Learn how Element Three has improved its internal communications through strategic planning and regular meetings at the leadership and departmental levels from Element Three’s Director of Talent, Karen Seketa.
Transcript
Karen Seketa:
Welcome to Tactical Thursday. My name is Karen Seketa and I’m the Director of Talent here at Element Three and I’m really excited to talk to you today about internal communications and more specifically share with you the Element Three communication methodology that we use here.
I think most of us know and it goes without saying that clear communication is the key to most successful relationships and it certainly applies within organizations. The information I’m going to share with you today I wish was my own brilliance but I have to let you know in full disclosure that this comes from a tremendous amount of research from professionals such as Patrick Lencioni, Verne Harnish and my personal favorite Marcus Buckingham.
The process that we use at Element Three you’re going to see pulls from all those different places. There are basically two steps in this process. One is the creation of the communication documents that you’re going to utilize throughout the organization. The second step is: what is your communication methodology? How are you going to share information up and down within the organization on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?
So let’s start with Step 1. I’m going to try and take something that’s very complicated here and make it look quite simple, so bear with me.
The first step for us started with our quarterly leadership offsite. Every quarter our leadership team goes offsite and we hold a meeting where we pretty deeply on key items that affect our business. The meeting that we have in January is fully dedicated to the creation of what we call our one-page strategic plan.
So we gather together – preferably offsite so you’re not interrupted – for a one- to two-day meeting and we create our strategic plan. Now if I were to show you our strategic plan it’s a little bit complicated and frightening, so I’m going to boil this down for you to four basic parts.
This one-page strategic plan takes a look at your organization in a couple of different areas. One is why. Why do we exist? What are our core values, our purpose, our brand promise? The second section is taking a look from three to five years out. So what are our targets? What’s our sandbox? Where do we want to dominate? What do we want to do? So where we want to be in three to five years.
The next section is the how. Looking one year out, what do our goals, metrics, critical numbers and key initiatives look like? And then this is the key part, is the what, the quarterly look at the company direction. This is what is most important now to us. What’s going to happen in the next quarter around goals, metrics and key initiatives?
So the next part is you take this part of your document, the what, which is the quarterly look, then we come to the creation of the quarterly thematic goal. So you take the information that you have assembled in your what’s most important now segment of your one-page strategic plan. This is critically important because this is the document that you’re going to utilize to communicate throughout your organization on a weekly basis.
The cool thing about this is everybody on your leadership team has participated in the creation of this document, so you can make sure that your communication is clear and consistent across the organization.
The quarterly thematic goal basically starts with what we call a “rallying cry,” what’s most important now. Just as an example, our rallying cry for the first quarter was “I Can See Clearly Now.” It’s based on our effort to put this communications methodology into place and make sure that we are creating some clarity across the organization.
You’re going to have some defining objectives: three to five. For example, one of ours is: “I understand how the company is doing financially.” We want to make sure that everyone within our organization is engaged and understands how our business works.
Then you have some standard operating objectives. These are your key metrics. You’re going to have three to five of these and these are metrics that you report out weekly as well.
Then you have a target for the quarter. What’s our goal? What do we want to hit? Ours is a revenue target and when we hit that target, how do we celebrate, what’s your reward? So throughout the quarter this is the document that you’re going to use throughout your communications.
Now the next step. Now that you have your communication documents, how do you circulate that information both upstream and downstream in your organization? You have a daily standup which is purely administrative, you have a weekly tactical which hits many tactical items including a review of the document we just talked about, and then you have your monthly strategic, which gets a little more detailed in how the company is going to make decisions going forward. And then we have our quarterly leadership offsite.
So let’s start from the top here. Our daily standups are fifteen minutes long and stick to this; this is really important. Everybody stands up. You don’t sit down and get comfortable, and we start with the leadership team first thing in the morning. We go around and everybody just lists their top priorities for the day, roadblocks, things that are important, key initiatives, and then we have the same meeting by department. So then the leaders go to their department, have the same type of standup, same agenda, but there the leaders share what they have gathered in the earlier meeting, the key priorities for the organization for the day, what’s happening.
On a weekly basis we get together for a longer period of time, 30 to 60 minutes, and this is where we review the thematic goal document that we have just talked about. We go through it both with our leadership team and by department to say: how are we doing? Does everyone still understand the rallying cry? How are we performing on our defining objectives?
You can use any system you want to gauge that. We use a green, yellow, red system basically meaning:
- Green, I got it. Everything’s good.
- Yellow: Not so much. Could use some more information.
- Red: I have no idea what’s going on.
The items that come up red or the other items that come up in the initial round of that meeting become your agenda, your real-time agenda, for that meeting. That’s where you focus on those tactical items.
In both of these meetings, anything that comes up that’s more strategic in nature that takes a deeper dive, takes more time to dissect and work out that actually becomes a strategic ad-hoc meeting. The key stakeholders that are involved in that decision-making process, they set a meeting. They talk more deeply about it outside of either one of these meetings so these are not hijacked by those strategic items. It’s a hard thing to manage and get used to, but once you get it, it really works.
Then you have your monthly strategic meeting. These are one- to two-hour where you only focus on one to two topics so you can really dive deeper into those topics. Those are really things that have come out of some of these meetings and if you can wait for them for the monthly strategic meeting, you talk about them there. You have a leadership one and then one by department.
And then finally you have your quarterly leadership offsite. So now we’ve come full circle. The next quarter comes and you go back to your quarterly offsite that we talked about in the beginning. We review the one-page strategic plan we put together, and then we come back to our thematic goal for the quarter. We recreate one for the next quarter and then we go right back at it the next day.
So this is what we use. This was a really quick rundown of it. I do encourage you to look at some of the resources that I mentioned. A lot of this came from a book called The Rockefeller Habits and I’m really interested to hear if any of you are doing something similar to this or you have any other suggestions. Good luck.
