We explored how managers should define their most important priorities in step 1 (know your business) and ways they can translate this into a definition of excellence for their team members in step 3 (define and model excellence). These steps will enable you and your employees to better focus on the work that matters and makes the greatest contribution to the organization. But things change. Circumstances change. New challenges pop up and new opportunities emerge. To ensure alignment and maximize your impact, you’ll need to develop strong yet flexible planning practices.

Planning is critical, but it’s a relatively rare activity, especially for busy middle managers. We can be more focused and successful if we spend just a few minutes planning each day and week. Most of the managers I’ve observed don’t plan enough. They perceive it as not being fun, something “higher-ups” do, and—most important—not urgent. By definition, planning isn’t something that has to be done right now. That makes it a perfect target for procrastination. Of course, we all know that choosing to wait or skipping it entirely will only bite us later because today’s urgent tasks probably are looming because we didn’t plan in the past. It’s a vicious circle—a time-sucking ride you can exit only by developing a regular planning regimen.

Before I share my thoughts on how to plan, I’d like to define what I mean by planning. Some people think they’ve planned if they’ve drafted a to-do list—and I guess that is planning at its lowest stage of efficacy. But you’re not reading this book because you want to struggle along at a low level of productivity, are you? You’re using this book to help you blow the lid off your productivity and success. In other words—simply creating a to-do list isn’t good enough to count as your daily planning.

Planning is the combined efforts of thinking about the contributions that you and your team can make today (this week, this month, this year, five years from now) and making specific choices about those actions that will best support your intentions. When you plan, keep both short-term and long-term goals in mind. To achieve long-term goals, work on them a bit each day along with your shorter-term objectives.

Planning isn’t boring and mundane—it’s where managerial magic happens because it’s where you make the decisions about how to spend your time and how to focus your team’s energies, passions, and strengths. It’s like going on a shopping spree with $5,000 in your hands—choosing what to buy is fun, but it’s also important you choose wisely! Your time and your team’s time are the $5,000 (and a lot more than that).

Build a Habit of Planning

How will you spend your $5,000? Will you blow it on short-term needs and wants, or invest in the future? Effective planning helps you and your team make the most of your impact on today’s and tomorrow’s results. To improve your planning practice, develop weekly and daily planning habits.

Weekly Habits

Let’s look at some habits you can develop to further your weekly planning efforts:

• Take 30 minutes each Friday afternoon or Monday morning to plan for the upcoming week (adjust the timing if you work a different schedule). Think again about the grand-slam home run described in steps 1 and 3. What would represent a grand-slam home run performance for the coming week (again, thinking about your short-term and long-term goals)? If you and your team excelled, what would occur? Ask your team for thoughts on this in a quick planning huddle (five to 10 minutes).

• Schedule meetings and conversations that will help you move things forward. Don’t just write down, “Talk with Joe about the ABC project timeline”; schedule a meeting with Joe.

• Create a list of decisions you want to make, request, or facilitate, and a list of barriers that need to be obliterated (such as the situations or people that are slowing or pausing progress for you or your employees). Post the list where you’ll refer to it daily.

• Think about coaching you can offer that would be most helpful to the team. Identify at least one skill or situation for coaching.

Daily Habits

Now let’s look at some habits you can develop to further your daily planning efforts:

• Spend 10 minutes planning at the beginning of each workday.

• Choose one or two actions you can take today that will make the greatest difference to your short-term and long-term goals. Act on them.

• Take a few minutes to consider each team member’s focus for the day. Is each person working on the most important projects or tasks? What adjustments should you make? What support or coaching would be most helpful? Is anyone up against a barrier you can obliterate so they can move forward?

• Take time at the beginning of each day to plan your meeting participation or leadership. Think about the value of the time each person spends sitting around the meeting room table. Meetings are expensive! When people come to meetings unprepared, they waste time and money. Set the standard and ensure your meetings are productive and move work forward.

Your new weekly planning habits will become the foundation for your daily planning. Trust me on this—the process works. Try the weekly and daily planning habits for one month. You’ll feel on top of your work and you’ll be getting much more accomplished. Worksheets 8-1 and 8-2 offer easy-to-use checklists to make these practices habitual and permanent parts of your managerial regimen. Give these worksheets a try for a month to feel more in control and on top of your busy days.

It feels great to go home after a long day and feel like you actually accomplished something. Without effective planning, you’ll be more likely to get sucked into issues and diversions that you regret later.

Share Your Plans

If you do the weekly and daily planning and then follow your plans, you’ll be more productive—I guarantee it. Even if you only follow your plans half the time, you’ll still be better off than if you never took the time to plan in the first place. And if you share your plans and planning regimens in ways that inspire (read: create pull) team members and peers, your positive impact will reverberate and expand.

This starts with communicating your plans, but let’s be real about plans and planning. Many people would not consider planning to be a fascinating topic. If you schedule a huddle with the subject line “Review of the Weekly Plan,” people might come to your meeting, but will team members be eager to hear what you have to say? Language is important; so, communicate in ways that engage and enroll. Here are a few ideas for communicating your weekly or daily plans:

• Show your enthusiasm when you communicate the plan. Focus and alignment are beautiful things!

• Discuss in terms of “setting the week up for success” or “ensuring we spend precious time wisely” or “elements for a great week or day.”

• Seek and consider input. Make sure your team members know their participation matters and makes a difference. The phrases “that’s just the way it is” or “we’re doing it because I said so” should not be in your vocabulary. Some tasks probably will be required, but in those cases be willing to share context to improve understanding and acceptance.

• Thank team members for their time and invite them to offer feedback and updates anytime.

• Keep it simple and brief. Offer clarification and details as needed, but if you communicate plans regularly (at least weekly), employees will become familiar and comfortable with most of the items you list.

Sharing your work plan helps improve clarity and commitment. People will understand what’s most important, as well as your focus for the day and week. Block off planning time on your calendar so that employees can see and know that this is something important and useful. Refer to planning time in ways that communicate the value you place on it.

Take the initiative to be inclusive and open. Share your weekly plans with your manager and peers with whom you work closely. This is important and helpful for two reasons. First, if your plan is off target, you want to know! Help others help you by keeping them in the loop. And when you communicate your plans, you will increase the chances that they reciprocate and share their plans with you. This is a good thing, because the more you know about your manager’s and peers’ priorities, the better able you’ll be to proactively support them. Remember step 2, Work Well With Others?

Encourage Your Team to Plan

I’m not suggesting that you ask your team members to do the same type of planning I’ve recommended you do (30 minutes weekly, 10 minutes daily). That’s not realistic, and it’s not needed. As the manager, you’ll ensure that the team is focused on the most important work. So what kind of planning should individual team members do?

To answer this question, let’s start by acknowledging a few typical challenges that workers face. Like managers, employees often have dangling unfinished tasks or projects. Things they’ve been meaning to complete or are waiting to address. Many also need to seek input or information from others to complete tasks. Team members, like managers, have things they want to do but have not had time to complete. Things like training, seeking coaching or mentoring, committee work, and more. And it’s common—at every level—for employees to allow daily urgent tasks to take over their time. So, what kind of planning should individual team members do? How about if they:

• Define and keep unfinished tasks top of mind.

• Describe and communicate tasks that need input from others.

• Let other team members know about work that keeps getting moved aside by daily firefighting.

• List one task they’d like to do or get scheduled.

Encourage team members to take five to 10 minutes each day to think through these items. All the better if they communicate their mini-plans with other team members. Why? When Bobby shares that he’s been unable to finish a quality report due to daily diversions, he’ll be more likely to get support to focus on that from other team members. Sima might offer to respond to operational pages from the manufacturing line. Jack might offer to help with the report. And if Bobby shares that he needs the Team A Manager’s data for the report, you can chime in and offer to help him get the information he needs.

Worksheet 8-3 offers a format you can use to share and post planning considerations for each team member. If you use a whiteboard, you can create the checklist form with black tape and easily add and erase daily information. I’d recommend you post your weekly planning worksheet with this one so that the whole team can get a fuller picture of their game plan.

You can adjust the team member planning worksheet based on the size and location of your team members and the type of work you do, but you get the idea. Although the type of planning you do, as manager, is different than what your team members will do, having everyone plot out their days with more forethought and consideration is a very good thing for productivity and engagement.

Really? Engagement? Some of you may be thinking that all this planning sounds a bit like micromanagement. Daily planning and daily huddles shouldn’t look or feel like that. In fact, when done well, these habits encourage ownership and independence among members of the team. Why do so many managers micromanage? Because they don’t have effective communication practices, and they feel uncomfortable not knowing what’s going on within the team. Huddling builds awareness and a shared understanding of priorities, but it’s never long enough to become a device for micromanagement.

Another potential objection you may have is that holding morning huddles gives the manager too much information from which to micromanage later in the day. If you’re a micromanager (offering more direction and control than is warranted to maximize productivity), the information offered in a huddle may be grist for your mill. Here’s the simple solution—just don’t grind it that way.

I believe the huddle offers managers a good look at what the team is focusing on and which tasks will be accomplished each day. If a team member isn’t working on the right things, it’s a great opportunity for you to help get their work on track. We all want our efforts to be focused and worthwhile, so this kind of refocusing should be welcome—not seen as picayune meddling.

I’m a big fan of the team huddle for communicating the weekly and daily focus. I don’t like to create a bunch of meetings where people take too much time to go around and say what they’re doing. That’s often a waste of time. The huddle, on the other hand, is a short, focused, stand-up meeting that accomplishes a lot in a little time. Don’t sit—it will lengthen the huddle. If everyone knows they’ll huddle for 10 minutes at 9:30 each morning and that each person is expected to share the plan for the day, individual plans will be made before 9:30. This practice promotes good planning. Even those who work on longer term projects have weekly and daily work plans they can and should share.

Monitor Progress to Plans and Goals

Daily and weekly plans support grand-slam goals and your basic expectations. Defining priorities and intentions is important, but the reason we do this work is to maximize the positive impact that our team and function has in the service of organizational strategies. We need to know if things are working, if our efforts are leading to throughput, and if our service is meeting the needs of internal and external customers.

It’s tough to address measurements in a book like this because you’ll each have unique circumstances. Some of you work in manufacturing environments with well-defined dashboards and quantitative metrics available with a few keystrokes. Others work in disciplines with fewer obvious ways to measure progress. Here are a few examples of ways to create measurement practices that are applicable in most situations:

• Involve the entire team in selecting and measuring indicators.

• Measure results on a regular basis—the same every month—so that it becomes a habit.

• Talk about metrics at team meetings—don’t just review them; engage in a meaty conversation about what the metrics are telling you and your team.

• Post the metrics—on common walls, on your office walls, on the intranet.

• Acknowledge and celebrate successes.

Meaningful measurements enable you and your team to discuss your part of the business with some accuracy and specificity. This will lead to richer conversations and better work plans. And as counterintuitive as this may seem, better measures (not micromanagement) will support more workplace pull. Remember that one of the elements that increases pull (step 5) is that the work is worthy of our time and attention. Measurements help team members understand the impact of their work and create a sense of urgency when progress is lacking (another element that creates pull).

When you create measurement practices, you’re putting the metrics into your daily and weekly regimens—inviting the data into the department as a respected partner. If you and your team are crystal-clear about the results you need to achieve, have crisp metrics that tell you how you’re doing, and have regular discussions about these metrics, your results will improve. We get what we pay attention to.

Act With Perseverance and Agility

Your weekly and daily planning habits help you and your team steer efforts in the right direction. You’ve heard the saying, “Plan your work, then work your plan,” right? I agree with that wholeheartedly—with one addition. Plan your work and work your plan unless your plan needs to change. To optimize your productivity and impact, be relentless in working your plan while being nimble in case things need to change.

Here’s a true story. I presented a plan that had several recommendations to a senior leadership team. I worked hard on the plan and believed in each of my suggestions. The team adopted some of the recommendations and rejected others. The CEO was uncomfortable with changing certain aspects of the product even though the rest of the team sitting around the table thought the product was getting dusty and needed to change.

After the meeting I was asked if I felt my efforts were wasted because several recommendations weren’t adopted. I know there are people who would have answered “yes,” but my view is different. I believe that, as managers, we’re here to make a difference. It’s always our job to prepare and share recommendations about how we think we can improve the business. That said, we have to go where the energy is. To have an impact, we need to get things done. Instead of digging our heels in and becoming stubborn, it’s much more effective to move full-steam ahead where we can and make adjustments where we can’t. It’s more important that we have an impact on the business than that we get there in precisely the ways we planned.

Similarly, it’s important not to get too attached to a plan or a project. As I’ve shared with you a few times earlier in this book, many departments continue to work on projects that should have been killed. Make sure yours is isn’t one of those departments. It’s good to review plans regularly, and to ask yourself and your team if the items on it still make sense, given the current priorities and what you think they’ll be in the future. It feels wonderful—liberating—to kill a project when it ought to be killed. Think of all the time and energy you’ve saved! You just put your $5,000 back in the bank and made it available for other pursuits.

Note that I’m not addressing yearly planning in this book; however, your daily planning ought to flow from your weekly plans, which should be inspired by yearly or quarterly goals you set as part of the budgeting and planning cycle. I assume that you’re working from your departmental business plan or the goals you negotiated with your manager. That said, most of those goals will not be expressed in terms of grand-slam home runs, so you’ll want to make those distinctions and additions.

Here’s an idea: Share the concept of grand-slam home runs with your peers and manager. They’ll love it. They’ll thank you. They might even admit that they’d like to “steal” your ideas for planning in this way. Then, you could recommend that you create yearly goals with that level of excellence in mind.

Oh no, are you rolling your eyes at me? OK, start with your area first, and expand after you’ve had some success using grand-slam goals.

Role modeling agility is important, too. You don’t want to cultivate a hair-on-fire work culture, where team members freak out or get stressed every time things change. Be pragmatic, matter-of-fact, and open to changes. Reinforce and show gratitude when team members suggest course corrections or alternative approaches.

Plan the work, work the plan, and make adjustments. Zoom forward!

Building ACCEL Skills

The management techniques we’ve explored in step 8, “Plan, Measure, and Adjust,” will help you build the following ACCEL skills:

• Accountability: Building a habit of planning is all about holding yourself and team members accountable for spending time wisely. Becoming proficient in the planning practices shared in this step will improve your accountability skills.

• Collaboration: This chapter has emphasized the importance of communicating plans to increase understanding and acceptance.

• Listening and assessing: Listening and assessing skills are important for plans to remain relevant and increase team member engagement.

Your Turn

Here are a few ideas for cultivating stronger planning habits:

• Try using the weekly and daily planning worksheets for two weeks. Then modify the practices to fit your style and needs.

• Share your weekly plans with your manager and ask for honest feedback regarding whether you’re focusing on the most important items. Ask for suggestions about regular items to monitor.

• Start asking team members about daily planning considerations. “Sima, do you have anything on your to-do list that we can help you with?” “Rajesa, what’s your biggest barrier today?” “I’d like you each to let me know one thing you’d like to learn this week.”

The Next Step

This step explored ways to improve weekly and daily planning habits. The next step will help you manage change.