The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #4 Setting up the Feedback Loop

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re discussing the fourth principle of Vigilant Leadership: Setting Up the Feedback Loop. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

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The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #4 Setting up the Feedback Loop

Now that the first 3 principles of Vigilant Leadership are under your belt, it’s time for the 4th: Setting up the Feedback Loop. This feedback loop helps you maintain vigilance over your plan.  Or said differently, how do you know your plan is working? The key here is understanding the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that lead to success. This can be the hardest part of Vigilant Leadership, because it requires hypothesizing, projecting, even leaning in with benchmarks. Our goal is to grow your confidence and comfort level here. If you don’t define what success looks like, others will do it for you. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Vigilant leadership is not about doing everything alone
• Contextualize the KPIs so your team understands the why
• Tangibility will only help you in the long run
• How to determine how you’ll measure KPIs
• Leverage the multiplier effect

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

• The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #4 Setting up the Feedback Loop
  • [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
  • [1:01] How do you know your plan is working?
  • [3:37] Create your signals of success
  • [6:24] Do not be vague in your KPIs
  • [8:42] Tangibility will only help you in the long run
  • [11:14] Contextualize the risk of the performance the business requires
  • [14:36] How to determine how you’ll measure KPIs
  • [18:02] Leverage the multiplier effect — the whole ecosystem needs to work together
  • [21:58] Make sure that you have strategic thinkers looking at the holistic perspective AND doers working together
  • [23:34] Set up reporting frequency and align stakeholders
  • [27:25] Proactivity and planning
  • [29:30] No one reads those weekly company newsletters
  • [30:56] Establish a protocol for intervention
  • [33:54] Get perspective outside of yourself
  • [37:04] Understand when vulnerability is valuable as a leader
  • [39:56] Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
  • [40:56] Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic. 

Transcript

Please note: transcript not 100% accurate.

00:03

Welcome to the Strategic Council by Forthright Business Podcast.  If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead  and operate in business,  you are in the right place.  In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking  to reveal a fresh perspective.  This unlocks opportunity for you, your team  and your business. Now let’s get to it.  Welcome to the Strategic Council Podcast. I’m Ann Candido.

 

00:32

and I am April Martini. And today we’re gonna talk about the fourth principle of vigilant leadership, setting up the feedback loop. If you have not listened to the first three principles, the landscape reality check, strategies for getting unstuck, what must be true action planning and enabling the action plan, you’re definitely gonna wanna do that because as we said before, these all build on each other. So for today.

 

00:55

Now, you have your action plan. If you’ve done the other three, you have your action plan and you have your team, you have your resources, you have your processes, and you have your mindset critical for enabling the action plan. So those are all baking in there. Now the last principle is focused on setting up feedback loops to maintain vigilance over your plan. Or said differently, how do you know your plan is working? Yes, and we warn a lot about the set it and forget it mentality across many topics.

 

01:23

This is what tends to happen at this stage of planning. We think the hard part is over and now we can just sit back and wait for  all the results to roll in, right? But the problem with that is we have no idea what to do  with the results. So then what do we tend to do? We let it run until something forces us to change or we jump right back into the weeds to work on whatever we are seeing. So the key here to avoiding that behavior

 

01:50

is understanding the KPIs. Again, those are the key performance indicators that lead to success. And then you also need to set up data collection, analysis, and reporting that will allow you to quantitatively and qualitatively measure against those KPIs. All right. And everybody’s rolling their eyes because this is like the most boring and like arduous part of the whole entire process. Everybody’s like, do we have to?

 

02:16

They’re like, do we need wine or coffee or some combination of both?  Do I need to be pinching myself? Am I going to need a nap?  All of that.  I mean, because this really is the hardest part of digital leadership because it requires so much brain energy. It also requires a lot of hypothesizing, projecting, even leaning in with benchmarks. All things that tend to make especially risk adverse leaders very, very, very uncomfortable.

 

02:43

So our goal here is to grow your confidence and comfort level here because if you don’t define what success look like, others will do it for you. So keep that in mind if you’re sitting here going, do I really have to do this? Well, if you want somebody else to define what success looks like for you, then no. But most of us want to define our own success. So  let’s jump into the fourth principle of vigilant leadership, setting up the feedback loop. All right, the first point here is to make your goals tangible. The goals you established and

 

03:12

the part of the  action planning that you went through are probably based on overall business needs like revenue, leads, profit, conversion, growth. Those are the ones we hear a ton. However, there are multiple factors that can impact all of these goals, which can make it very difficult to track progress and determine what is working and what isn’t. So in order to really make this tangible, we break this down by analyzing the actions and asking, how will I know it’s working?

 

03:42

Or ask slightly differently, what are signals of success? These, these signals or how you know it’s working become your KPIs. They let you know if you’re making progress towards your bigger business goals. So let me give you an example of how this kind of works or maybe, maybe said differently how it doesn’t work because sometimes people we learn,  we learn from our mistakes and other people’s struggles. So let’s not repeat their struggles. So.

 

04:08

We have a client and  a big one of their goals is lead generation, which I’m sure it is for many of you. So  when they were trying to decide how are they gonna generate leads, they decided they’re gonna do paid ads. Probably like still a lot of you guys do, right? So when they were doing their reporting and they were setting up their KPIs, they were sending it up on impressions and clicks, but not conversions. And here’s where you have to really think through. And this is where you sometimes have to bust the agency’s butt.

 

04:37

because they are going to give you what they think they can deliver that’s going to get them paid. And I’m not saying all agencies do this, but it’s a lazy, complacent mentality that a lot of agencies have that if they’re going to set up paid ads, for example, they’re going to tell you, we’re going to get a gazillion eyeballs on it, or we’re going to get a 5 % click-through rate, which is three times above the industry standard. Whatever they’re going to tell you,  those  could potentially be good signals of success.

 

05:06

but only if you know how those going to drive down the funnel into actual conversions. Conversions is the key here. Of course, leads is the ultimate goal that you’re striving for, but as you’re thinking about conversions, you wanna think about where you’re converting and where you’re not converting. So for example, if you’re starting at this point at the top where you’re like, okay, I’m gonna get like 10,000 impressions.

 

05:32

We might know that maybe 5 % of those people will click through just based on industry standard. But then you’re looking and you’re like, well then how come only like 0.00001 % are actually converting? This is your opportunity to say, something’s going on here. Let me go back and see where this process is falling off. So you can see how it’s now it’s becoming very, very tangible because if you can say, ooh, not getting my conversion, something is happening here. You can go back and you can diagnose and you can really start to.

 

06:00

drill down how to make your funnel work harder for you versus just saying, I’m feeling good about the fact. Well, like that 10,000 impressions, something must be working. Nothing is working unless you’re driving to conversions, right? Whatever those conversions are as they tie to the goals. Now, the other thing that people tend to do here is they tend to be vague in their KPIs because they don’t want to fail, right? But what happens when you’re vague is that other people will then start to infer

 

06:30

what they think success is. Remember what I said in the beginning, if you don’t define success, somebody else will. This is the key point at which they’ll do it. So if you’re very big and be like, didn’t even make five, maybe 100, we don’t know yet. Somebody else is thinking 100, maybe might be thinking 1,000, and then you deliver five and think you did great. But they’re like, oh, I expected 100. So you have to calibrate that. You have to be very specific, even if it means you’re testing and learning at this point in time.

 

06:58

Now one more point and I’m going to turn this over to April. It also can be very difficult to establish KPIs and things that are a little bit more nebulous. So for example, a lot of you guys like to go to conferences and expos and those sorts of things and you go with the goal of having some sort of benefit, but you don’t know exactly what it might look like.  And that could be due to a bunch of factors. Maybe you don’t know exactly who’s going to be there. You don’t know what the foot traffic is going to be like. You don’t know if you’re going to have time to meet with everybody that you want.

 

07:29

And those are all like real realistic things that are kind of going on in the landscape there. But what do you have to then consider is what is the role of this conference? So maybe then it is, we just know we should be there and we’re going to chalk this up to investment and we’re going to make the most out of it that we can by doing these things. But we’re not really looking for anything or any signal of success per se coming out of this. Or you might say,  Joe really needs to

 

07:57

work on or learn something about leadership. So he’s going to go to this conference, he’s going to come back, he’s going to give us four leadership principles that he’s going to share back with the team. So your KPIs don’t need to be necessarily metrics driven in a way that is going down to your P &L. It can be culturally driven, it can be people driven, but based on that example, you can see you can quantify these things and you can make them expectations.

 

08:23

Yeah. And I want to go back to the point about the tendency to be vague so you don’t fail. Um, and the build that I, I mean, I want to, I want everyone to hear that first of all. that, that let’s just start there while Anne laughs. But the, the reason I want to go back there is the other point I want to make around this one is tangibility will only help you in the long run. And so I think flipping your perspective and not doing what we see so many people do.

 

08:52

And that sort of like  where the rubber meets the road moment and they’re like, oh shoot, I’m like putting this out there that this is what we’re measuring and this is the results and conversions we’re looking for. Again, like Anne said, whatever it looks like, how hard or soft metric based or not it is.  If you can think about it more as we are putting stakes in the ground so that we can learn more about what is going to work for our business.

 

09:19

And the way to do that is through tangible goal setting.  Because the other thing we run into with clients  when they try to be more vague or think that’s going to quote unquote, protect them  is then it gets into a situation where  either people don’t know  what is being measured  or  they’re measuring different things because there’s too much gray area and what those nebulous goals mean.

 

09:45

Or  like Anne said at the beginning of this, we get more into just like numbers for number sake. And so what I am working with people on consistently is don’t  look at this like my feet are going to be held to the fire. And if I don’t hit exactly the number or I can’t show the connection through the funnel exactly to, you know, lead or impressions to leads to conversions or

 

10:12

Shoot, we’re not sure what we’re gonna get so we don’t have a baseline to start from. Like don’t let those deter it. We’d rather see people like Ann said, and the point of this point, make the goals tangible. And then all kind of hold hands and say, in some cases, we’re not gonna know what the right metric is for the longterm or the right goal for the longterm.  But at least if we set some things that we’re gonna all say we’re measuring, then that’s data for us to look at.

 

10:40

And then if we have to shift things or we were unreasonable  or, you know, good news happens and something goes gangbusters and we can lean more into that. All of that is really important, but  I do think that there’s the tendency for self preservation or team preservation or company preservation, whatever you want to call it to not really say, okay, this is what it’s going to be. It’s tangible. And now we’re measuring it. The mindset needs to be more.

 

11:05

We’re putting this in these stakes in the ground so we can get somewhere and continue to make progress against the business. Well, I think that’s super important, April, because you hit the nail on the head that a lot of people get really freaked out about setting these KPIs because they think that people are going to hold them to it and then their performance is linked to it. Right. And so everybody’s like, I’m not going to put my neck on the line and put that out there.

 

11:31

risk not meeting it and then have my performance reviews suffer or people think I’m doing a bad job. So I think the contextualization that you provided is really, really helpful.  And we get that doesn’t work in every single organization, but the most you can do is manage your own integrity  and then be the leader that you want to be. then that  episode for another day is, you know, whether or not that works or not.

 

11:57

So if you’re gonna be a leader and you wanna be a vigilant leader that is empowering a team to really stretch and grow, you need to set that expectation with the team, with the stakeholders, with everybody. And we’re gonna get to aligning stakeholders in a second.

 

12:11

so that they understand what you’re doing, so that you share the risk. And then you can have a dialogue on it. You may say, hey, we’re going to hit 10%, and your boss is like, you really need to hit 15%. It’s like, OK, well, we’ll make 15 % the stretch. Stretch, yeah. But my team is committed to hitting the 10, and we feel like we can hit the 10. Share the risk. And then if they said, no, no, no, you really need to hit the 15, then you go back to, well, what must be true in order to meet the 15?

 

12:38

Right? So this becomes a dialogue. This is not like a written in stone in Ten Commandments and therefore you shall go do this. This becomes a dialogue and this is really the power of vigilant leadership and actually owning your leadership.  Well, and I think to the other thing that occurred to me as you were talking, Anne, is  there is no way as a single leader, as a team, even as an organization with how quickly things change from the perspective of metrics.

 

13:07

to know everything that could possibly happen from an outcome perspective. So I think you’re exactly right. Like share that risk. And the other point I want to make is make sure that you communicate clearly and you get that sign off or you have the back and forth like Anne just said,  because I think the other thing about hiding in the…

 

13:26

you know, making them more nebulous or whatever is everyone can kind of interpret a different way where, like you just said with your example, you know, you say we can hit 10%, the boss says, no, it has to be 15. You go back and say,  okay, we’ll make that the stretch. And he says, no, we have to hit the 15. And then you go back to what must be true to make that happen, right? So then it’s a negotiation. And again, you’re all aligned moving forward.  But the other piece about that is to communicate as things are going on. Because if you wait till the last minute to say,

 

13:54

we didn’t hit the 15 sorry, you’re gonna be in a lot more trouble than if you get halfway through whatever it is, the campaign, the conference, the whatever you’re doing, and you can tell that already you know that the chances are 10 % that you’re gonna make that or whatever that looks like that you’re going back and saying, listen, this is not working based on what we’re doing. And then we go through the steps again, right? The negotiation, okay, if it has to be 15%, what must be true?

 

14:22

so that you’re pivoting along the way instead of waiting for things to quote unquote finish and then quote unquote failing. Yeah, I mean really good points. We’re gonna get into frequency in a second. But before we get to frequency, April, why don’t you talk about how to determine how you’ll measure your KPIs. Keeping me on track. I like it. Okay. We always provide a nice little overview in the first question. Everybody’s like,  Jesus, this is gonna be like the whole entire episode. like, you guys know us by now.

 

14:50

kind of pack everything to that first point and then we drill it down to the other points. But that’s exactly right. You take it April, you go from there. So determine how you’ll measure your KPIs. though there are lots of tools to measure things, it’s important that you’re measuring the right things. And again, Anne said these points piled on each other. So you already  heard us making some of this point in the previous one. But,  and as she shared in her lead gen example, we can become complacent with vanity metrics. So again, those are things like impressions, likes, views, circulation, visitors, et cetera.

 

15:18

These actually mean nothing unless you specifically define how their signals of the business success. So what we would say is first, quantify as much as possible. But if you can’t quantify, then use qualitative metrics. So like Ann said in the previous one,  I think she’s called him Joe. I don’t know, I’m so bad with names. I think it was Joe.  Anyway, Joe’s gonna go to the conference. I think it’s Joe, yeah.

 

15:41

because  he’s gonna learn about leadership and he’s gonna come back with four points and give a presentation or Joe’s gonna go and we don’t know who’s gonna be there and so we’re gonna have him set a goal of minimum 20 people he’s gonna meet with maximum stretch 50, et cetera, et cetera, right? So those are more of the, mean, I guess that last one’s technically quantitative, but you get where I’m going with this where it’s not like.

 

16:04

Oh, we’re going to measure this number that then is going to tell us how successful we were at conversion. There are reasons in  the marketing funnel and why you do things and cultivating your teams and all of that, where you can lean into metrics that are important that aren’t tied to a bottom line, I guess is the point that I’m making.  And then sentiment is a big one that’s more qualitatively oriented. So if you’re trying to shift culture, you may do interviews, for example, to understand how people are feeling.

 

16:31

to make an assessment based on the general vibe of the place. You could make this a more quantitative survey, but what we often find with this is people get nervous about whether it can be tracked back to them.  And also then you may not get the full story. So  you’ve heard us talk before and I’m not gonna get on my soapbox a lot at least.  That quantitative metrics are and aren’t helpful, but they really don’t give you the human lens oftentimes. And so if you need to do that,

 

16:58

Okay,  there’s reasons for that, I guess. Not my first choice. But  the qualitative piece helps gauge people’s reactions in the moment. And so if you can supplement even with some of those, that’s what we always recommend.  This qualitative piece I do want to reinforce is a really big thing when it comes to the internal culture of the organization and those temperature checks, because we always say,

 

17:22

If things aren’t going well on the inside and people aren’t getting what they need, that’s reflected in the way we treat clients, all of those things. So  even though those metrics sometimes feel squishier, those KPIs feel squishier,  sometimes they’re even more important than the ones that you can actually measure.  Many people use dashboards to monitor KPIs. We’re a fan of these because this is somewhere that people, if it’s done right, you can pop in and track real time.  There can be calibration done.

 

17:50

You can share it, there can be alignment, caveat, make sure that people aren’t going in and selecting their metric of choice.  we set up with the episode and just following that, but it can be a good way to provide visibility. And that can be another communication point for people to feel like there’s transparency. And then the last thing I’ll say here, and then I’ll let Ann talk is there is always the multiplier effect to consider. So where you can’t tease out one part to make a direct correlation, you may need to look at the activation as a whole. So.

 

18:19

Some of those softer things like I’ll just use the conference example because it’s an easy one, right? If you set a goal for someone to talk to so many people and then you have a whole campaign when the person comes back with the business cards, right? Of how you’re gonna follow up and when, but maybe you’ve already known them before, they’ve been on your email list or all those types of things. The whole ecosystem is meant to work together.  So just be aware of that when you’re trying to measure the KPIs that again, like we said in the beginning,

 

18:46

Everyone loves numbers, but if they’re not pointing to anything, that’s a problem. So make sure you’re taking a holistic view at that and setting the KPIs appropriately for that bigger picture. Yeah, I just want to expand on that point because I think it’s such an important one because if a multiplier effect  wasn’t a real thing, we wouldn’t have things like marketing campaigns, right? Because marketing campaigns basically take a bunch of different things, put them together in order to create fuel so that you get

 

19:15

more oomph from what you’re doing versus doing things in silos and hoping this email campaign over here works or this ad campaign over here works. But when you unite them all together, you give them a theme, you give them fuel, they can then have a better success rate of rising above the noise. Right.  So these things work. Now, the problem is, and I’ve seen this a lot and I experienced it at P &G, especially being in the my function I was in and communications is like

 

19:44

If you can’t directly measure it, then a lot of people won’t go do it. Right? Exactly. Right. We have the opposite effect sometimes. We’re like, and in April said if  we need to measure everything and I don’t know how to measure that, so therefore we’re not going to do it. I’m like, you guys use your brains. I mean, we live in a world that takes an ecosystem, it takes five to seven touch points in order for someone to actually engage with a new brand, a new service, a new business. So it takes some effort.

 

20:11

So if you think that that one paid ad campaign because you’re getting data from it means that that’s the only thing you need. You guys, need to really consider this multiplier effect or the network effect or the ecosystem effect that we talk about  and realize that some of the things may not be able to be isolated in order to be measured directly, but you know, because you’re smart and you understand your target consumer, customer, whoever your whole effort is in pursuit of.

 

20:38

And you know how they need to receive information. You know what channel that they’re on. You know what messages they need to believe. You know you have to hit them five or seven times. That’s gonna take a cooperative effort. Even if you can’t say,  I did this communications influencer thing, but I don’t know exactly how many  leads it got me  or how many closes it got me or whatever your call to action is.

 

21:02

Think about it holistically. Don’t use this as a way to kind of parcel out and piece out certain things that either A, you’re trying through a different agenda to maybe like eliminate  or whatever you’re doing,  but think about it from a holistic standpoint and make sure that if it does become a multiplier effect, then look at the impact of the entire program and know that each piece is playing some sort of contributing role into that.

 

21:30

That one is, I am on my tie box for that one because I live through that. Now, if you think that there is a dead duck in there somewhere and you think that it’s bringing everything down, then turn off the dead duck and see what happens. But just realize, a lot of these things don’t change overnight. They take some time. They take some time to build and gain traction. They take some time to show that it was a bad idea. So again, use your brains to consider, do you want to take that risk or not?

 

21:57

Yeah, and the last thing I’ll say to build here is we talk a lot in terms of thinkers and doers on teams.  And so I said before how, you know, no one person or team can possibly ever understand every implication of every metric in the entire world. That’s just not reasonable in the world we live in.  But do make sure to the point Anne just made that you have thinkers,  know, strategic leaders on the team that are keeping an eye on that holistic view and understand it really, really in depth.

 

22:25

and then the people that are pressing the doing buttons  and that they’re working in tandem with each other. Because if you don’t have somebody or several people, depending on size of your organization and initiative that are  keeping an eye on that bigger picture and then the people pressing the buttons, you’re never gonna really be able to assess where things are. And especially in that dead duck situation, right? Those people sitting over can kind of spot like.

 

22:51

Well, every time we do this, this happens. You know, there’s a, yeah, whatever the themes that are happening.  can isolate it. And then like Ann said, you turn it off. You may see that actually like, no, we thought that’s what it was, but it’s not. But if only the doer is the one just kind of, I mean, I envision people like pulling levers and not being sure what’s going on behind the scenes.  You just need to have both of those working together to make sure that that whole ecosystem  is having the multiplier effect.

 

23:20

possible and it’s set up for success in the best way possible. Yeah, that’s a really, really good point. Really good point. Okay, so our next point here is to set up reporting frequency and align stakeholders, both things we alluded to earlier. But in order for your action plan to work, you must be looking at your KPIs on a regular basis. You need to determine the appropriate frequency based on how fast the environment and the sources of the action move. For example,

 

23:47

Going back to digital ad campaigns, it’s a big one that you guys are working on and one that you guys have a lot of questions about. These are generally looked at every two to four weeks, because it takes a certain amount of learning time for the algorithms to optimize. If you’re doing relationship building, as April said, you may check in every day, week, month, depending on the urgency. And as April pointed out, you can’t quantify those two.  it’s not something a lot of times people will just make that a general expectation and assign no quantifiable goals to this. And then you kind of wonder,

 

24:17

Why don’t we have anybody to go like, you know, campaign against or go in bed or go pitch?  And those things kind of fall through the cracks. So you can assign some quantitative value to those, even things that don’t seem like they’re quantifiable, just to make sure that you can start to track those things and hold people accountable for doing these things, even though they are, as April said, squishier.  You know, my very formal.

 

24:44

marketing  professional business speak  squishy. can thank the abundance of squishmallows in my house. I think that’s where it comes from.  It’s squishier.  But here’s the point, you guys. I mean, if you’re trying to be a vigilant leader here, you’re trying not to be in these details every day. As April said, you’re the thinker to the doer. If you’re sitting there pulling the levers, you’re not being a vigilant leader. So the important thing is for you  to fold one. You don’t want to be surprised.

 

25:14

So you’re trying to make sure that if you’re looking at these at the appropriate frequency, you’re doing so so that you’re not surprised that something fails or something goes haywire or maybe something is going really well too and you want to be able to leverage it in a very timely manner. But at the same time, like I said, you’re giving ample time to intervene before it goes off the rails. So that’s what your goals are as a vigilant leader, not to be in it, working it.

 

25:42

on a daily basis. So you know, then when it’s time to evaluate your KPIs, then you can go look at them, but you’re not sitting there every day. Like I know a lot of you guys do, like, where are we at for likes today?  Where are we at on this today? Where are we at this today? It’s like, when you know you’re going to be seeing that every two weeks, you can rise above it. Now, if you feel like you need to see it on more frequent basis, then do that, but don’t make it a micromanaging tendency.

 

26:09

Also then, as we said before, this is a really great way to align your stakeholders. So now they can know when they expect progress tracks. So they’re hopefully, although we can’t promise, not in your business all the time, forcing you to basically say goodbye to your vigilant leadership and have to be in it with your team on a day-to-day basis. Because we all know what happens when our boss comes a calling or management or stakeholders or the board, and they want to know all of these things that are happening.

 

26:35

we start to go into it. Now, if you’re doing a really good job of managing your dashboards, you should be able then to run a report  and you should be able to maybe provide a little bit of context for the report and move on versus like, oh shoot, what is happening?  I haven’t checked that in several months.  I wonder if that’s even working. How do we explain this? How do we explain this? So vigilance means being on top of it, but not having to be in it all the time. So you can do the big thinking.

 

27:04

And hopefully your leaders are vigilant leaders as well. And you’re all holding yourselves accountable. Let’s hope so. Right. Let’s hope so. Yeah. But I do think  what comes to mind here and when I think about the discussions with our clients is  proactivity and planning. And so  if you’re  setting expectations  and you’re leading based on what you know at the time, you should be able to  educate

 

27:34

set the expectations and put a plan in place so that people know, like Anne said, when they’re going to be seeing things. You included in that. And when are you going to discuss them? Yeah, when you’re, yes, exactly. Because I think where we often see people get nervous, and Anne, you kind of alluded to this too, is like, you know, you get busier doing things and somebody asks a question and you’re like, oh shit, where is that? You know, and not, not just, you know, because again, like I said, you can’t track everything all the time. And so,

 

28:04

I think that when your team and you are humming along  and you as a vigilant leader have that bigger picture in mind and you’re keeping your hands out of what your team’s doing and your team is highly functioning as a result, when people come calling, it’s less quote unquote scary, but also you have a plan that you can point to. Now I say that and I know there some of you out there, they’re like, yeah, that’s great in theory, but my boss does X, Y, and Z or this board member just can’t help him or herself or whatever, right?  So we get that things happen.

 

28:34

But what we’re saying in this one is this is your best chance  of avoiding that.  And also,  even if it does happen, it’ll be so much less disruption than if you’re not prepped for it and have an answer and then a consistent answer across the team that will provide comfort to those people when they do come.

 

28:57

Yeah, and I think it’s really important to lead from that place because a lot of people do is they’ll just send out a weekly newsletter or a monthly report. And then when somebody comes calling, they’re like, didn’t you read the weekly newsletter, monthly report? And the answer, you guys, 99 % of time is no, no, they don’t. So you need to make these reports like something that they pay attention to so that they are tracking as well. It’s going to save you so much effort. So.

 

29:25

For example, if you’re having a leadership team meeting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, make it a point to share key results in that weekly, bi-weekly leadership teaming so everybody’s hearing it, so everybody’s up to speed. So your leadership isn’t worrying or wondering what the heck or how something’s going on or what’s going on.  And I think that helps in several fold. One, it keeps people tracking again so they’ll stay out of your business.  But also when you come calling and wanting resources like money and people,

 

29:54

They’ve been tracking all along and you don’t need to make a big, huge overture for why you need more people or why you need more money or why you need more time or whatever that resource need is at that moment. So  do the due diligence and  practice the vigilant leadership by  being a responsible leader to your management as well. So I think that was a really good point you made April. So I just wanted to build on that. Right.

 

30:24

I’m trying to I’m trying to you know, I see that it’s like well, I’m already I’m already like ready to go and I know you’re gonna cut me off. So I’m I’m  that was maybe an awkward segue, but I didn’t have anything to add. And I was also like I could add and then she’s going to be like, that’s in the next point. So I there we go. I will see. OK, there we go. OK, so we’ll move on to the next point for April, which is establish a protocol for intervention. Yes. And again, this builds on the previous points we just made, which is why I held off.

 

30:54

This is about finding the right balance between knee-jerk reactions and letting something go on too long. So there’s no easy answer here. That’s what we always start with, but being proactive on when and how you will engage will help. to the previous conversation we were just having, an example of this is let’s say you’re watching the performance of your competitor  and you’ve set a KPI that if they reach 15 % of market share, you’re going to take action. Until then.

 

31:23

you will monitor on a bi-weekly basis, right? So that’s that vigilance we were just talking about.  It’s not that you’re gonna set that KPI and an alarm’s gonna go off at whatever point they hit 15%, right? You should still have your eyes on,  oh my gosh, this is happening fairly quickly. For example, we need to be ready to make a change or, ah, you know, they’re getting, I don’t know, make it up one to 2 % every three months. I think we’re gonna be okay for a while. But then you should be checking.

 

31:50

on that cadence to make sure you’re right. So it’s not the set it and forget it, let the system tell you, but it’s that discipline that helps with the nebulous nature of this where you don’t want to knee jerk, but you want to make sure you make a move at the right time. It’s also good to have some semblance of what that action plan might be. So like I just said,  with the tracking, if you see something moving faster than you anticipated,

 

32:15

you want to be ready with what’s going to happen as a result of that. So we’re going to accelerate the launch of a new product or service, or we’re going to run a competitive campaign to try to take some of that share back or stop the bleed that’s happening with what they’re accruing, those types of things.  And then you’ll also want to establish when to elevate and seek help. This can be  really hard to do for ambitious leaders who don’t like to admit that they need some guidance or some help.

 

32:41

or at the very least, the ability to share risk with others that are their peers or leadership or the board or all the things we’ve talked about here. But the call out for that one is we’ve seen too many really strong leaders even actually get themselves in way too deep for failing to share and failing to say, you know, I might need some assistance or at the very least that we’re going to align that we’re all taking on this risk together.  So please, please, please don’t be one of those leaders,  but

 

33:11

As you can  hear me say here,  and the point of this one is it’s a little harder to do. So we always talk with people about, yes, the sharing the burden piece, but also giving yourself a little bit of grace, especially for those hard charging leaders.  They want to feel like they can carry the world, manage everything on behalf of their team, be in front of all of it, be ready to go with the plan, all of those things.  And the best thing you can do is when you hit

 

33:40

a pressure test point in what you’re doing is get some perspective outside of yourself. That will help alleviate the stress of the situation. You’ll be clear to make the right decision.  And then like we said, even better if others are carrying it with you to the points we made on communication and alignment and when you have check-ins and all the things we’ve talked about today, it doesn’t have to be all on you. Vigilant leadership doesn’t mean that it’s that lonely at the top. I have to handle it all or else I’m not being vigilant.

 

34:09

It’s actually the opposite. It’s staying on top of things and being able to make the right decisions, non-emotional decisions, and not let things get so dire  that then it’s a bigger problem for people to solve. You’re in the business with other people because you need the other people. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really, really good point. mean, when I was at P &G, we used to do these sessions. I can’t remember exactly what we called it, but it was basically a competitive analysis sessions where we would sit down, we would look at our biggest competitors.

 

34:38

And we would analyze,  and try to be 10 like we them, frankly, and be like, okay, if they did this, or what do we expect them to go do? It said more broadly, we might expect them to  introduce a competitive product or a me to product or service, or we might expect them to put at that point in time, a new ad on TV, or maybe in this case, in this day and time, it’s a new digital campaign or, you so we would start to think about and put ourselves in their shoes and think about what they might do.

 

35:07

And then we took like those top like most critical ones and said, okay, if they do this, then this is what we’re going to go do in response. Right. And so it helps you to prioritize once and that everything is a dramatic urgent. Like you said, April, needing to have a knee jerk reaction to it. And two, it helps to manage expectations of leadership again, where

 

35:33

I mean, this used to happen to me all the time at P &G, we’d be sitting there and all of sudden, you know, we see a competitive ad and we’re like, what are we going to do about this? It’s like, what do mean what we’re going to do about it? It’s a, you know, an ad. And so I’m not trying to say that that’s not an important thing, but it’s like, then everybody stops what they’re doing for the next like two days and starts to address some sort of competitive response. So what you’re saying about being proactive, planning for as much as you possibly can, but even if it’s something simple to say, these things we’re not going to worry about and these things we are going to worry about,

 

36:02

helps again to align those expectations with your team, with leadership, so that you don’t get distracted by these things that happen. I call it, there’s a mouse in my kitchen, occurrences, and then your whole team gets distracted. You’re like, oh wait, we just spent the last three days doing this and we missed this other really key deliverable that we really wanted to go work on.  And it also helps your team maintain a level of consistency, because when they start having that whiplash back and forth, and every day is some sort of fire drill,

 

36:28

You’re gonna burn them out, they’re gonna get overwhelmed and you’re gonna lose the opportunity to really harness all their brain power to further the business. So I give you that tool as an opportunity to, as April said, sometimes it’s really hard to be vulnerable, but this is an opportunity then to be vulnerable in that situation of like, woo, if this happens, we’re gonna need help. Like we’re gonna need  some sort of R &D claim or we’re gonna need  to elevate or to accelerate this innovation or this product or

 

36:58

we’re gonna need expertise in a marketing campaign. We’re gonna need these things. And so it kind of helps put the rest of the team on notice so that you’re not on your heels when something happens, you’d be like, ooh, now I need to go talk to that marketing guy about like, or girl about this marketing campaign because  I need their help. And now I feel like foolish, like, or like an idiot because I’m not managing my business. So now things can happen, unexpected things can happen. And then you…

 

37:26

Basically, you’re like, all right, we need to rally the troops and we need to do a what must be true planning session in order to understand what we need to go do here.  So  use these tools, guys. These tools really, really work. I can’t emphasize that enough. But the important thing is to maintain that vigilant mindset and not feel pulled into  going into the details and going into the weeds every time something happens. Yeah. I mean, I’ll make this a quick one. But the other. That’ll be a first.

 

37:55

I know, but  we talked about being proactive and I know the example specifically is in the competitive space. But I think the other thing, if you’re building in and you’re the reviews and when you’re looking at things and like Ann said, using the tools  just reminds me of we did a pretty massive campaign here regionally.  And one of the agencies I was at in the healthcare space, specifically hospitals.  And the one thing  that we learned really quickly from doing that auditing is that it’s a me too industry in total.

 

38:25

So the minute you take a leadership step to change the way things are communicated, you have to know that everyone else is gonna follow suit. Especially if it’s good. Yeah, so to Anne’s point, we were setting up what that change was gonna be and it was really like, you know, let’s stop talking to each other and providing metrics and saying, you know, beating our chest and saying, I’m the best at whatever. Meanwhile, the consumers, patients are driving by and not even seeing it, right?

 

38:50

So we were going to turn that lens and make it much more patient focused and speak to them as it should be.  But then we knew that the minute that we made that change, because of the patterns we could recognize through all of the auditing that had been done by this hospital system was they’re going to follow suit. So then how are we going to stay ahead? So just to provide another example of why this vigilance, the discipline and the proactivity is so important.  And that’s really, I think what

 

39:20

can make you a true leader in your space, in your business, for the consumer, all of those things. When you are so in the flow of this type of stuff and it’s just part of your DNA that you’re always the one staying ahead. And that’s a really exciting place to be when you have the foundation to get there. Yeah, I think that’s really well said. There we go. See? And it wasn’t that long, actually, either. I was watching the clock. I’m like, April, stop talking. Stop talking.

 

39:47

No, mean, you guys, hopefully, I mean, that wasn’t as dense or as like, heady as you’re worried about. But hopefully, you got some really good insights for how to practically define these KPIs, what to do with them, how they’re going to work really well to set a vigilant leadership mindset, but as well as help to train your leaders and your stakeholders how they can be vigilantly minded as well. And with that, let me just summarize the key points here again, just so you have them. So

 

40:16

Setting up your feedback loop, you’re going to want to make your goals tangible. Remember, we talked a lot about that and how important that is. Determine how you measure your KPIs and quantify as much as possible, but make them qualitative. need to be just have something that you’re measuring and monitoring. Setting up recording frequency in aligned stakeholders. We already talked about that. And establish a protocol for intervention and really have that help you manage your any kind of feelings you may have.

 

40:44

for insecurity or worry  or failure, frankly. So with that, we encourage all of you to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put it into practice. Because remember, strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action.  Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further?  Reach out to us through our website, forthright-people.com.  We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business.  And make sure to follow or subscribe to strategic counsel on your favorite podcast platform.