Meaningful Platitudes Edition VII: It's QBR Season, Baby!

In what may be an unpopular opinion, I'm pro meetings. I don't like qualifying it as "I am pro good meetings" because I think that's dumb. You don't say "I am pro good food" or "I am pro healthy relationships." Meetings should have an implicit modifier that they be good and thus eliminate a significant amount of debate about whether to-meeting-or-not-to-meeting. Could it have been an email? Sure - could your date have been a text? Could your college class have been a textbook? Probably. But then they wouldn't have served the same purpose or gotten you to the same outcome and they are far better when used in a complementary fashion. Anyway, this is not a post In Defense of Meetings but I may write that another time.

My favorite meetings take place during what I call "Wrap Week" which usually takes place within 3 weeks of your end of quarter (or other meaningful period for your business) and in our case, includes three types of big meetings:

1. All-hands to review that company performance
2. Exec team 'offsite' (whatever that looks like for your team)
3. Quarterly Business Reviews (a.k.a. QBRs)

As is their way, two of my professional spiritual gurus - Raw Signal Group and Molly Graham - published content recently that was so specifically relevant for Wrap Week and how to effectively manage a cadence of performance.

Molly wrote a piece about how she hates OKRs which resonated deeply because I threw out OKRs (that I had introduced, to be clear) for our 2023 planning. I could paste her whole article here but that's why you should just go read it. The key takeaway was about finding and using "a goal-setting process and cadence that works for you." To me, that read:

Not only is it okay that popular methodologies don't work for your organization, you should in fact do the work to find the right approach for your business.

Look - I'm still learning all the time and I appreciate the occasional externally-validated nudge that what I'm doing (i.e. ditching OKRs) is a-ok! Furthermore, that this applies in lots of areas of company-ing (yeah I made that a verb) gives me that little confidence boost I need to pursue a direction that feels right.

Speaking of feelings.

Our friends at RSG sent an inordinately timely edition of their must-read newsletter with the subject line: Once more with feeling. Again, read the whole but if you don't, sit with this: "Before we get into the dashboards and reporting, we should go around and talk about how this quarter felt. Feelings before numbers. Not because the numbers aren't important. But because there's incredibly important data hiding in the feels."

CAN I GET AN AMEN!

Another future post: feelings in the workplace. For now, suffice it to say, that this was music to my data-driven ears and warmth to my emotional soul. Why? Because, as Melissa and Johnathan explain, it does two important things:

1. Activates intuition, a la "system 1" of Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, not just analysis.
2. Prompts reflection, such that you get a better understanding and more clarity around what happened (or didn't, as the case very well may be).

As I read this, I thought:

It's another consummate "yes/and" - yes you need data AND you need the feelings around it.

We did our Q1 Revenue QBRs yesterday and it was the perfect example of this dynamic. The reps covered their performance in detail, yes, and they talked about the dynamics they encountered; how the economy is impacting conversations; and the patterns they're seeing across accounts. We wouldn't have gotten half as much out of the time if we simply walked through dashboards or pipeline progress. They were useful precisely because they brought data and feelings together.

Spring is a time of renewal which can be applied to your annual planning processes (more goodness on that from Molly here) and/or to how you do your own version of a Wrap Week. Make it fresh and I bet you'll be pleased with what blooms.