As a leader, the demands on your time and attention can be overwhelming. When you’re managing a team, juggling multiple projects, and every action from every meeting seems to have your name against it, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. This is where the practice of regular quarterly planning and review can be a game-changer, helping you stay focused, keep your eyes on the real priorities and ultimately deliver more in your role .
Why Quarterly Planning and Review Matters
In most organisations, objectives are set once a year. And that can be useful for setting broad, long-term goals. Trying to stay focused on half a dozen or so things for a year at a time is no mean feat. And that’s assuming nothing changes. Having annual objectives might make sense, but having a 12 month plan to go with them is not so simple.
A quarterly planning cycle just makes sense. It means you can check in with whether the annual objectives are really still the things you need to deliver, and then to create plans over a time frame that’s shorter and sharper, allowing you to be more responsive to what’s changed.
Instead of being locked into a rigid annual plan, you can course-correct every three months, keeping your team focused on the most important priorities for that specific stretch of time. It helps you stay responsive while still making steady progress toward your bigger objectives.
So how do you do it in a way that makes life easier for you rather than being yet another task to add to your (already endless) list?
Reviewing the Previous 90 Days
Before diving into your next quarterly plan, take a step back and assess the past quarter objectively. If you’re a pacy and ambitious leader then taking action probably comes naturally, but reflection might take more effort. But looking back and capturing learning is one of the smartest things you can do so you can make informed decisions about future priorities and actions.
Think about the following areas:
What does the data say? Review relevant data and metrics that provide insights into your own and your team's performance, project progress, and overall results during. Are you on track for the annual results you want to deliver?
Reflect on Achievements: Most ambitious leaders we work with don’t spend enough time capturing the good stuff. This is important for a number of reasons - there’s a feelgood factor to celebrating successes, both big and small. It can help you to recognise the efforts and contributions of your team members, and understand the contributing factors that made them possible. It also helps you define how and where you’ve made a contribution and you’ll be glad of that list when appraisal time (or an interview) comes around.
Identify Challenges: This isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about having an honest assessment of where you fell short of your goals or came up against unexpected obstacles. Understand the root causes and you can explore potential solutions.
Seek Feedback: Asking for feedback can feel uncomfortable and expose vulnerabilities. But again this isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about capturing both good stuff that you can continue doing and exploring changes you can make so your next review has more for the achievements section.
To get useful, actionable feedback that’s not going to sting too much, let people know you’re doing your 90 day reflection and planning and ask questions like:
How would you rate the degree of clarity and direction I give the team? Are there any examples of times where I have done it well or could have done it better?
From your perspective, what are 1-2 things I could do differently? (You can keep this general or apply it to specific situations, e.g. in meetings)
How can I better communicate our goals, priorities, and expectations?
What would you say are the best things about the contribution our team makes?
As you reflect, capture the key lessons and takeaways from the previous quarter ready to move on to creating your next plan.
Creating Your 90-Day Plan
As you come to create a new 90 day plan, it pays to think about the next 90 days both on its own and in the context of the longer term. There will be things you need to deliver now (or soon). But there will also be groundwork that will need to happen in order to deliver the next quarter priorities and longer term projects.
With that in mind, use the following steps to craft your plan:
Create thinking space – before you start planning, set yourself up to be able to do your best thinking. Simple things like blocking a chunk of uninterrupted time and choosing the right environment pay dividends. At a subconscious level, your normal work environment tends to be more of a ‘doing’ environment rather than a ‘thinking’ one.
When I’m planning, I tend to go to a local café with a notebook and some coloured pens. Away from my laptop I find it easier to think creatively, and nice stationery means it feels more like fun and a luxury rather than some dull planning task
Create clarity – The clearer you are about the outcomes you need to achieve and how important they are relative to each other, the easier it will be to decide what needs to be done. Capture your answers to these questions first, even if it feels like stating the bleeding obvious:
What are the expectations of you in your role?
What are the priorities?
What is the current number one priority?
What specific outcomes do you need to deliver within 90 days?
What will need to be in motion in the next 90 days so that longer term outcomes can be achieved?
If you’ve got any hesitation about what’s expected of you or what the priorities are, it can be useful to sense check your answers to these with your boss before you craft your plan. Better to know for sure than make a plan to deliver things they’re not wanting or expecting from you.
Reflect – once you sit down to create your plan, it’s time to reflect. Use the questions below as prompts and initially just capture your thoughts as they occur to you. It tends to work better to dump things from brain to page in any old order and then come back to them to make sense of them rather than try to take each question in order and answer it fully
What actions need to be taken in order for the outcomes to be delivered?
What knowledge / skills will need to be gained? (by you or by others)?
What relationships do you need to develop?
What do you need to stop doing or do less of and who will now be doing that work?
Create – Now you’ve got your ideas out of your head you can create your plan. It’s easy to get hung up on the format of this – if you’ve got one you love then go for it, or you can use my template. It’s back of a fag packet rather than fancy, but it works for me.
Take the initial brain dump you’ve created and ask yourself ‘which of this needs to come first?’ Start to sift the ideas you’ve listed into 30, 60 and 90 day actions. It’s not unusual at this point to have a huge list in month 1 and barely anything in the second or third month
If that happens to you, a useful question can be ‘if some of this has to wait, what will come later rather than start now?’
You’re not looking for equal lists in each month because life and work will throw new stuff at you in month 1 that has to be slotted in. But you are looking for a month 1 that allows for some curveballs and doesn’t already feel an impossible mountain to climb.
Review – Once you have a draft plan, step away from it for a while and come back to it later or the following day. It’s amazing how fresh eyes can pinpoint things you’ve missed, things you thought were important but really aren’t that critical, or just that the sequence you’ve plotted is a bit off
Once you’ve looked over it, ask yourself which are the top 3 priorities for the first 30 days. If you could ONLY guarantee 3 things from your list being done, which 3 would allow you to make the most progress? Coaching clients often HATE it when I ask them this question, but once they pick three and see the progress happening, they stop cursing me and grudgingly admit that it does work
From there, the final question is ‘What’s the current top priority for me and my team?’ Being able to answer this question (and know that your team can answer it in the same way) means that when new things get added to the list or circumstances change, there is a ‘filter’ for how to prioritise
Use and Refine it – The best plan is the one you’ll actually do. You can do all the planning in the world but having a beautifully written or typed sheet is a start point, not an end point. If it doesn’t guide what you do day to day, it’s the equivalent of the time I wrote myself a running plan to get to half marathon distance and never went further than 5k
Equally, there will be times where circumstances change. New stuff will land on the list and other stuff might be pushed back as a result. So how do you account for that without spending half your life re-writing the masterplan?
The simplest way I’ve found is to allocate an hour at the start (or end) of the month. Take the plan for the next 30 days and sense check it.
Are the top 3 priorities clear?
Are they the same as when you made the plan or do they need to be tweaked?
If you do everything on the list for the month will you be making the right progress?
Assuming what you’ve got now makes sense, plot any specific tasks into your calendar. If your role is operational then ‘business as usual’ tasks can easily expand to fill time, so blocking it out ahead can help keep the important stuff front of mind
Then simply rinse and repeat each month, ticking stuff off as you go. If monthly is too big a gap then you can use the same principle weekly or fortnightly
The Impact of Using 90 Day Planning
When you embrace and become consistent with planning you also embrace and become consistent with creating thinking time. That in turn makes it way more likely yourself and your team are better equipped to deliver what you need to deliver without burning out or wasting energy on unnecessary tasks. It’s a disciplined approach that makes you more flexible and able to stay in control despite inevitable curve balls.
Download your free copy of my planning workbook and if you’d like support with crafting and using your plan, you can book a Practical Leadership Power Hour