Speaker 1: 0:03

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Operations Toolbox podcast for business leaders. I'm your host, Ttonya D, and I help business leaders navigate team management challenges and turn overwhelmed teams into efficient, high-performing powerhouses by leveraging key leadership and operational principles of excellence. Today, we're going to take a look at the use of planning to increase your team's performance. Hmm, I bet you didn't know you could do that. A couple of episodes ago, I talked about planning, but it was from the perspective of being a leader and planning for your business. Today, I want to talk about how to take some of those things that we talked about and implement them down to the team level. You want your goals and your vision and everything to cascade throughout your business to the lowest level, whatever that is. This is applicable whether you have one or 1,000 employees or members of your team. Some of the things that we're going to talk about, or some of the things that we'll cover during this episode, is the importance of clarity in your goals. You have to be crystal clear. Probably heard me say that before Also going to talk about performance tracking, which is huge, whether you are a solopreneur or if you are managing a team. We're also going to be talking about defining team roles and more. All right, so sit back, get ready, take your pen and paper out so you can take notes and let's get into it. All right, so if you are a business owner and a leader who has a team and you want to improve your team's performance and engagement, I really want you to listen up and, again, I want you to get your pen and paper ready so that you can take notes. I want to break this down into four C's of team planning. Some of these C's you've heard me talk about before because they are a constant theme throughout business and throughout organizations. So you're going to hear them, but from a different context. Right? So let's set the stage.

Speaker 1: 2:37

When I first started with planning, I had a love-hate relationship, so I learned a lot about planning when I worked in corporate. We would have all of these consultants and experts that would come out and they would share all of this information. I mean, we went through a couple of different iterations of, you know, preparing our vision and coming up with our mission. They did really a really great job at that. We also did some things where we documented what our goals were going to be. How were we going to realize this vision? How were we going to accomplish it? So we came up with some goals to kind of lead us down the path, and sometimes we ended up with something tangible that we walked away with, and other times we didn't.

Speaker 1: 3:30

But the common piece that was missing was that we, as leaders, were not trained, we were not taught how to take that information and take it back to our team and implement it at the team level. And when we don't do that, we miss a key part of you know, we miss a key part of the planning process. And not only that, we miss a key opportunity to meet our objectives and to increase engagement and improve in performance with our team. And this is why I love this topic. From this perspective, today we're really going to be talking about how do you take this information and now implement it at the team level so that you could truly achieve your goals, but not only that, so that you make your team feel like they are a part of the success of the solution. They know from the beginning that they had a part in it. Okay, so when we're talking about the four C's, the first, the very first C that we're going to talk about is clarity.

Speaker 1: 4:47

I know I've said this before, I get it, but when we start with understanding what our vision is for our business or for our team, then we are able to really think about how our team ties in to our vision. So the very first thing, if you have not done this, if you are a business leader, you want to make sure that you have a vision. If you work for a corporation, you already more than likely you already have a vision. They have a vision, they have a vision. Now it's a matter of understanding the role that your team plays and how you align with that vision. Most of the time when we have visions, they are forward thinking, right. So back in corporate, we do a vision 10 years away. Now things are a little bit more fluid, so we want to shorten that.

Speaker 1: 5:48

I recommend having a vision that goes out, let's say three no more than five years, but three years. And then, once you come up with your vision, you want to have goals. Now your goals can act as milestones to help you achieve this vision. So you're one, two and three, so you can look at it from different perspectives, but every year you should be going to the table and assessing what you did last year and what it is that you want to accomplish this year, and this should be in alignment with where it is that you want to go, and this should be in alignment with where it is that you want to go your vision.

Speaker 1: 6:27

When we're talking about setting these clear goals on a yearly basis at minimum on a yearly basis you are going to make sure you begin with the end in mind. What is it that I want to accomplish this year? For this goal, you want to have clearly defined goals. Your goals should provide direction and purpose. So get really clear about the change that you want to see what it is that you want to make happen. Right. And initially, when you're kind of drawing it out, you may not have all the pieces, but you may know. For instance, you may want to enhance customer experience by improving the wait times right, so that tells me you know the direction that I'm going in and the purpose, the reason why I'm doing it. Think about your goals in terms of that. It may be you want to make a million dollars this year right, so your goals can be financial goals. Think about what it is is going to have the biggest impact and what it is that is going to put you on the path to achieving or realizing your vision.

Speaker 1: 7:48

Okay, so, once we come up with our clear goal right, our direction and our purpose, we need to assess where we are. This is all under clarity and making sure that we're getting extremely clear. Where are you now? If I know that I want to improve customer experience by improving wait times, what are my current wait times right now? So I need to dig up any pertinent data that I have and I want to get a really great understanding of where it is that I want to go. I mean where it is that I am now. So assess where you are now.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Your team can help you do this. They may have access to data or know information that you may not know, and this is because they're the ones that are doing things on a daily basis, that are doing things on a daily basis, so they may understand things at a different level. Depending on how large your team is. They may know some things that you may not know. As we start to grow, we start to become a little bit more removed from certain things. So get your data. Assess where you are A part of this clarity.

Speaker 1: 9:09

You want to perform a team SWOT analysis. A couple of episodes ago and I'll link it in the notes I did a podcast that talked about a SWOT analysis. This is where we identify our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and you can do this from a business perspective, personal perspective, team perspective. You need to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of your team, as well as your opportunities and your threats. This is going to help you identify low-hanging fruit and also identify a watch list. What are those things that I really need to look out for because they can hinder us from achieving our goals? Once you've done these things, you want to firm up your goal, right? So now I want to get into being more specific, and this is where we use the SMART method, right? So you want to be specific. So your goal should be clear and focused, so anyone can understand what needs to be done and who will do it.

Speaker 1: 10:16

You want it to be measurable. The goal should include how progress will be measured, right. How do I know if I'm going on track to achieving my goal if it's not measurable? It needs to be achievable. This is something that you can attain within a certain time frame If you want to make a million dollars. Are you able, is it realistic, to make a million dollars in right now? We're recording this in August, so between August and December, is that something that is attainable for you and your business? It has to be relevant. You want something that's practical. So if I have a goal to make a million dollars or to to decrease wait times, I want something that is in alignment. Right, I don't want, I don't want to put, I don't want a goal that's not relative to my vision. Is what I meant? Start from relevant. When we're talking about relevant, the goal should be practical.

Speaker 1: 11:30

Think about what your vision is and think about your goals. Do your goals align with where it is that you want to go from a vision perspective? And they need to be time bound. When am I going to accomplish this? Someday is not a date. Let's be really clear. Someday I'm going to be a millionaire. Someday I'm going to lose 20 pounds. Someday is not a date. We need a date on the calendar, okay. So let's make sure we have all of those, and that's the smart method. We have all of those and that's the SMART method, okay. So, once we get crystal clear, I know what my vision is. I know what my goal is. I've firmed it up. It's really clear. I understand my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats from a team perspective. Now I can really start to think about what are some of the things that I need to put in place to get there right. So I got my watch list. So I know what I need to watch for from a team perspective and we all do.

Speaker 1: 12:40

Now the second C is compass. So our compass tells us where we are and where we're going. So this is your performance tracking. Now why performance tracking?

Speaker 1: 12:55

Tracking performance helps to identify areas of improvement and recognize achievements. If I'm not tracking my progress, I don't know if I'm on track to achieving my goals. I don't know if I've exceeded where I'm supposed to be at this time and place for achieving my goals. I don't know that. So it's kind of like I'm going blind right, like I'm blindly moving. I don't know if I'm going in the right direction. I don't know if I'm going at the right speed. Tracking helps to provide that additional level of clarity. So now I know it also provides data-driven insights. So you're going to be tracking specific information right, and that is going to help you gain additional insights, leverage data and make decisions quickly. If I find that I'm not going in the right direction or I'm not going at a fast enough pace, I can now make some decisions to alter that so that we still meet our goal. That, so that we still meet our goal. So it allows us the opportunity to identify what is working, what is not working and change the course. So when we're talking about tracking, we're talking about key performance indicators and these key performance performance indicators they are going to be from a team perspective and then an individual perspective.

Speaker 1: 14:34

So my goal right when I, when I do my goal, after I firm it up, I'm making it a little bit more specific right. So for my goal could be I talked about earlier to reduce onboarding. Let's just say my goal is to reduce my client onboarding from five days five business days to three business days, 90% of the time, and I want to do it by the end of Q3. See how specific that is. Once I implement the SMART method, I know what it is that I want to do, I know the percentage of time that I want to do it and I know when I want to have it done by, if I'm tracking my client onboarding, the length of time that it takes to onboard a client, I can tell if I'm going in the right direction or not. If I want to go from five to three days and I'm tracking it on a weekly or monthly basis and I see that I'm averaging six, seven days, I know I'm going in the wrong direction, so I need to do something, just like I can identify if it's trending down or not. So having that goal, that specific, is going to be a lot easier when I'm talking about identifying KPIs for my team and for individual contributions.

Speaker 1: 15:58

So when I say in team versus individual contributions, I want you to think of this. I want you to think of this If you have a team of five people, you may have a team goal. So, overall, our goal may be to reduce from five to three days, but on an individual level, every five, each of those five individuals, should have their own North Star. What exactly do each one of these people need to do in order to contribute to this goal? Okay, so you want to make sure that everybody has their own role. The roles are clear. The responsibilities are clear. This could be from having your detailed job descriptions that is going to be extremely helpful and from you outlining and reiterating what the priorities, what their responsibilities are.

Speaker 1: 17:00

So when we're talking about the onboarding process, I want to pull out the key components that are related to this goal. So, if I have a project manager that's on my team, what are the tasks, what are the things that the project manager does that's related to this goal of reducing my client onboarding, this goal of reducing my client onboarding? So, for instance, my project manager may set up the project and click up, they may schedule the kickoff call. Those are the tasks that they do that are related to onboarding. Then my assistant may be the one that sends out the welcome package, create the storage folders, stores the documents. She has specific things that she does. So when I am identifying their individual North Star, it is going to be related to their responsibilities. North Star is going to be related to their responsibilities.

Speaker 1: 18:15

So I may say that my project manager needs to have the project set up and click up, you know, within a business day or two business days, and they need to schedule the kickoff call within, you know, a business day, just throwing things out. Same thing with the assistant. When is the welcome package sent out? I'm going to make sure I have a criteria around that. So anything that relates to this overall goal of reducing my client onboarding time, any tasks that they have that are related to that, I want to identify it and then I want to give them the North Star right. So each one of the tasks that they do do not necessarily have to have a metric around it, but I do want to identify what is the most important task that they do that impacts this five to three day reduction that I'm looking for. So I hope that makes sense. So just get really clear on your goal, identify the tasks and responsibilities from your various team members and then from that that, which are the ones that are the key tasks, and make sure you implement a north star, a key performance indicator for that specific individual. Now you have your team and then you have your individual as a team. Here's what we're responsible for going from five to three days, ninety percent of the time, and we want to do it by the end of Q3, that's a team and then from an individual perspective, all kickoff calls should be scheduled within one business day, and that's from the project manager and then the assistant. The welcome package needs to go out within one business day. That's theirs. Okay, all right. So after we've gone through and we've talked about from a performance perspective or a compass perspective, we've talked about making sure everyone has their own KPI and we have a team KPI.

Speaker 1: 20:28

The other thing is, you want to make sure, underneath this is that you have the right tools and techniques in place. So I'm talking about measuring, right? Do they have the tools and the resources to be able to register? Do they have the tools and resources to be able to measure? How do I know? How can I measure, if the kickoff call was scheduled within one business day? Do I have the tools to do that? So we need to make sure, right? So they need the software, they need the process in place. Whoever is going to be pulling down this information needs to have a way to be able to see if this was done in a timely manner. So what does that look like? Right? So I know if I have my project manager setting up projects. I need a project management software. I also want to have a dashboard, something that we can all look at and say, okay, are we trending in the right direction or not? We want to have regular performance reviews so that they know where they are. Okay, so we have five projects this week. You know the kickoff calls were scheduled within one business say for three of them, but two of them they weren't. We want to be able to have that level of information so that we are able to communicate that to our team and be able to share what our recommendation is in terms of what we need to do to fix it, or we want to make sure that we are letting them know that we are trending in an upward position, right? So maybe the opposite is, in effect, right. So for the project manager, all of the kickoff calls were scheduled in less than one business day, so we're definitely trending in the right direction. We want to be able to share that information with them as well. That leads us to the third C, which is communication, effective communication. So think about how you're going to communicate this information with your team and yes, it's going to look a little different depending on the size of the team.

Speaker 1: 22:51

When I was back in corporate with one of my departments, we had standup meetings, so I was over collections and we had standup meetings um three times a week. So we would meet for five to 10 minutes and we will review our goals. We will review, you know, what we did well, what we didn't do well and what we're going to keep our eye on. So we kind of just talked about a couple of things and then we went on Five to 10 minutes max, right, but it was a specific meeting. It was only about our goal, where we were in terms of collections, whatever our goal was, where we were, what adjustments, if any, we were going to implement, and it gave the team an opportunity to kind of tell me if there were any roadblocks or anything that they were running into. That I may not have been aware, right? So that was a larger team and then the one-on-one individual goals that we had. We did that on a one-on-one basis.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Now, when you are operating a business, most of us usually have a really small team, right? So the teams are smaller. Think about what is most effective, right? So the teams are smaller. Think about what is most effective, right? Especially if your teams are not, if they're in different time zones and all of that stuff like that. So what does it look like? It may look like meeting once a week instead of three times a week, and you're going to meet and you're going to go over your goals, regardless of how you decide to do it, because you'll have to decide what works best for you and your team. The goal is to make sure you do it, and you do it on a regular basis. Okay, so you need to be making sure that you're meeting with your team, you're sharing the information and then not just from a team perspective, you're meeting with them on an individual basis to go over their specific KPIs and any roadblocks that they may be encountering. So we want to be really clear about the communication.

Speaker 1: 25:10

The last C is continuous improvement. Now, when we're talking about the role of continuous improvement, we're talking about emphasizing the importance of always seeking ways to improve team performance. This could be, you know, going back and looking at what we did last week Right, looking at, like you know, one of the things that we do at the end of every project we list out lessons learned, what went well, what didn't go well. Right, because we want to do more of what went well. So, when we're looking at what went well, we want to make sure that these are some things that we already have within our processes. Sure that these are some things that we already have within our processes. And then the things that did not go well, we want to identify. Are there things that we could do to improve that, or what did we do to rectify that situation? And now does that need to become a part of our standard operating procedure?

Speaker 1: 26:20

When we're talking about continuous improvement, we're always looking for ways to get better. Even when we meet our goals. Even if we are able to take our onboarding time from five days to three days successfully, we always want to continue to look and see are there ways to more efficiently do things? Is there some things that we could automate? So maybe we're doing something manually now and we want to automate it. So if I'm talking about creating folders on Google drives, there may be a zap that I could create to have it automatically create folders or do some things when, you know, based on some triggers, right? So just kind of thinking about what are some of the things that we can automate, what are some of the things that we can improve over time? And we want to always be looking at this throughout our entire business. Okay, be looking at this throughout our entire business, okay. So so what that does is it fosters a culture where where team members know that we're always working towards excellence.

Speaker 1: 27:32

And not only that. When you engage your team early on in this process, they that's it. They. They feel more engaged, they feel like they are a part because they're our part of the solution. We're not figuring that out all by ourselves. We're saying, hey, here's the vision, here's where it is that I want to go. We may even come up with the goal here's, here's the goal, right but we may not even have the full goal. We may have the direction of where it is that we want to go and, ideally, what it is that we want to accomplish, and then our team can help us fill in the gaps as to how we are going to get there. What are some of the steps that we need to take? This is what happens when you have an engaged team. This is what happens when you have a team that is performing at another level, because they feel attached to the solution. They want to see it happen, they want to see it work, they have a vested interest right from the beginning. Okay is key to not only achieving your goals, because that's extremely important, but doing it in a way where your team is more productive and they are more engaged. So those are the four C's of team planning.

Speaker 1: 28:52

We talked about clarity. We want to make sure that we have our vision and we want to make sure that we have a clear goal. And then we talked about compass. So when we're talking about compass, we're talking about making sure that you are measuring performance, and that is from a overall team level and then from an individual level, right? So every person has their own North Star, and if you have a large team, it is okay that two people have the same North Star. Okay, the next one is communication. We want to make sure that we have effective communication with our team and, again, it doesn't matter if it's one, 100, 1,000. We want effective communication with our team. And then the last C is continuous improvement Always looking for ways to get better, reaching towards excellence.

Speaker 1: 29:48

Okay, so action time. You know we got to have an action item. First things first. Do you have a vision? If you have a vision, has it been shared with your team? And if the answer to yes is if the answer to both of those questions is yes, then the next step is what is your goal? And have you identified the North Star for each of your individual team members. Okay, so that is your action, that's your takeaway. That is what I want you to implement.

Speaker 1: 30:31

If you have any questions, any feedback, you can leave them below.

Speaker 1: 30:34

I want you to invite you to leave me your feedback, to rate our episode. Let me know how you like it, let me know if there's other things that you want me to talk about. Right, and remember, if you're struggling with team management and you need personalized guidance, you can always reach out to me for a consultation. We can have a call and I can kind of hear about where you are and I can tell you what it is that I have to offer. Okay, so make sure you are reaching out to me, make sure that you are subscribing to the podcast, and also make sure you are joining the team navigator, where I share tips on a weekly basis via email about successfully leading and managing high performance teams, and we're going to be talking about some of the key leadership and operational principles that you want to implement. All right, I am Tanya D Harrison. Thank you for joining me on this latest episode and I will see you next week. And I'll see you next week and I'll see you next time.