You have your list of priorities for next year. Excellent. But that’s just the beginning of the conversation. Without a significant amount of clarification and conversation, your team will not have a solid handle on what will come next.
Here’s a sample list—by no means comprehensive—of what you and/or your team might need to discuss:
● What’s it going to take to achieve our objectives?
● How do you see this playing out?
● Exactly how will each priority or initiative impact each of your departments?
● Where are we likely to have bottlenecks?
● What’s likely to show up or happen this year that we haven’t accounted for yet?
● Are we trying to do this to a gold, silver, bronze -or- platinum level of quality?
● Now let’s talk about what we mean by those; one person’s gold is often another’s silver
You may say, “Eric, don’t worry. I have a very capable team. We are in great shape. We’re in sync.”
I know you’re likely to say something along those lines, because my clients often do so. But then a funny thing happens: I listen to the leader’s vision and priorities and then—with his or her permission—talk individually to each of their direct reports. I ask each person to offer their version of what needs to be done, by whom, and by when.
Then, I synthesize everything I’ve been told and show it to the leader. In the vast majority of cases, the accumulated list of everyone’s interpretations demonstrates vividly that the team isn’t anywhere close to being in sync. Numerous questions and many gray areas often exist.
I share all this to help you make sure you don’t underestimate how much time and effort it takes to break down in sufficient detail what must be done over the next year. This isn’t a two-hour conversation; it might be a two-day undertaking.
The temptation to hearing this may be to conclude that would be spending way too much time on administrative or technical details, instead of talking about strategy or innovation. That’s a misperception; it’s the unsexy stuff that sets the foundation for effective execution, and it is absolutely essential to get it right early. (Like now, in January.)
Otherwise, you run the risk of a strong start that falters as the organization gets bogged down in a fog of mis-alignment and inefficiency and loses momentum.