What Is Your Dashboard? How Does It Tie to Your Annual Planning?

Measuring and tracking the key elements of your business so you can sleep better.

This post was written in collaboration with Ray Foote.

Clients often come to us asking “What Operating Systems have you seen work for other companies?” The truth is, a company’s operating system stems from the company’s dashboard — how they track their business data. This ultimately stems from the questions: What does your company need and what does your company want? A well-designed dashboard and operating system go a long way to providing ground for you and your team.

How well you know your business and its levers will help shape what you need to track currently. It can also help you understand what larger questions to hold about the business as you continue to put practices, processes, and systems together. Down the line, you will want to tweak as much as needed to make sure you’re capturing what’s most important.

Each company’s dashboard (and subsequent operating system) solutions are unique. To start looking at how to shape your own dashboard, consider the following questions:

• What are the levers of the business? What do we need to know to run our business well? What are the metrics that matter?
• Who has access to that data/information? How can we capture that information if it’s not being tracked and organized?
• What data are we tracking and looking at together as a leadership team, and as a company? At what cadence do we need to look at certain reports together?
• What reports need to be made each week (and sent to the team) from each individual/team?
• How are these going to be shared — to whom? by when? at what cadence? In what format?
• And, what else do we know about the business that needs to be tracked, and looked at, consistently?

Reboot coach and former CEO Ray Foote offers other key questions to help in figuring out what to track:

• What keeps you up at night?
• What are the forward-looking metrics that you care about?
• When the business is flourishing how do you know? What is the feeling you get? Can it be represented in music or an image?
• What are the metrics that help you sleep?
• How does the organizational structure map to the metrics you are tracking?
• What have we shipped? This year, this month, this week?

“What is the appropriate chunk level to track how things are going?” Foote adds. “I had a client who recently designed and deployed a dashboard that employs the red-yellow-green metaphor. She invited her team to reflect on where they were in relationship to the appropriate metric and designate a color. Her executive team co-created the design of the dashboard so that it became a group project. It has been transformational in that it gives a high-level view of how things are going and what people are tracking across all of the management team at a glance. It also has helped in designing effective agendas with more nuance.”

Before Planning, Review Last Year Together

How did last year go? Getting everyone in a room together to conduct a review of last year’s planning against actual business results is a useful precursor for setting out the vision for the upcoming year. Treat this as a blameless post-mortem to glean all the learnings that you can from the previous year. Doing so can help you better understand what was strong, what needs bolstering, what the team and business are capable of, and where the areas of opportunity are both in the organization and in the market for the upcoming year.

What’s the “Where Are We Going?” Story.

Leadership and storytelling go hand in hand. The CEO is the storyteller-in-chief. The stories help to ground the team and the company by contextualizing the mission. Ray Foote tracks a narrative theme with his clients when it comes to planning and their dashboards. He asks them to consider: What is the narrative for where we have been, where we are, and where we are going? What are the three stories that you want to tell about where we are going?

All of this wraps up into the CEO's vision for the year that frames the annual planning process.

The Dashboard

The idea of a Dashboard ties into the annual vision + goals of the organization (and even more so for the directors in charge of bringing those annual goals to life). This Dashboard is as much of a place for the practical-tactical clear-sighting of tracking the company and team progress over the year as it is a commitment to your stance (way of being) as a leader while holding the team accountable (in quarterly, monthly, weekly chunks) to the stated company goals.

The idea here is that you would have your Dashboard, and each executive would also have theirs. You could move this out to key players on the team as well. The dashboard is set up in the planning meetings.

A Leader’s Planning Meeting Preparation

When it comes to preparing for the planning sessions, it is useful if each individual leadership team member dedicates time to taking stock of objectives and priorities from their seat in the business. Many of these will be related to the vision for the upcoming year, will include learnings from the previous year, and will name the questions that are outstanding, big, and worth bringing to the group for collective conversation.

Below is a template to use as a point of departure for each individual leadership team member for pre-planning meeting preparations. Ideally, each person would email their documents out to the team ahead of the meeting, with ample time for each team member to read them. When everyone is in the room (or virtual room), it’s easier to ask clarifying questions of each other and dive right into the big questions. This planning template for individuals on the executive team can also be reviewed in 1–1’s with the CEO in advance to ensure that most points are clear and aligned before it’s sent out pre-planning meeting.

CEO Dashboard Goals for the Year

As CEO, your goals and commitments for the year may be slightly different than the rest of the team, yet taking the time to reflect upon and articulate what you’re setting out to do in the upcoming year will be handy for you and your teammates.

Here is a format to use and adapt to you and your organization’s needs:

Dashboards and annual planning go hand in hand. Done well, your team has the clarity they need around what they are setting out to do this year, and commitments on what they are responsible for. In doing so, they have what they need to be accountable. Clear planning commitments and dashboard tracking gives your weekly 1–1s and leadership team meetings clear talking points and lines of inquiry.

In strategizing and planning mode for the company? Here are other useful pieces to check out:

• Reboot Podcast Episode Wisdom for Work #12 — Collective Planning as a Leadership Team — with Andy Crissinger & Jerry Colonna
  When considering collective planning as a team, what are the best practices leaders should adopt and what common pitfalls should they avoid?
• Annual Planning in Uncertain Times: 6 Tactics for Rethinking Your Company’s End-of-Year Exercise - First Round Review
  The folks at First Round Review have compiled six unique approaches to end-of-year planning.
• Dear Reboot: Annual Planning that Sticks
  We share our advice for what to think about (and clarify) before you embark on planning for the future.

In Review

Vision — Mission — Values — Strategy sets the tone for the year by defining purpose and vision, and sets clarity of goals per responsible party and per function on the team. Each function knows what they need to meet these goals, and makes those asks of other functions if needed.

Once agreed upon as clear directions, the team makes commitments to the work and to each other. This will call into question the culture of commitments on your team. Does the team know how to make, maintain, change, and meet commitments?

Once the Dashboard is established for key leaders, goals, and initiatives can be further broken for the entire company. This is to be done by those charged with managing the teams involved. Ultimately, annual goals are broken down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly tasks per department. Managers set clarity and commitments around ownership, responsibility, and accountability of these outcomes.

Your meeting calendar for the year should have a cadence that suits the biz needs — from 1–1s, to executive team meetings, to offsite, to all hands, board meetings, and annual planning meetings. Each meeting should have its own agenda in regards to the dashboard as well as reviewing the state of current things (including world events) against stated goals for the year. The metrics that the company tracks should also be distributed where and when needed to ensure everyone is on the same page.

There are other questions that may need to be addressed in light of all of the above.

• Are job descriptions clear, agreed upon, and updated annually in accordance with performance review processes?
• What key roles on the team need to be hired for, or re-worked?
• What needs to happen to ensure that everyone on the field is playing the right position?
• Is everyone on the team clear about reporting structures and communication flows?
• What new board management and communication processes might need to be established?