Within each theme, the company lists smaller “Rocks” (column 5 of the OPSP) that need to be addressed in order to achieve the company’s big goal for the next 13 weeks, helping to focus everyone on execution. Though employees do not discuss the themes during daily huddles, which are focused on daily operations, they devote 30 minutes at weekly meetings to addressing progress toward the Quarterly Theme.

The short-term agenda should:

• Link to your business assessment, so that people understand the rationale;

• Identify the core initiatives you intend to launch and explain why they are important;

• Address short-term issues while not detracting from the long-term directions for the organization;

• Be built as a joint effort with your team; and

• Incorporate an explicit plan to address cultural issues and barriers to change.

Short-term agenda, long-term agenda - the time frame doesn’t much matter if the organization is not operating smoothly enough. “One of the biggest contributions a leader can make, although it’s often underrated, is defining the operating mechanisms - the meetings, the information flows, and the decision-making process used to conduct day-to-day business,” says Dan Kerpelman, president of Kodak’s Health Imaging Group. Sometimes you need to be directive.

Ten Guidelines for Crafting Your Strategic Agenda

1. You have more time than you think. You don't have to deliver a fully baked strategic plan on day one… or even in the first hundred days. Find the right balance between creating a compelling picture of where you want the organization to go and not becoming prematurely locked into your plan.

1. In developing your agenda, diagnose the company’s (or department’s) problems starting with the customer perspective and continuing with a grounded view of what the company stands for.

1. Strictly limit the number of themes and priorities so that they can be easily remembered by the organization.

1. When crafting your short-term agenda, always endeavor to underpromise and overdeliver.

1. Build the strategic agenda in a joint effort with your team versus in a silo.

1. Incorporate an explicit plan to address cultural issues and barriers to change.

1. Define the operating mechanism / process - the meetings, documents, and report formats to conduct the day-to-day business.

1. Secure some early wins; look for obvious flaws in the organization and fix them quickly to establish your credibility as a leader.

1. Expect pushback on your agenda, but rather than resist, coalesce that input in a positive way to maximize buy-in.

1. Don’t be a perfectionist; your strategic agenda is by definition a work in progress. Use it to help you and the organization make decisions, see how they work, and make adjustments as necessary.

4. A living agenda.

Develop a spacious, adaptable agenda so the participants can shape the meeting.

Again, our tendency is to make use of the precious in- person time of a meeting by filling up every minute, from the beginning to the end of the day, with formal session time, creating schedules that are hard to change when new information comes along. These agendas are often burdened by an unrealistic hope, an underestimation of how long conversations may actually take. Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative.

Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation.

A meaningful full group conversation needs roughly five minutes per person. Underscheduling the amount of time a conversation needs means that energy will start to build up as people look for a way to release their thoughts and ideas into the group. Pair this with the power dynamics that often emerge—that some people feel really comfortable talking, and others don’t—and you have a frustrating waste of time on your

on your hands.

Folks are so used to not being heard. So used to not getting their needs met. When people feel heard, the time starts to expand as people move past expressing and start to be able to listen.