As you look back over the past year and forward to 2011, schedule time to get your team re-energized and re-focused when you get back to work in January. Here are a few ways to do it:
  • Summarize Your 2010 Accomplishments – this can be done as an “Annual Report” with photos, graphs, video clips, and such in a published format, PowerPoint, Intranet, etc to chronicle positive changes and improvements. It doesn’t have to be glossy and expensive. It can be a simple collection of summaries, stories, improvement charts, lessons learned, significant milestones, etc. Publicize it broadly across your organization and use it for celebrations and recognition activities.
  • External Assessments – Have external improvement experts do team/organizational audits and assessments on what’s working, what’s not working, change/improvement obstacles and challenges, and how to overcome them.
  • Project Reviews – finish every major change/improvement or project with the team assessing what went well, what they would do differently, and a summary of the major lessons learned. Post, publicize, or share those broadly for everyone to learn from.
  • Learn from Your Successes – during operational reviews, look for unexpected and unplanned successes. Dig deeper to understand what went right and how that might be repeated or built upon.
  • Annual Retreat – Start a powerful annual practice of taking your team offsite to:
  1. Create, review, or update your vision, core values (no more than 3 – 5 words or phrases), and purpose/mission.
  2. Review data/feedback from your internal external customers or partners on their expectations and how you’re performing against those.
  3. Assessments of team/organization performance.
  4. Review of all improvements and positive changes. This can be the input for your annual report.
  5. Celebrate your accomplishments and key milestones.
  6. Set plans for celebrations and recognition across all of your groups or organization.
  7. Set your 2010 strategic imperatives and the key elements in your cascading goal deployment system.
  8. Identifying this year’s performance gaps and improvement priorities.
  9. Agree on the improvement planning process and timetable for development, approval, and implementation.
Go to Management Team Retreats if you’d like to see the framework and approach we’ve refined over the last few decades.