You already know how your year is going
Photo by Pixabay.
We're deep into the January social season. While not quite as famous for festivities as the month that precedes it, there's still a lot of catching up and coffees and overdue dinners that were meant to happen last year but just didn't make it onto the calendar.
Which means several opportunities for people to ask how work is going. It's not a brain teaser. At least it's not meant to be. But you pause to do the quick calibration on whether the person is asking for the long answer or the short one. You go with, "Good, year's just kicking off. But so far, so good. I think."
The gut answer before you got all self-conscious about it? That's a good starting point. But there are other ways to get a read on how the year is going. Even this early in the year. Once you know to look for them, the breadcrumbs are everywhere.
How was the last team call? If you had to break it down with rough percentages, how much of that meeting was about the goals we set at the start of the quarter? How much wasn't? When you look at your notes from your last three 1:1s, do any trends jump out? Are your folks running full speed or spending a lot of time waiting on approvals? And, if you asked every person on your team to play back the org's big goals for the year and then a few words about how the team's focus for the quarter plugs into that, could they?
This isn't meant to stress you or your team out. We actually don't care so much whether the team can answer your strategy riddles. But our put to you is that, as a boss, you already have a sense of whether we're on track. Or whether we're slipping.
The good news
The good news is that it's still January. So much of being an effective operator is noticing problems early, because groups react differently to problems early on. And we get that it might not feel like good news. Because last month was December, and end-of-year problems feel very different. The dominant problem solving strategy last month was "shut up and muscle through it and hit the number and close it out." December for many orgs is lower quality, more slips, unfinished business, and generally feeling less great about your work. Happy holidays!
But it isn't December, it's January. If you can give your organization the gift of spotting problems early, you can solve them with shoulders down. People still have their New Year Energy, and so the problems you spot land less like oh no we're doomed ("shut up and muscle through it") and more like I've discovered something about how we do this kind of work. It doesn't mean every problem has easy answers. It just means that searching for answers, changing the way the work happens, restating what we're trying to get done is still, like, allowed.
Some people get too fond of spotting problems early. They become a constant drone of imagined problems that could happen, which leads to a bunch of firefighting hypotheticals. This generally lands as unhelpful stop-energy, and in short order no one will invite you to their fun or important projects, and you shouldn't do it. But assuming you're looking at something real, not hypothetical. Assuming we're a few weeks or months in, and you can already tell that your team's work is at risk, it's time to intervene.
More good news
You are not alone. Most teams screw this stuff up. Over-optimistic timelines. Assuming things will parallelize without seeing the hidden interdependencies. Punting on questions of measurement, or priority, or realism. It's all pretty normal and you spotted it early and that is all good news. But given all that, we also shouldn't have too much fondness for the plan as it's currently written. In the moment where your intuition is telling you that there's a problem, that intuition is a better signal than anything you wrote down in the heady optimism of a planning session last December.
Chase that intuition. Assume your current plan is a lie. Assume your metrics are shit. Assume that your abstractions aren't and your leading indicators don't. If you have a strong sense that things aren't getting off to a good start, it's usually one of three things:
We're working towards the wrong goals.
We don't know what's most important.
We are working on the right, most important things but something is in our way.
The solution to #1 and #2 is the same. In every RSG program there's a slide, somewhere near the beginning, that says, "Your job as a leader is to make your team more effective." And when things are going sideways and you're worried that you're slipping, the question you want to ask until you get a crystal-fucking-clear answer is, "effective at what?"
That's a conversation to have with your boss, immediately. It can sound like, "My team is spread too thin and I want to get clear on prioritization." Or, "I'm worried my team's work isn't plugged in to the goals of our department." Or, honestly, "It sounded good when we were planning last year, but looking at it now, my team's work doesn't make sense." There's lots of forms the question can take, but you can't get things on track without an answer.
If your team disappeared overnight, what would drop and why would the organization care? If your boss doesn't have that answer, then you should take them by the hand and walk together to their boss. Someone, somewhere in the organization, is signing off on your team's payroll. Why? What do they think they're buying? Either that clarity exists somewhere in the org, in which case you're entitled to it. Or it doesn't, in which case you're going to be the owner of figuring it out.
If, on the other hand, you're in situation #3. If your team is working on the right and most important things, but they are blocked, then that's your new job. Maybe it's someone else's team. Maybe it's an unavailable executive. Maybe it's budget or headcount or tooling or snacks. You might feel like that's someone else's problem, or above your pay-grade, or out of your hands. Our put to you is that none of those are very satisfying answers. Your intuition is not gonna give you a break until you figure this thing out.
But you can figure it out. It's still January.
— Melissa & Johnathan