The importance of reflection
I don’t know about you, but I get so caught up in the day-to-day. I am “go-go-go” more days than not. It used to be rare for me to slow down and appreciate the progress. I barely took the time to analyze what was working and what wasn’t so that I could learn from it. And if I wasn’t doing that, it meant our team wasn’t doing it either. I rarely brought us together to work on the business instead of in it. At best, we took time to reflect just once a year at our annual retreat. But that changed when I met a CEO who would eventually become my coach.
His company hired me to help them identify and articulate the values that would bring their culture to life. I spent two days with him and his team, and I watched them in awe. The session I joined was a quarterly meeting, not a year-end review, but their discussions centered on things that my team only brought up at our annual retreats—if we brought them up at all: They reviewed projects, analyzed what went well and what didn’t, gave each other feedback about how they showed up, identified new goals, and, of course, spent time on their company culture with the discussion about values.
When I left, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I witnessed. They are a high-performing team—and no wonder. If my team did what they did every three months, I thought, imagine where we’d be! I told the CEO how much I admired what I saw, and to my surprise, he offered to be my coach. Shortly after that, he facilitated a quarterly review for my own team. He still coaches me to this day, and I’m so grateful to him for helping me see the value of taking the time to pause more than once a year. Now, I am able to facilitate our own quarterly reviews after learning from him and adding parts of my own.
In case you’d like to try the same with your own team, I thought I’d share the agenda from our most recent review with you:
1-10: I asked the team to rate the following categories 1-10 (1 being it’s the worst it’s ever been, 10 being it’s the best it’s ever been): Teamwork, Communication, Relationships, Trust, and Happiness At Work. The rating is supposed to represent the overall feeling for the quarter (which for us was April-July), and I asked each person to share their score. We talked about the reasoning behind their scores, calculated the average for each category, and then we laser-focused on the categories with the lowest scores to identify what we can do better next quarter to get the scores higher. Last quarter, we scored lowest in Happiness at Work (5.8 average) and Relationships (7.6 average). The main reason is that with COVID-19, we went straight into survival mode. People started to take on projects that they didn’t really love in order to help the business stay afloat, and we stopped taking the time to connect personally because we were too focused on getting things done. We left with a plan to do it better this quarter, and we can already feel a world of difference.
Reflection Questions: Before the meeting, I sent the following questions to our team and asked everyone to come with their answers:
What went well this quarter and what did we learn from it?
What didn’t go well and what are your ideas to make it better next quarter?
When you think about this quarter, what is the biggest win on a team level and what was your biggest win on an individual level?
When you think about this quarter, what was the moment that challenged us most both individually and as a team?
When we discussed our answers, we agreed that our biggest win this quarter was taking care of our people during the pandemic. Even though our cleaning business was closed for almost two months, we didn’t lay off a single person. Our biggest challenge was learning how to pivot our business and come up with new ways to earn income.
360 reviews: This part of the session is a chance for each person to get individual feedback and give feedback to their teammates. Each person comes with two personal strengths and weaknesses from the quarter, and then we each build on those and give additional feedback. One thing I took away from this 360 was that one of my biggest weaknesses this last quarter was my level of intensity. When I get into survival mode, I am hyper-focused on the goal. While that’s a good thing in many ways, it can also add a lot of pressure to the team, especially if they feel like they can't keep up with my pace. I need to learn how to channel my intensity and be focused on the impact it has on others, which is something I am determined to get better at this quarter. (We shared everything you need to know to have a successful 360 Review here!)
Vision for upcoming quarter: When we’re done with our reflection, we use what we learned to set the vision, goals, and focuses for the upcoming quarter. My role is to set the financial vision: the numbers that we need to hit for the quarter and what hitting those numbers will do for our people and our business. After that, the team decides on the projects they will work on to help drive our financial results as well as the cultural initiatives they will lead that will have the largest positive impact on our people.
This review took a total of 10 hours split between three days, none of which were consecutive. I think it’s important to give people time to reflect and think and process what we discuss so that they can be at their best in every session.
I asked the team to share with you what having this moment of pause every quarter means to them. Here’s what they said:
It’s easy to assume that a team focused on culture and open communication will naturally talk about everything there is to talk about in weekly meetings. But for some reason, that just isn’t the case. Though we’ve worked together for years, our team dynamic is constantly shifting as our business grows and changes, so it's always eye-opening for us to see how our strengths work together—or how they can really clash if we don’t pay attention. Sometimes, we can get so zoned-in on our individual goals or projects that we forget to stop and check in with each other. A great, recent example of this is tension in Kristen and Monique’s working relationship that came up in our review of Q2. Monique is our Chief of Growth and works the closest with Kristen. While Kristen was in survival mode, she dipped into her tendency to become a little micromanage-y when stressed and started doing things without thinking through the processes or the effect on the team. Monique is great at coming up with efficient processes, but she wasn’t able to fully lean into her strengths with Kristen overstepping and swimming in her lane. The tension had been building for months—Kristen was frustrated at having to manage the details, and Monique was frustrated that she wasn’t able to handle the details because of Kristen’s over-involvement—but it wasn’t until the review that Kristen and Monique took the time to sit down, reflect, and really get to the bottom of why they were both feeling the way they did. A light bulb went off in our review as the puzzle pieces started coming together. With the team’s help, Monique and Kristen realized within a matter of 60 minutes what they had been stuck on all quarter. We worked together to identify and implement changes that will set us up for success in the new quarter. Had we not taken that time to reflect, the tension between Kristen and Monique would only have gotten worse, and they would have spent another quarter outside their sweet spots, which would have held us back from reaching our goals! This was just one thing that came out of the review. No matter what our discussions reveal, we talk them out, get clarity, and focus on how we can learn from this moment so that we can grow. As our business and our team change, so do our needs. What worked last month might not work in the next two months, and that’s okay!
To help you make this happen on your own team, we’ve put together a facilitator’s guide to leading your own quarterly review. The guide is designed so that you can follow it step-by-step, and we encourage you to make it your own!
Happy reflecting!
