Is your team ready for Q1 2023?

Are your goals stretching, realistic and aligned to your organisational strategy?

If you answered yes to BOTH of these two questions - awesome job! Congratulations -?you’re likely to be well on your way to a successful 2023!

This article however is for those of us who have not quite got to a resounding “yes!” on one or both of those questions!?

As the African proverb says:

"If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together."

To get as far as your team needs to get in the next quarter, the planning of this should involve a team effort. Not only will you need to “walk together”, you’ll also need to plan together to give your team the highest chances of success.

Perhaps we should add to this proverb the additional statement:

‘And if you want to walk in circles, walk without a map’

Imagine how helpful it would be to achieve full clarity around what your team will achieve between January and March 2023; that your team is equipped with a set of milestones which are perfectly aligned to your organisation’s longer-range, strategic goals.

Create a Map

Maps are helpful metaphors when it comes to planning ahead. A group of hikers can study a map, determine their destination, discuss what they see as potential obstacles along the way, gauge the difficulty of the terrain and then construct a realistic timeframe for each waypoint and ultimately their chosen destination.?

Much like hikers, a work team needs to collectively gather and plan the approach they will take and the milestones to meet to achieve the goals they need to accomplish in the next quarter. This planning also needs to be positioned within a useful timeframe.? This plan serves as a guide, like a map, for team members to repeatedly refer to so as to enable them to continuously refocus their efforts with the confidence that everyone is aligned to the same ‘map’.

3 months - The sweet-spot timeframe

A week is too little for planning - it’s over so fast.?

A year is too long - too many changes along the way.?

Teams seem to be most successful at planning within a timeframe of 1 to 3 months -? long enough to achieve something significant and short enough to stick to, allowing for a few course corrections along the way.

For a team to kick-start their year and continue with sustained focus, they could usefully dedicate a session to constructing their own ‘road-map’ for the quarter. This involves deciding on their overarching goal or theme for the quarter and the key results that they should deliver en route to that.?

Asking questions like these, during such a planning session with your team, can be enormously productive:

• Where should we be, as a team, by March 2023?
• What are the crucial milestones we have to pass along the way?
• How do we translate these milestones into measurable key results, both for us collectively as a team and broken down by team members?
• Which other goals do we put on the back-burner for this quarter?
• Who in the team is best placed to own the achievement of each selected milestone?
• What difficulties are we likely to meet along the way?
• How will we mitigate those risks?

If you are a team leader, you might be thinking that this is not rocket science! You may very well do this single-handedly for your team anyway, as part of your own leadership planning. If you do, and you are certain that your approach brings out the full potential of your team, then great!?

What we often find however, (and the research backs this up) is that the lone-wolf, team-leader ‘does it alone’ approach to planning is less durable and therefore ultimately less effective than the ‘walking together’ ?approach where the whole team is integral to the planning phase.

Why is whole-team planning more effective??

Because it helps a team to develop stronger ‘shared mental models’ of what their collective efforts will look like.

What is the value of? ‘Shared Mental Models’?

Mental models is the term that describes the mental states that enable team members to anticipate situations with a shared perspective and purpose and to coordinate with one another quickly and effectively.

If you want to:

• Determine a clear destination for the next quarter
• Develop a clear route to achieving that
• Clarify the deliverables your team will commit to along the way?
• Align your team members on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ for achieving the goals for your next quarter

Then schedule a half-day workshop with all your team members, and use the guidance questions in this blog to help you create your road-map and map your milestones!

For additional, more in-depth tips, guidance and structure on how to run this workshop, access our ‘Mapping Milestones’ pathway. This is a FREE step-by-step guide on how to run your team planning session super effectively, without the need for an expensive facilitator in the room! All you need are your team members, 3 hours and this playbook for every team member to access. Just follow the simple instructions and by the end of your 3 hours, your team will be so much better equipped to start and continue 2023 with a renewed and strong sense of purpose, focus and team connection.

Whatever you decide to do, Jyre wishes you good luck for your next quarter and if you have any questions or just fancy a chat about this subject, do get in contact with us!

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