GIVEAWAY!! Launching Our YouTube Channel & Effective Annual Planning Strategies
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Mary: [00:00:00] Welcome to Confessions of a Terrible Leader, where real leaders share the raw truth about the lessons they learned the hard way so you don't have to. Join our host, Laci Nelson, founder of Transcend Leadership Collective and former terrible leader. On this podcast, we invite you to step into the confessional and get real with the messy stories and behind the scenes reality of leadership.
Mary: Let's get to it. Hello
Mary: friends, and welcome back to Confessions of a Terrible Leader. Take care. I'm your friendly neighborhood podcast producer, Mary Scopp, and I'm here with our fearless leader, Laci Nelson. Laci, welcome.
Layci: Hey, hey, I love when I get to be on this side of the table. Mary, whatever you got planned today, I have no doubt it's going to be a great ride.
Mary: Awesome.
Layci: In the
Mary: interest of full disclosure, we were just laughing about this because as we record this, friends, it is Friday, December 20th, [00:01:00] 2024. This episode will not go out till January 8th. And we're going to get more on that in a moment. So right now we're not super coherent. There's not a lot of sleep happening.
Mary: There's a lot of loops that need to be closed. Gifts that need to be wrapped and we're all kind of like shuffling through like zombies.
Layci: We're laugh, like we're giddy. We're laughing at, we're just punch drunk. Yeah. So this should be a great show. It's going to be great.
Mary: It's going to be super slap happy anyway.
Mary: Before we get into it, I am so delighted to share that this, as you will find out friends, is the inaugural episode and the launch of our YouTube channel for Confessions of a Terrible Leader. I figured it was time to move us into the current century and get confessions in video format on YouTube. Yes. We are going to have a lot of fun and enjoy ourselves on video.
Mary: [00:02:00] I will have to be more cautious of my facial expressions, maybe, I don't know. We'll see. Not necessary. Probably not. Anyways. This is super fun. We do also have a backlog of episodes that you will see in our YouTube accounts. So enjoy perusing those and we will keep doing our very best to bring you all the great leadership content and continue to bring you all the confessions of terrible leadership and how we learn from those lessons.
Layci: I've been peeking at our contact forms coming in. And we got some good stuff coming in the new year.
Mary: Yes, we do. I have been surprised myself, like, Whoa, how did this person find us? But you know what? I'm not going to ask questions. I'm just going to do my job. We're going to go with it. I love it. So Laci, again, we're recording this five days before Christmas.
Mary: Yes, but we are going to talk about the new year. Best ways. To really give yourself the strongest [00:03:00] possible start in the new year as a leader and for your team. Go back and review listeners. If you remember the episode on strategic planning, we have a little bit of a primer on how exactly we do quarterly planning, strategic planning.
Mary: So we've got some details on that in previous episode, but today we're going to focus a little bit more on really thinking in terms of the strategic. Setting yourself up for the year. It's January. We have our own annual meeting scheduled in January. Yep. To get us off on the best possible foot. So Laci, feel free to just freestyle a bit on annual planning.
Mary: Let's go for it.
Layci: Okay. Yes. So as Mary alluded to for the brass tacks go listen to that episode probably link it in the notes It's gonna give you the ins and outs I want to go for mindset right now because we gave you that the brass tacks stuff already Thinking in the seat of the leader. Where does your mind need to be is part of the conversation and What do you do to help your team get into a mindset to have [00:04:00] a really intentional year?
Layci: Meaning you are focused, you all are rowing in the same direction, you know where you're going, and everybody knows exactly what their contribution is and how it's going to move the needle forward. I honestly start thinking about annual planning six months before the year ends, at least. I don't talk to my team about it until we get about a month out.
Layci: Because I know A, it's going to change a bunch, and I don't want to create unintentional chaos. And B, I don't want to create an unintentional false sense of urgency, of like, oh, I'm thinking this, so I don't want to derail us. And as a leader, you have a lot of potential to do that, not on purpose. Be aware of that.
Layci: All of that said, what the heck am I thinking about six months out? First of all, I'm paying attention to the market. I'm paying attention to the markets that we're in, the groups that we serve. What are they doing? What is important to them? What are they starting to forecast? What are the thought leaders in those different industries that we serve?
Layci: We [00:05:00] serve a lot of people in egg, a lot of people in manufacturing, people in the trades. Some people in retail even that are adjacent to those. Ace Hardware is one of our clients. When you start thinking about what are the challenges that they're facing? What do they have going on? What are the things that they're paying attention to?
Layci: What is important to them? And how does what we do support the areas where they have pain without deviating? Don't start chasing dollars. What I mean by that is pay attention to that stuff and And think about how does the way we talk about what we're already doing, our solid core offering, how do we speak in a way that's going to meet their needs?
Layci: So I'm starting to think about that. Gathering information, paying attention to nuance. I'm always doing that just constantly all year, but mm-hmm six months out, I'm starting to go, okay, what's shaping up for the next year? What am I seeing? So that's one of the things that my brain is working on. I [00:06:00] also am thinking about starting to pay attention in our own services with more a laser focus.
Layci: What am I observing that are the current constraints on our business? What are the thing or things that are the limiting factors for us? And I have to be really careful to not make a knee jerk decision. This isn't something that you want to think, Oh, I got it in the day of annual planning. Because it's a pretty big question and you want to be starting to pay attention to different data points and going, Okay.
Layci: You know, common areas of constraint can be sales. Do we have sales? How's our marketing? How's our messaging? Maybe those things are great But we're getting stuck when it comes to delivery because we don't have enough people that are trained Thoroughly enough to go out and deliver the services whatever that is for you Start thinking about that and then double check it with do I want what would happen?[00:07:00]
Layci: Are we ready for what would happen if we remove those constraints? These are all thought processes. I've said this a hundred times. It is not mine. I don't know who said this listeners. If you know who said this, tell me. Healthy organizations often don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion. Meaning they grow too fast, they're trying to do too much, and they don't go slow to go fast.
Layci: They don't really slow down enough to make sure that their foundations are firm, to check in with their processes. How is our user experience for our customer? All of those things that really need to be in place if you want to grow. So that's another gut check. We say, Oh, we want to grow, but you better be able to answer why.
Layci: Why do you want to grow? And do you just want to grow to make more money? Okay, fair, but right, can you handle it? And I don't care if your revenue is 42 million dollars a year, but your profit margin is 1 percent
Mary: Yeah,
Layci: no, or you're barely breaking [00:08:00] even you want to figure out where do we have inefficiencies?
Layci: Where can we tighten bolts and then this is one of the hard parts of leadership and strategy You could definitely pull your team in, but you need to be thinking about this. What do we want to focus on for the year? Because you can't do all the things at one time. Because as you start putting your business under the microscope in this way, you're going to go, Oh, we got a lot of things.
Layci: Yeah. One of the ways as a leader, what you could start doing is asking questions of your team. Tell them that you're brainstorming. Tell them you're in information gathering mode. You're thinking about things right now. And when you do enter. Your annual planning phase, the more structure you can give and still co create with them, the more effective it's going to probably be in the long run.
Layci: So what I mean by that is, if you don't know that you're not ready for a growth sprint, and you've got people pulling really hard in that annual meeting at the end of their leash going, I want to grow sprint, I want to get after it, I'm going to do this, do that, but the [00:09:00] systems aren't there to support it.
Layci: You need to know that before you go into that meeting, or you're going to get caught up in the energy, if you're like me. And excitement of the idea. And then partway through next year, you're going to go, Oh, that was not the right move.
Mary: Yes. Right. Kind of like the marathon versus the sprint mentality. I once read in this, it was not actually referring to an actual marathon.
Mary: It was something, it was a business article of sorts, but they were saying if you treat a marathon, like a sprint, you are going to throw up all over your shoes within the first few miles.
Layci: Oh yeah, absolutely. And not finish. Right. You can't even do it. And there are appropriate times to sprint in a business.
Layci: But make sure that you know what things you need to have set, and the training the team needs to go through to be ready, right? If your people are in couch to 5k shape, or your business is in couch to 5k shape, and you're trying to throw them into a marathon, y'all gonna die. Or into like, a relay race, right?
Layci: So just be aware of what people need, [00:10:00] and what you need, and where you're at going in. Where do you want to see the year go, generally? So for instance, is this a year where you're like, yep, we're ready. We're going to break into a new sector this year. Or is this a year where you're like, we are ready to shore up our systems this year.
Layci: Yes. We are ready to revisit the foundation and maybe fix some cracks or we're not ready to put on an addition because we got to fix our roof before we do that. It's just doing that thought work within the context of what's going on in your industry. Where is your business at? What are you ready for?
Layci: Most businesses try to jump into most organizations. And if you're like, I don't run a business, Laci, I just run a team. Same can be said for your team. Most teams or departments, they are trying to, and I am speaking from doing this the wrong way. Having done this backwards so many times, it's embarrassing.
Layci: learning to work on things in the appropriate order [00:11:00] of operations. And we oftentimes think we're ready for growth or the next level, but really the next level isn't more, more, more. It's sophistication and refinement of what we have. Oh yeah. And so I think if you can even just delineate in your head as a leader with annual planning, is this a more, more, more year, which sometimes they are, or is this refinement?
Layci: Is this sophistication? Can you guess which one ours is going to be? Is this a year for refinement and sophistication? Is this a year for, we want this to go to the next level, but before we even define Find exactly what that is. We got to be ready for it and shore up what we have here at home first.
Layci: Those are going to be two different energies you bring into a planning meeting. And if you start planning the seeds ahead of time with your team and let them know, hey, I'm thinking this way. So when you come into the annual planning session and you've been thinking about your own piece of this puzzle that we [00:12:00] have, my mindset right now for this coming year is we need to really get serious about refinement at even a deeper level or building our sophistication, smoking out our inefficiencies, plugging holes, and that can also look like are the right people in the right seats.
Layci: Every year you should be evaluating No matter what phase you're in, are the right people in the right seats.
Mary: There's
Layci: multiple steps to it. The first is looking at the structure of your organization. And if you are a startup or a small business, this is probably in flux every year. We literally have to redo ours every year.
Layci: We have to do it again this year. Where we take a look at what are all the roles within the organization? What functions do they fulfill? And that's the first step. And what is the structure that we need? That's going to serve us best for the next six to 12 months. If you are in a growing, small organization, that structure is going to change frequently.
Layci: It does for us. And the amount of hats people wear is changing. And then the next thing is, okay, whose name [00:13:00] is going to be in each box. Whose name is going to be in each box for these things? The kicker is you can't have more than one name in each box, but you can have one name in multiple boxes, which is really common in a small business and a startup.
Layci: Yeah. Many hats, many, many hats. I am really trying to get rid of some of my hats. Yes. All of these things are things to set your team up for a really good planning session and to have a really good annual plan. And then there's the 30, 000 foot view of, well, first, don't forget to celebrate your wins. Yeah.
Layci: Don't forget to do that. Start there. Start with celebration. Start with the listing of accomplishments. Pause. And especially if you're someone who is very task oriented, very pragmatic like myself, we are generally suck at that. It's on to the next. We'll celebrate our people all day long, but we don't acknowledge our own [00:14:00] accomplishments and, even in celebrating others, We can tend to be like, well, we told them once it was awesome.
Layci: So having that collective, all of you just taking that moment to appreciate where you've come together over the course of the last year, what you've learned, what are the gains that you want to keep. What are the things that you're like, we killed that this year and we made progress in this area and we don't want to lose these gains.
Layci: We want to keep these gains. We don't want to lose sight of it and have it be something that falls off. And you're celebrating all of those things. That's a really good place to start. Yeah. And then you go from there into just a review and not a revision, but a review and a refresher on who are we as an organization?
Layci: What are we doing and why are we doing it? It's just a different way to answer the question about what's your mission and vision. I think we've kind of become numb to mission and vision because it [00:15:00] was used for decades and became this thing on people's walls that didn't mean anything. Right. Another way to answer that question is who are we?
Layci: What are we doing? And how are we doing it?
Mary: Mm-hmm .
Layci: So what is it that we're doing as an organization and how are we making that happen? Yeah. Having that discussion, reviewing your core values and talking about, very honestly, are these aspirational or are these actually real? Oh, right. Yeah. 'cause
Mary: it can sound really good.
Mary: Mm-hmm . But it's like, well, this isn't actually what we're doing. Mm-hmm . And this isn't actually who we are. Mm-hmm .
Layci: Your culture at your organization are your true core values in action. Yes. You gotta be real with yourself. And so it's having that check in. It's like, who are we? These are our core values.
Layci: Why are we doing what we're doing? How are we doing it? What are we doing? Just that check in. What is our long term vision, goal, impact that we want to make? Very simple, right? I think even a five year strategic plan at this point is ridiculous. Oh, right. [00:16:00] Everything changes so quickly. Mm hmm. Yep. What you can have is this solid framework that you can flex with, right?
Layci: And so part of this framework, it's part of our vision mapping process, and what we do is we help organizations really define, we do this in house as well, what do we want our impact to be? We've had organizations set it out for a hundred years, but it's like, literally, which is the most dramatic, but it was just, it's one sentence.
Layci: Yeah. Maybe two. So it's not this huge multi page page plan of a hundred years. It's this one or two sentences of the kind of impact or sometimes people tie it to revenue. Sometimes it has nothing to do with revenue. The hundred year one, they are so passionate about what they do and why they do it, that they want their modality of service to be relevant and available for people that need it and want it a hundred years from now.
Layci: Cause right now. It is not in favor with the style that they use. The [00:17:00] methodologies that they use are in favor with legislation, but it's going to swing back at some point because it always does. And so they know, no, we really believe in this so much. So that that is our biggest thing we want to have is a hundred years when we're all dead and gone.
Layci: This is still available for people. Yeah, really getting that nailed down is a big deal. So if you've reviewed all of those things, And then you can understand what makes you unique, what sets you apart in the market, why should any organization want to work with you versus any other organization that does exactly what you do, because we like to think we're all precious individual pebbles, and we are, but we're not, you know, like, especially to the consumer.
Layci: I mean, leadership training, Google that, you'll get 8 million hits. So you have to really work hard to understand what differentiates you and you need to have your core leadership team on the same page.
Mary: Yeah.
Layci: I've already talked really long, Mary. We were not supposed to talk this long. That's
Mary: okay. [00:18:00] It just goes to show you that there is a lot to explore in annual planning.
Mary: And I will say just from direct personal experience being on the team at Transcend Leadership Collective. Laci started asking us about a month ago to start thinking about mission, to start thinking about what is annual planning going to look like this year, start thinking about refinement of what we currently have.
Mary: Just like you said, planting the seeds. Getting just those thoughts moving in that direction to help further refine and define who we are and what we do. And it really helps, you know, not a whole lot of thinking is going on at the moment. But it
Layci: will again.
Mary: That's why I asked you a month ago. Exactly. See, timing is everything.
Mary: And something else that comes to my mind. You may think you want to take on this task. scope of work. But in the words of my middle schoolers, especially my [00:19:00] boys, it's like, you're doing too much, bruh. You're doing too much, my guy. Being careful to not be doing too much, my guy. And knowing what truly is the most important thing, annual planning.
Mary: And like you said, mindset. Versus brass tacks. Execution is one thing. The mindset is really the foundation. And of course you don't have to be a business owner. You can be, but if you are just leading a team, this absolutely applies. If you feel you need some support or are just curious, reach out to us. We love to chat and we sure do.
Mary: We would be delighted to walk alongside you in your leadership journey. Every day. We would. Well, Lacey, I suppose it is time to get back to the existence of our December 8th. Sorry. That's it. We love
Layci: the holidays.
Mary: We do. But man, we do. And it's a lot all at the same time. It's all the invisible stuff. Yep.
Mary: Anyway. Well, Lacey, [00:20:00] thank you for your time. And would you see us out? Absolutely.
Layci: Until next time, friends, go manage like a leader.
Mary: Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Terrible Leader. If you're feeling brave and have your own terrible leader story that you'd like to share, head over to TranscendLeadershipCollective.
Mary: com slash podcast to fill out a guest application. We'd love to hear from you. Confessions of a Terrible Leader is hosted by Lacey Nelson and produced and edited by Fixation Point. Productions music is by Leaf Olson and Mary Scott from the band. The number of months Confessions of a Terrible Leader is a free leadership resource offered by Transcend Leadership Collective.
Mary: If you are ready to refuse the limits of average leadership and join the leadership revolution, visit transcend leadership collective.com to check out our offerings for engaging workshops, strategic planning, and more. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave us a review.
Mary: And until next time, go manage like a [00:21:00] leader.