EOD Spotlight: Plan and Achieve 2024

This month, EOD looks at how to plan and achieve for great results.

How do we get beyond activities and busy work in our daily lives, and move to creating great results?

We don’t need two-day offsite retreats or big ideas to be more strategic. The most practical way to bring more results is to be strategic in your day-to-day work.

Here are some quick tactics from FranklinCovey on making strategic use of the information you have so that you and your team can make better decisions with better results.

1. Analyze your own intuitions so you can start applying them. What do you use to make predictions, like how a candidate will be as a new hire? You might seek opinions from others, but you also rely to some extent on your intuitions, i.e., your “gut”. Sometimes we don’t give our intuitions much thought. But taking the time to identify and articulate them can help you gauge which situations are leading you to good or bad choices.

Achievement Challenge: Write down your gut feelings that you typically rely on and keep a running list of them so you can notice how you react to things.

2. Look at “lead” measures, not just “lag” measures. By the time you see the results of a certain goal (for example customer satisfaction scores), it’s too late to do anything about them. “Lead” measures are often behavior-based and can be tracked daily or weekly. In the example of customer satisfaction scores, a lead measure might be reaching a quota of customer feedback surveys each week.

Tracking and improving these kinds of measures help a team focus on the right behaviors needed to reach a goal.

Achievement Challenge: Develop a list of possible lead measures with your team. It will take trial and error to find the lead measures that impact lag measures but lead measures can boost team moral and influence how your day or week will go.

3. Do a brief what-if test to surface ways to improve your current plans. What obstacles or challenges might be waiting to derail your plan? Or could there be a way to make your plan more efficient -- if only you were open to seeing it?

Achievement Challenge: Ask yourself questions like “What if I only have a month to do this, instead of two?” or “What if my budget was unlimited?” By thoughtfully running through relevant hypothetical scenarios, you may uncover factors that allow you to improve your strategy or build in bigger and better ideas.

This month, EOD has two offerings to help you with planning and achieving your very best. First, our Hungry Minds Café offers a look at how to be an expert at delegating (register here). Second, our open enrollment course will offer practical project management processes for the unofficial project manager- which is most of us (register here).