Time to agree on your strategic planning cycle.
- Some businesses choose a financial year cycle (July to June).
- Others prefer the calendar year (January to December).
- You may choose a different cycle considering peak trading times or school holidays.
Discuss & consider what is best for your business. If you haven't already, review the strategic cadence learning package contained in the pre-work.
Your business cadence is made up of these types of meetings:
a) Your annual strategy session
- This needs to be in the weeks leading up to the start of your cycle. So if you are aligning with the Australian financial year it will be sometime in June.
- Best practice is two full days away from the office.
There is a lot to do in this session and investing the time for this critical work is important. You will be collating and reviewing inputs from multiple stakeholders, reviewing progress on strategic goals, closing out the current annual and quarterly objectives, and creating new annual and quarterly objectives.
Consider what is the best time for the leadership team to get away from the business for two full days. Having it away from the office removes distractions from your team and gives you all a fresh environment to have some deep conversations. Some organisations hold this at a hotel or resort - this is a great idea because it gives the team time together to develop relationships and build trust.
b) Your quarterly strategy sessions
- About a week before your next quarter starts, you will meet for a full day.
- Running this session away from the office is a good idea to create space for your strategic work.
In this session, you will be checking on the progress of the annual objectives, reviewing inputs from stakeholders (largely employees for the quarterly), closing the last quarter's objectives, and setting the objectives for the next quarter.
c) Your monthly strategy meetings
- Each of these monthly meetings will take around 3 - 4 hours.
They are designed to check in on objectives' progress and deal with any important strategic issues that may have arisen. They are for keeping your strategy on track, they are not for discussing operational or day-to-day issues.
d) Your monthly objective check-in meetings
- Each of these meetings should take less than 30 minutes.
The purpose is to check on the progress of objectives. If any are slow or stuck, discuss what needs to be done to move them along or unblock the person responsible for their delivery.
Establish Pulse Meeting: Why is business cadence important