There are two things I want you to focus the rest of the year on:
- Establishing a leadership team
- Scheduling quarterly off-sites for your leadership team
First of all, let me explain the importance of a leadership team.
If you feel like everything in your business falls on you, you need a leadership team. It should include each department head, and you, the CEO/visionary. The leadership team meets once a week for 60-90 minutes, so everyone is aligned and across all departments.
I’m the first to admit that I move fast and dream big as a CEO. It’s my job as the visionary and leader. But strengths can sometimes be weaknesses too, as I’ve often found myself frustrated with the pace of growth. I’ve had to offset this by having grounded, ‘realists’ in the leadership team – whose default is to be cautious and risk-aware.
You don’t want ‘yes’ people on the leadership team, who agree just because you’re in charge. Establishing a leadership team helps give heads of department more ownership, allows you as the leader to focus on higher leverage tasks, and have stronger direction passed down to the teams.
This works for any industry, not just real estate. Look into the EOS leadership team structure. It doesn’t need to be big – we have three people in ours.
Now, onto the quarterly off-site.
The most valuable meetings of the year
Every quarter, I take the leadership team off-site for half a day to realign our vision, review what’s working (and what’s not), and set out the next 90-day rocks. Rocks = priorities/projects, if you haven’t read EOS.
Note: These are different from our weekly leadership meetings, which happen in our office.
Our quarterly offsite is the meeting that helps us keep momentum throughout the year, especially when things get busy. The goal is not to get to the end of the year, feeling like we didn’t achieve anything. We’ve certainly had those years prior to implementing our 90-day focus.
Our quarterly meetings focus on the same structure each time.
Here’s the agenda if you want to follow it:
- Warm up with some wins (professional and personal)
- Expectations for the meeting ahead – write this down on the whiteboard to have a visual reference
- Review last quarter’s metrics, rocks and outcomes from the previous 90-day cycle
- Review our vision for the business, zooming out 10 years and pulling it back to the next 12 months
- Reassess unrealistic goals and strategise what impact that’ll have on the budget
- Focus on the ‘rock’ for the next 90 days. E.g. With a key team member stepping away for mat leave, we needed to focus on systems and processes.
- Work through pressing issues, confirm action items, and everyone rates the meeting out of 10.
That’s what we do four times a year to keep aligned and grow together.
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