We’re two months into the year. It seems like January 1 wasn’t that long ago, but Q1 is already two-thirds done.
Time flies, especially when all of your new initiatives are kicking off, you’re finishing up last year’s goals, or you’re adjusting them for a change in strategic direction. It’s easy to be execution-focused as a manager, focus on hyper specific problems every day, and then look up and realize you aren’t tracking diligently to your quarterly or yearly goals.
Here’s the uncomfortable question: if Q1 ended today, would you be happy with your team’s progress?
Most managers can’t answer that clearly. They’re drowning in activity, but they haven’t stopped to check if the activity is leading anywhere. It’s easier to run a staff call and focus on the problems of the day, but you must be disciplined about treating your staff call as part of your operating system — a checkpoint to make sure you’re actually tracking toward your goals.
The 5 Warning Signs
- You don’t know your numbers.
- You’ve already abandoned a January priority.
- Your team is busy but not shipping.
- You’re surprised by problems.
- Your calendar looks like January’s calendar. If nothing about how you spend your time has changed, nothing about your results will change either.
You Don’t Know Your Numbers
If someone asked you “Are you on track?” and you’d have to say “Let me check,” that’s a problem. Leaders know their key metrics without checking.
This doesn’t mean you need to know every single goal down to every detail, but you should know most of them directly. If you don’t, now is the time to fix it — before you’re called to account for it.
You should be operating against some form of goals that have metrics associated with them (possibly even OKRs), and you should have an understanding of what you’re tracking to and where you stand. If you work in an organization with vague goals, the responsible thing to do is build your own rubric. Define what you think an A, B, or C performance looks like and what metrics are associated with that. Then give yourself an honest grade.
If you don’t think you’re performing at an A level right now, at least you’re aware. It’s not even time for midterms yet. You still have a lot of time to turn this around. And if you are doing well, then look ahead to where you need to be going into Q2 and the first half of the year. It’s a much easier story to tell about why your teams are doing well when you have data to back it up — whether those are metrics everyone has agreed on or just metrics your team has agreed on. Either way, they’re metrics you can point to and justify why you think you’re on the right track.
You’ve Already Abandoned a January Priority
Goals set six weeks ago should still be goals. If you’ve already moved on, either the goal was wrong or you have a focus problem.
You can have goals that you meet extremely fast, although I’d say those were already in the bag when you set them. You can also have goals that are going to take the entire year, and I’d expect that most of your goals fall into that category or at least a significant portion of the year. If you have goals that are no longer relevant after six weeks, that’s OK — it just means you didn’t set them very well.
Acknowledge that and move on. Update your goals. Do you need new ones? Are the old goals invalid because the company changed direction or your projects changed direction? The important thing is some introspection about why the goals are no longer valid and what you’re doing as a result.
Your Team Is Busy but Not Shipping
Activity isn’t impact. If you can’t point to concrete outcomes from the past eight weeks, something is broken.
It’s really easy for teams to look busy and not deliver value. Those teams are more focused on theatrics — whether it’s personal drama, team drama, or some form of internal weird culture — but the only thing you really get measured against is whether you’re delivering an outcome that your firm or your client wants. If you aren’t doing that, you’re just doing an elaborate version of dancing in place.
You’ve got to be focused on delivering outcomes because that’s really what you’re paid to do. You can talk about progress. You can talk about going in the right direction. But if you haven’t delivered, you don’t really have an outcome to point to.
Maybe it’s early in the year, but you should try to structure your delivery so you’re producing some incremental value — building reputation and fundamentally buying credibility that you can accomplish the bigger outcome. That’s what gives your clients or your firm confidence in you.
You’re Surprised by Problems
When issues pop up, you find out late. That’s a communication or visibility problem, and it won’t fix itself.
At this point, your operating system is broken. If you’re being surprised by problems this early in the year, you need to diagnose why. Are you not talking to your team enough? Are your directs not talking to their teams? Have you put together an environment where people don’t want to bring you bad news?
Are you having skip-level 1:1s so you can see what’s going on in the organization? There’s always going to be a bit of a “sunny side up” version of events that people tell their manager. Hopefully, you have an organization where you promote transparency and honesty, and people are not punished for bringing bad news.
I’d much rather deal with bad news early and possibly correct it through some form of positive action than be blindsided by something I wasn’t aware of at the last moment. If you don’t make an environment where people can bring you bad news, they won’t — and you will have trained them to blindside you.
Your Calendar Looks Like January’s Calendar
If nothing about how you spend your time has changed, nothing about your results will change either.
Getting set up for the new year and executing for the rest of the year probably don’t have the same cadence. Your calendar should look somewhat different by now.
I’ve talked about this before, but I color-code my calendar. Green for things that are strategy, planning, or an investment — something I want to make happen and I’m looking forward to. Yellow for operational concerns — a weekly staff call, a follow-up, maybe a 1:1. Red for meetings that I really need to pay attention to, possibly a significant problem or escalation.
The cadence and the number of those meetings should change over the course of the quarter. You should have more planning at the beginning and more operational meetings in the middle. Hopefully you don’t have a lot of red, but at a glance, you should be able to look at your calendar and assess where your time is going. If it’s a sea of red, you’ve planned the quarter wrong.
The Good News
There are still five weeks left in Q1. That’s enough time to course-correct if you start today.
Pick the warning sign that hit closest to home. Fix that one first. You don’t have to overhaul everything — you just need to stop, look at where you are, and make one honest adjustment.
The managers who finish Q1 strong aren’t the ones who started with a perfect plan. They’re the ones who checked in, told themselves the truth, and made the correction before it was too late.
See you next week!
-Frank
