I love the smell of Q4 in the morning...

Ah the smell of Q4 in the morning. To me, it smells just like the scholastic book fair on a foggy morning in October - a chance to stock up on books, school supplies, and start fresh. While I don’t have the book fair to go to anymore, it still feels like a time to start over, reset, and think about what’s next. Q4 in my world is a chance to finish the year strong, but most of all a time to do my own annual plan for the following year.

In the hustle of trying to achieve our goals in Q2 and Q3 over the summer, it can be easy to let our core mission get away from us and spend the remainder of the year chasing emergencies and fires that come up and need to be managed. Once Q4 arrives then it’s Thanksgiving and Christmas, which while personally exciting, tends to mean that staffing levels are lower and distraction is at an all-time high. Once the New Year rolls around we’re all so tired that the first couple weeks of the year rolls around and by the time we realize it, we’re already a month into Q1. When do we even have time to plan and prepare for our next year?

This is exactly that time. Before the holidays take our attention. Before PTO and sick time puts our staffing levels into disarray. Before our own managers are taking well-deserved breaks and time to rest. This October is when I’m putting pen to paper and coming back to my position’s core responsibilities so that I can keep my eye on the finish line this year and get started right out the gate January 1 (racing analogies right??).

Ultimately annual planning gives us definition and clarity in the middle of what can seem like chaos. Even as managers, if you know the department you’re assigned to, the team you manage, you can still start to lose sight of the overall mission of why you are here. Taking time to step back and redefine that WHY not only helps you actually stay laser focused on your results but can help us know why we matter - something that can be very hard to know when it’s 11am on a Monday and your day is already off course because of a major issue that just came up.

Not only is this important for us personally, it is important for our team as well. Do you have a team of direct reports, or even one employee? Why not go ahead and do this annual planning not only for your role, but with them for theirs? As managers we are absolutely responsible for our employee's development. This process, giving them a mission, coaching them through developing their own values and objectives for the year can be a very powerful tool in helping them develop extreme ownership over their results and showing them that you are dedicated to their success as well.

For a “read-me” on how I go about my annual planning, continue below for step-by-step instructions on the process I go through, and if you’d like to follow along with annual planning for your own position or team I’ve included a template that you can download to either fill out by hand or online as an editable PDF. Once I am done with my planning, I print this out and keep it in a folder so that I can come back to this each week for my own purposes of knowing - am I on track? Am I focusing on the right things? Is this initiative going to help me achieve these goals or does it need to go on the back-burner?

Defining Your Mission + Vision + Values

Even if your position or team has a job description, does it tell you truly what your mission? What is the ultimate purpose your team or role has? Who or what is it impacting at the end of the day and why is that important?

For example, my mission is to help our teams achieve their monthly and quarterly objectives by managing effectively and proactively.

With your mission set, your HOW is your vision. How will you actually achieve that mission? Who will you be working with and what will you be doing to achieve that mission?

For example, I achieve my mission by coaching and training our management teams to manage effectively and proactively. This is done by designing and implementing our organizational management practices in partnership with my colleagues - business processes, management and training practices - that are used to achieve those objectives.

Often overlooked, but equally important to me finally are my values. Knowing my why and my how, it’s important to me to really be clear on my unique approach. What are the skills that are unique to me and how will I use those in my role and with my team, whether those are employees or my colleagues.

For example, one of my values is understanding. I place a lot of value on understanding one another, as I feel that understanding someone else’s experience and viewpoints is one of the most important parts of a relationship - whether that is personal or professional. I also believe that when we need to work with colleagues to accomplish something together - one of the best ways to approach that if we can is to understand what each others personal goals are for that. What are they looking to get out of this project? What opportunities will it give them, and do they know my goals as well? With that mutual understanding an agreement, we can move forward much more effectively and even navigate issues that pop up a little more easily knowing that we both have the same ultimate end goal.

Creating Your Own Goals & Scoreboard

Everyone likes to win, right? I know I sure do! How do we even know if we’re winning, though, if we don’t have a scoreboard to look at? When you’re in a role that is a support position - maybe you’re an administrative assistant, or even a training specialist - it can be hard to know what “winning,” looks like. Even if you don’t have a clear number or goal that you’re assigned to currently, doesn’t mean we can’t create one, though. Even if you’re in a support position, who do you support and what targets are they responsible for hitting?

My next step is to take my overall mission, and break it down into three goals or numbers that I want to affect and achieve. Let’s say you are a Marketing Coordinator managing social media campaigns for your company. One of your goals to achieve your specific mission is to increase the engagement on your company’s Instagram profile.

With that in mind, how do you know that we are winning? Right now, what is your current engagement rate, and what rate would you like to achieve? Is there a funnel that tells you for your company to get a certain number of purchases through that platform?

For example, your goal could be to increase your engagement rate from 1.5% to 3% in 2020 on your company’s Instagram account:

Exceeds Expectations: Achieving an average engagement rate of 2.5% or more

Meets Expectations: Achieving an average engagement rate of 1.5-2.5%

Needs Improvement: An average engagement rate of below 1.5%

With this benchmark, you’ll be able to look at your activities and projects to see at the end of the day, are they having the intended effect to reach those goals?

Listing Your Quarterly Priorities

Now that we have our mission, our goals, and a way of measuring those goals, we can brainstorm what our work will actually look like! Specifically how are we going to achieve the above in 2020? My last step in annual planning is to draft out what the year will look like and what I will focus on each quarter as stair steps toward that annual goal. What are the projects you can focus on each quarter?

For example, to achieve your improved engagement rate on Instagram, do you need to fill an open position of Social Media Coordinator? Perhaps your Q1 priorities could be to fill that open position and improve the consistency and quality of your content by contracting with a copywriter. Q2 priorities could include partnerships with influencers and market research to better understand your audience and what they are actively engaging with. Lining out each piece of this breaks this larger goal down into achievable steps that will help you focus on the immediate next steps and know what you need to accomplish several months at a time to “win” at your larger goal for the year.

Where do we go from here?

With your annual plan in hand, now it’s time to make sure this is in line with your manager’s vision for you. Hopefully you have already had discussions with them about your efforts over the next year, which will have helped you line out your plan. But even if you have not, this is a GREAT starting point for those conversations. It is always much easier to start with a draft, and use that as a way to see if you are either on track or if something needs to be adjusted. After coming to an agreement on what you will focus on, you’re ready to put this on your wall, roll up your sleeves, and get started.

Bonus! Pre-schedule meetings with your manager (or employee) each quarter to review the previous quarter’s work and plan ahead for the next quarter. This helps us adjust if something else has come up as a priority, and helps you review your own wins and lessons learned over the last few months. Pre-scheduling those meetings will make it much easier to follow through on those conversations.