Here's the hard truth for small team leaders. You may have the best plan, but nine out of ten businesses will never turn the plan into results. And that's called the execution gap. Today we're going to show you how to close that gap for your team. Welcome back to Leveraging Operations and Leadership. I'm Tanya, your leadership and team performance partner for small teams that want to work smarter, lead stronger, and build a culture of excellence. Today's episode is Plan with Purpose. We're going to talk about what high-performing small teams do differently. Because small teams don't thrive on luck, they thrive on clarity, they thrive on alignment. They thrive on structure. And the difference between a team that's overwhelmed and a team that's consistently performing often comes down to one thing: purposeful, intentional planning. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Here's why planning sets high-performing teams apart. When you look at small teams that consistently deliver, you'll notice something immediately. That's not the case with small teams. In a previous podcast episode, I talked about a CEO that I work with, and he had a small team. And at the time we started working together, he was down two people. That's a third of his team. That's huge for a small team. One of the things that we had to do is we had to start unpacking everything and identify what the root cause was, why the people left. And we realized that the team members that left, the two vacant roles, they weren't the right fit. But we also identified why they weren't the right fit. And we were able to build a hiring plan so that he could go out and hire with intention. Hire based on the things that were important to him and the team. And the next two hires, I have to tell you, they were in complete alignment. Performance improved, stress decreased, all of the things. But it started with a plan. And I'm talking about planning right now in the month of November when many of you are planning for the next year. So this is an optimal time to actually start planning if you haven't started that process. I want to share with you what planning with purpose actually looks like so that you could start to close that gap that we talked about earlier. Many businesses either have a plan in their head, buddy, they set goals in their head, or they'll even write them down, but they don't have a full-blown plan that tells them how they're going to execute it on a regular basis. One of the biggest gaps is people plan, but they don't integrate it within the day-to-day operations of your business. Your plan has to become a part of your business. It's not something that you write and you put in a shelf or you put in a binder somewhere. This is something that is living and breathing, and you are executing it on a regular basis, and your team is executing it on a regular basis. So let's dig in and talk about what this looks like. What planning with purpose is. And it's not about adding more work to your plate, because we know as a leader, you already have a lot of work, but it is about structuring what you already do so that you and your team can get better results. So let's break it down in a couple of steps. The first thing that you want to do is start with outcome-driven goals. This isn't a task list. These goals are going to be outcome-related. For instance, if I want to improve client experience, that's not my goal to improve client experience. I need to put more meat around it. I need to make it outcome-driven, make it measurable, make it clear so when I'm sharing it with the team, they understand what success looks like. So if I wanted to use that, improve client experience, I may say something like increase client satisfaction scores from 4.2 to 4.8 this quarter by tightening our onboarding process and reducing response time to less than a business day. That's specific. I can measure it. People know what the expectation is. I'm talking about operational clarity. And then they know what success looks like. They know if they are doing well or not. If we are consistently responding in more than a business day, then we know we're not meeting the goal that we set in place. That's number one. You want outcome-driven goals that they're going to eliminate the guesswork and they're going to create alignment, but most importantly, they're going to provide clarity. The second thing you want to do is identify the gaps. And you want to identify the gaps before they actually derail your plan. Every goal carries gaps. That's just a part of it. But you want to make sure that you are identifying what those gaps look like ahead of time so you can start to close the gaps. For instance, with my goal that I said earlier about improving the client satisfaction scores, there may be some things that I need to do. Maybe I need to put a process in place because there is no process for onboarding clients, or maybe there isn't a process for how we're going to respond to people in less than a day. Maybe I don't have the team to do it, the resources to do it. I need to consider that. Is there some type of technology that I can implement that's going to help with that? So identifying these themes, whether it's like I said, a missing process, uh, capacity issues, skill development, whatever that looks like, I need to be able to identify it. Because if I put a plan in place, if I put a goal in place, and there's a gap that I do not close, then the likelihood of me achieving my goal just decrease. So I want to take some time and I want to really think through what could stop me from achieving that goal and what do I need to do to fix it? The third thing you want to do is translate the plan into people and performance. Who owns it? Think about it. What person is going to own this? What person is going to be responsible for this? What do they do if they're not meeting it? Is there an escalation process? That is the person and making sure that they have the things that they need. The performance piece is how is it going to be measured? How often is it going to be measured? Who's going to measure it? Who are they going to share it with? What does it look like if we're not meeting our goals? All of these things need to be considered. This is a part of putting together a tight plan. By making sure you know who's on first and who's doing what, it eliminates confusion. It eliminates duplication. And by defining your success in terms of metrics, now you know clearly if you're on track or not. And as the leader, you can decide how you want to move, if you need to change some things, but you need to have the information. Somebody needs to be feeding you this information. Someone needs to be on top of it. And they need to know first, whoever owns it, if it's going in the right direction or not. The fourth thing you want to do is connect the plan to the purpose. This is the why behind the work. And I find that this is extremely important, not just for the leader, but this is important for the team as well. Purpose fuels consistency, and consistency fuels performance. And performance fuels growth. When you and your team understand how your work connects with the vision, connects with the purpose, connects with the client impact and their own growth, they show up differently. And this is one of the reasons why I'm always telling leaders you need to share, especially if you're a business owner, you need to be sharing your purpose, sharing your vision with your team. When you have a team that buys into this purpose, they show up differently. They are now a part of something. They're a part of something and they understand what they're doing, they understand the impact. Make sure you are sharing this with the team. And then not just the purpose, but the entire plan. So you could do this a couple of different ways. There may be pieces of it while you are actually going through and creating the plan. You may have different team members that are a part of it. But at the end of it, when everything is put together, you want to share the completed plan with the team. You want everybody to understand everything. Even if there's a part of the plan that someone is not a part of, you want everybody to have the same information. You'll be surprised of how impactful this is. Because even though a part of the plan may not touch one employee, but now they know the full plan and they understand how their piece may impact somebody else. Give them the full information. This is not the time for you to hoard information from your team. That's how you implement purposeful planning. Those are the steps. Just to recap really quickly, the first thing you want to do is start with outcome-driven goals. Remember that your goals are not tasks. They need to be measurable, operational clarity. Um, they need to define success. You want to identify the gaps before they derail you. Identify what those gaps are, and then start filling the gaps so that they don't stop you from achieving your goals. The third thing, translate the plan into people to own what part of the process, what part of the goal. And then you want to also identify what performance looks like. How am I going to track it? This is my metrics. What am I tracking? Who's going to track it? How often I'm going to track it, how is this information going to be shared? The fourth thing you want to do is connect the plan to purpose. This is the why behind the work. Making sure you understand what the purpose is and your team understands the purpose. And then the last thing you want to do is share the completed plan with your team so that everybody understands what's going on, what we're driving for in the next month, quarter, year, whatever it is that you're planning for. If you found this helpful, I want to share with you a guide that I created. It's called the Gap Guide. And basically, it's a tool that helps you close the space between setting goals and achieving goals. When we're talking about goals, I'm not replacing your. If you do any type of projections and things like that with your accountant or on your own, it doesn't replace that, but it talks about how you're going to take that information, how you're going to take that goal and document it and then go through these steps where you are actually going to be creating what that dashboard looks like. Creating where you're going to put these tasks and hold people accountable for and all of the things. So be sure to download the guide. Your team deserves clarity, your business deserves consistency, and you deserve a planning system that supports both. Download the Gap guide using the link that's in the show notes. And let me know what you thought. If today's episode helped you, ship your perspective, share it with another small team leader who needs it. And don't forget to give us a review. Let us know how we're doing. And then don't forget to download this recap guide with all of the resources. It's your roadmap to start leading with it. I'll see you in a minute.