Most leaders manage in a short-term, task-based way. Only the best have the discipline to identify a few immutable drivers of value and focus relentlessly on improving them through experiments that span quarters and years.
The challenge is that leaders go through the motions of establishing long-term plans in their annual operating plans (AOP), only to ignore or dismantle them in the weekly and monthly work they do. The weekly or monthly business review (WBR or MBR) becomes a meeting where new tasks are assigned rather than reviewing progress on the goals established in the AOP.
I recently saw this pattern play out in a client’s business. I was meeting with them to review their progress on writing their monthly business reviews (MBRs), ensuring the MBRs would refer back to the annual operating plans (AOPs) they had created.
When they showed me an example, I was surprised to find that they had added a new section at the beginning of the MBR doc listing 15-20 action items and their status. The list was a set of tactical to-dos, such as price changes and promotions to run.
These to-dos had nothing to do with the initiatives identified in their annual operating plan, and they had been created in last month’s MBR. In other words, the company’s senior leadership was coming up with a new to-do list for the team each month. The latest, “urgent” tasks took up all the team’s time and energy, and virtually no progress had been made on the priorities outlined in the AOP.
This is incredibly common: leaders get distracted by day-to-day operations or new ideas and end up failing to advance their yearly goals.
This happens because Leadership either lacked conviction in the initiatives within their annual operating plans or disregarded the original plan and set direction on the fly.
In either case, the many weeks they had invested in building an annual operating plan became a waste, and the clarity achieved through the AOP exercise gets obscured by the constant introduction of new ideas and tasks.
The antidote to this is learning to run an AOP process that builds conviction and alignment around the right long-term initiatives. The stronger the AOP, the easier it is to reinforce with the MBRs rather than undermine.
The AOP should be the tool that allows the team to adhere to the old Jeff Bezos principle of “Stubborn on the vision, flexible on the details.”
Learn more about running an effective AOP or Monthly Business Review with our course:
