Hi Michelle,
We work to what’s called a BUP (pronounced ‘boop’). It’s a Business Unit Plan that rolls up into the whole BUP. So for eg, as leader of my Business Unit, I do my BUP and that adds to the full Bup. We use a Balanced Scorecard to record critical metrics.
The BUP has 4 critical categories within it: 1. Innovate & Create, 2. Clients for Life, 3. Grow the Brand, 4. Our People. We start with the vision (each unit has it’s own), then record 4-5 main objectives and then add initiatives in those 4 categories as well as SMART goals.
We then have our enablers - things that enable us across the whole business to achieve the plan - this is mostly operations.
I do like the OKR framework too - but this is usually three month planning. I find the longer planning that we do keeps us questioning any shiny new things that appear and it takes us back to the plan to ask whether it hinders/helps the plan.
We then created our Behaviours Framework that talks about what being a Coronian Leader is. All leaders within the business had to do a capability statement against a benchmark that was assessed by Andrew. We had to agree/disagree on where we both saw improvement. It was one of the most valuable things I’ve done. It drew out a lot of discussions.
We also did HBDI (Whole Brain Thinking Model) and learnt about us individually as well as a leadership team. This is similar to other personality profiling instruments I’ve seen where we worked out who were the visionaries, the data peeps, the people peeps and the doers in our group. We bench marked ourselves against other organisations. We found that we were strong in vision, but while good in green (doing), we weren’t really strong in this area. It’s led to us bringing in another Exec who is very strong in that area. Now, every meeting focuses on the 4 areas.
It’s been a massive year learning about how all of this fits together. One thing I’d like to add to any plan is the behaviour changes needed to achieve what wasn’t achieved in the quarter plan. I think that’s really important. We haven’t identified that yet, but it’s something I’m going to suggest to the leadership team. We measure the Balanced Scorecard in Quarters with monthly targets.
We have a very strict exec meeting structure that each leader chairs each month. It starts with an activity (it’s led by Andrew and is usually centred around work that he’s doing at Harvard) and then we go into Actions from Previous Meeting, Future Focus, Risks, Financials, Balanced Scorecard, Skills & Successes. It’s a good meeting structure that allows enough time to chat through issues (usually 1 1/2 hours) and also ensures we’re becoming much more cross functional as everyone contributes to each other’s issues. We find we have a lot of the same things. Hope this helps! X
