Dear leaders, this week marks the third year anniversary of Leaders Letters. Thanks for being a part of it by reading the newsletters weekly, sharing across social and replying and even challenging my leadership advice.
I look forward to landing in your inbox every week and love debating with readers if they like the post, dislike the newsletter or feel you could add more to that week’s topic.
I have a dedicated newsletter coming soon to break down my learnings and share some of the insights from the last 3 years. With a focus on those who I have collaborated with and worked with through leaders letters.
The Q3 Questions To Tackle
With Q3 starting in just a couple of weeks, here are the most pressing questions to ask internally to help with people (aka company culture) and performance (aka the company-wide strategy) and drive change for the future months.
The hints below are there to help you think slightly differently or position the points internally
How are we scoring with company performance and our people's performance?
Hint >> Score out of 10 and where do we need to improve the score by 1 or 2 points?
If we were to change 3 things to improve our working environment, what would they be and how would they improve performance?
Hint >> Don’t just think office environment, think of all working environments (remote, hybrid, etc), look at reviewing meetings, look at how you are encouraging cross-functional collaboration, look at reviewing how your skip meetings went, and look at reviewing the exit interviews and onboarding flows.
What three themes (bigger than trends) have we seen this quarter we need to address and build for the future?
Hint >> AI is definitely in there already, but what else is happening within your space or with your customer spending / customers new habits that you need to address and refactor
Are we in the place to accelerate growth?
Hint >> Find where you have some seeds planted with small bits of traction and question how much water we might need to get it to grow or where we might place more resources to really take this to the next level. Anything with say 6/10 traction is already in plan and in flight and often causes confusion if you push too hard on what people are already aware of.
What two areas of the business are struggling most and what is the next quarter plan to address these or remove these?
Hint >> This could be from a hiring perspective, this could be from a retention POV or could be performance related and if you might need to:
keep (the activities that are doing well but could do with some extra attention),
kill (stop the work on it, it won’t work again),
cure (optimise or tweak elements of existing tactics or plans)
or copy (copy features or styling) from others.
If you cannot answer these questions easily, consider building management pods for ownership and tackle these together with their teams.
This week’s focus action is to add these five points to your next management or leadership meeting and help to progress the company forward.
If you are struggling, hit reply and I’ll happily guide you forward.
Thanks and have a great week and I’ll see you with one of my favourite newsletters to date, titled 3-3-3.
Danny Denhard