Remember earlier this calendar year when you came out of that strategic planning session feeling energised, with a renewed sense of clarity and purpose?
Then, a few weeks later, you felt like you were back ‘in the weeds’.
Now, after a few months into the plan, you’re wondering where the time has gone and worried that your to-do list has drifted off into a different strategic direction.
If this is you, I have a suggestion on how to tackle this.
Behold, the mid-year review!
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(Are you rolling your eyes, yet?)
OK, so it’s not something new but hear me out anyway.
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Now, before we dive into the actual mid-year review process, let’s identify your starting point so you don’t waste time on the things you don’t need.
When it comes to strategic performance monitoring, we have roughly three groups:
The hope strategists: The people that plan, prepare a pretty document and then hope for the best.
The corporate reporters: The people that diligently prepare quarterly or six-monthly strategic performance reports, that most executives don’t really pay attention to and, quite frankly, find incredibly tedious.
The strategic swans: The (annoying) people that seem to have it figured out – they somehow manage to plan, execute, report, tweak and generally kick goals without breaking a sweat. And, what’s even more frustrating, they sometimes have fails along the way, but own up to them, adjust and get back to kicking those goals. (Well, it’s enough to make your blood boil!)
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But, jokes aside, we all want to be more like the strategic swans, generally gliding through our strategies successfully but also able to smoothly deal with adversity. (Apologies for the lake references.)
So, how can the mid-year review help? And how can we get more out of the effort we put into it?
Here are some tips for the first two groups…because, clearly, the third group already have their act together.
TIPS FOR THE HOPE STRATEGISTS
If you are a hope strategist, you need:
to be convinced of the value that strategic performance monitoring or a mid-year review bring
to find a way to make this fun and easy and not overly bureaucratic.
Here are two main reasons why you should do a mid-year review and not just shelf your plan.
It helps you maintain momentum by reminding people of the goals from the plan and hopefully reconnecting them with that sense of clarity and purpose they had during planning. This also helps ensure that the goals continue to be used as a reference for ongoing prioritisation – to remind them of what is considered important work when new opportunities come along. (Shiny object syndrome, anyone?)
It helps you identify if something needs to be adjusted, to get back on course or to get onto an even better path. By checking in and seeing how well you’ve progressed against your commitments, you can identify whether you’ve created misalignment between the goals and the things you spend your time on. You can also assess whether the work you’ve already completed is effectively progressing you towards your desired outcomes or whether you need to tweak the plan and try something new.
Sounds useful, right?
Great. Now the trick is to make this more engaging, which I’ll be tackling next.
TIPS FOR THE CORPORATE REPORTERS
If you are a corporate reporter, you already understand the value a mid-year review brings. You just need to get more eyeballs on those reports, right?
Wrong!
Before you rush off to improve your report or strengthen relationships to convince people to read it (believe me, I’ve tried both with subpar returns), take a step back and remember why the mid-year review process exists. As mentioned earlier, it’s there to maintain momentum and to see what needs to be adjusted, to improve your chances of success.
The report is just the tool, not the desired outcome. There are different ways the outcome can be achieved and if the current tool isn’t effective, try something else.
Now, I appreciate that you may want to formally document your progress in the form of a report or that there may be a statutory requirement to produce one. By all means, go ahead and prepare the report. As a governance nerd, I love to see organisations taking the time to analyse and document their progress – it’s definitely good practice. However, if the executive team is not using it to maintain momentum or adjust their course, then you will need to do more.
Looking at the way the report is designed can help. Perhaps it’s text-heavy with no visuals or it’s lengthy with no summary page and list of key takeaways. Those are all helpful tweaks you could make.
However, a better way to increase engagement with the mid-year review is to organise a discussion around it. And I don’t mean to add it as an agenda item to your weekly executive team meeting where a couple of people say a few words, before you move on to the next exciting agenda item, such as allocation of executive car parking spots.
I’m talking about a dedicated session, which has minimal presentations and focuses mainly on conversations and in-session problem solving.
This doesn’t have to be an all-day thing. You could set aside two hours and keep it simple by structuring the first half of the session around a ‘stop-start-continue’ format and then use the second half to roughly agree on and plan out the adjustments that need to be made. This would allow you to both celebrate what’s working and have a group discussion around what’s not.
A key thing to remember is to send out the structure well in advance of the session, with some thoughtful questions for attendees to consider as they prepare.
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Essentially, make the mid-year review process engaging and worthwhile. Design it around a session that people will look forward to attending.
(Oh, and the promise of snacks helps, too.)
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Thanks for reading the post. I hope it’s helpful.