deci­sion or debate, get the best ideas, and then the per­son in charge will take those and run with it. Num­ber six is learn­ing, you know, when­ev­er we can make it work, we like to get the whole team read­ing a book, and what­ev­er that book is a book rel­e­vant to how we want to or what we need to do to win this year. And then we have a dis­cus­sion around it, what the learn­ing is from it, which, you know, helps to make sure peo­ple read it and lis­ten to it. And then talk­ing about how we can apply this. So for exam­ple, we did a meet­ing last week. And we had all read, there’s a sim­ple sum­ma­ry book of Porter’s work this that that car­toon book called What a strat­e­gy. And we sat and we dis­cussed it. And we went through it and had a con­ver­sa­tion about what was valu­able about it. What do we think about this in our con­text? And then what do we need to do? Not shock­ing­ly, some insights. Now book end­ed up this orga­ni­za­tion now wants to do the five forces, which they haven’t done yet. And and and it’s got every­one think­ing more about com­pet­i­tive strat­e­gy, ver­sus, you know, sell­ing in a poten­tial­ly, you know, what would be called a red ocean, but the point of it is hav­ing a dis­cus­sion. And then at the end, we pick the one, what are we going to read next quar­ter. Now, either it’s a dis­cus­sion, some­one presents it what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, but it’s real­ly, real­ly key to have time where we learn togeth­er and grow togeth­er. And if it fits the agen­da, it’s very powerful.

Brad Giles 16:47

Yeah, learn­ing. Here’s the thing about learn­ing that peo­ple may not con­sid­er. Imag­ine if this stuff actu­al­ly works. Imag­ine, right? Well, the rev­enues grow, the mar­gins grow, the size of the team grows, the com­plex­i­ty grows. In that envi­ron­ment, we need to stay ahead of that curve. And that means every­one in the lead­er­ship team has to con­tin­u­al­ly learn how to do their job bet­ter, how to become more effec­tive as lead­ers, because most times, most of the peo­ple in most of the jobs have are at the high­est lev­el in a firm that they’ve been before most of the time. And so there­fore, we’re always break­ing new ground in terms of things that we’re learn­ing. And so we need to curate that as a lead­er­ship team.

Kevin Lawrence 17:34

Yeah, and often we need to re learn it, we’ll go back and read books again. And a lot of these com­pa­nies, we need refresh­ers, or there’s new peo­ple in a team that haven’t read these things. So super pow­er­ful port. And it’s a dis­ci­pline just to con­tin­ue to stay sharp. And although it’s not enough, we need more learn­ing than just that. But that’s a good start.

Brad Giles 17:53

Yeah, and then we move on to the 90 day exe­cu­tion plan. And so that is the pri­or­i­ties, the smart pri­or­i­ties for the com­pa­ny, for the depart­ment for the indi­vid­ual. Now, I like to say that all through our time togeth­er a day, some com­pa­nies have two days, we’re look­ing through all of these dif­fer­ent lens­es to iden­ti­fy poten­tial pri­or­i­ties, through even through the strate­gic review, even through the bru­tal facts, every­thing that we’re doing, we’re try­ing to find any poten­tial pri­or­i­ties. And then toward the end of the ses­sion, we get this whole col­lec­tive of ideas that we can then cat­e­go­rize and maybe some get thrown out, but we’ve got some real sub­stance to work with, in order to set our 90 Day plans. So every­body should be walk­ing away with a indi­vid­ual, smart set of goals, ide­al­ly, three to five, depart­ment and Company.

Kevin Lawrence 18:53

Yep. And the idea is, you men­tioned Brad, as you go through the meet­ing, you’re look­ing for the things that need to become goals, or some stuff does­n’t, you know, a lot of stuff just might be a lit­tle task that some­one does, or we leave it and deal with it in the future. But we got to boil down to a set of com­mit­ments that we’re all going to march towards. So the quar­ter­ly meet­ings are out­stand­ing. And you know, and some peo­ple say, Why do you need to do every 90 days, it’s because it works. It becomes this learn­ing and growth fly­wheel for the busi­ness where you eval­u­ate, get a lit­tle bit smarter, get realigned, and then go and do it again. And it starts to get frag­ment­ed, but every 90 days, you’re com­ing back and reset­ting. I just, I love that dis­ci­pline. And you know, we’ve got a whole bunch of peo­ple on our team that do these for com­pa­nies, and they have us do them for years, if not decades. Because the big­ger piece of this is orga­niz­ing and run­ning these meet­ings is a job. It’s a project. It takes a lot of prep and skill. And so a lot of peo­ple would rather out­source it to experts like us to run these meet­ings, for­get­ting even the con­tent and per­spec­tive and exper­tise we have because we’ve helped so many com­pa­nies Just the basic of hav­ing some­one to run an effec­tive meet­ing and make good use of your time is incred­i­bly, incred­i­bly valuable.

Brad Giles 20:07

Awe­some. So let’s move to review the quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan­ning meet­ing. So, one to two days, it mat­ters because it answers the ques­tion, what is the pri­or­i­ties? What are the pri­or­i­ties for the busi­ness, the indi­vid­ual, the depart­ment, etc? And that is a real­ly impor­tant ques­tion, because it tells us where to focus our effort. And there’s no short­age of dis­trac­tions out there. Sick. So the first point in the agen­da is that we go through into a pre­vi­ous quar­ter review. And then next, we’re talk­ing about the core ide­olo­gies. Kevin, do you want to take us on to the next one?

Kevin Lawrence 20:48

We’re review­ing test the strat­e­gy. We’re almost always work­ing on some dif­fer­ent strate­gic mod­els, and we’re review­ing tests and update the pieces that we’re work­ing on to make sure that are still rel­e­vant, or updat­ing with data we’ve got from test­ing things in the field. Then we go and debate and resolve key issues, whether it’s solv­ing a prob­lem or get­ting aligned around key things that we need to do and be on the same page with, then we have time for learn­ing so we can learn and grow and get smarter togeth­er, and whether we’re learn­ing some­thing for the first time, or we’re going back and refresh­ing and learn­ing again to touch up our skills. And then final­ly drop­ping it into a 90 day exe­cu­tion plan where the rub­ber hits the road. We have a plan for the com­pa­ny, a plan for each of the teams, and then ide­al­ly a plan for each of the indi­vid­u­als. So every­one is crys­tal clear on their march­ing orders for the next 90 days.

Kevin Lawrence 21:40

So hey, I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth whis­per­ers pod­cast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. You can get each of us on our newslet­ters and you should because we got a newslet­ter shar­ing our best insights on a week­ly basis. Brads’ you can find on his web­site, evo­lu­tion. part​ners​.com​.au also more about Brad and what they do at his firm. And same for myself, Kevin, you can get it Lawrence and co​.com lots of free resources. Learn about what we do and get newslet­ter to help you to stay sharp and con­tin­u­ing to build an endur­ing great com­pa­ny. Hope you have an awe­some week!