What every company has to do at least once a year

Why do you need to summarize

If leaders and teams do not make such summaries periodically, they will quickly fall into chaos, because they will live on current fires, will not have a broader perspective, will not notice what needs to be changed, improved, what to give up.

Summary is an important stopping point. Every 6 months at least you have to catch your breath in business, take a look from a distance – otherwise you will go crazy! A year will pass, during which time your employees will lose their motivation and the competition will overtake you.

We have a tradition of annual summaries at the beginning of January each year, but we have also made quarterly or semi-annual summaries in different years.

Me and Kamila, as the owners of the company, hold strategic meetings at least once a month. With my own head, I have these meetings almost every week.

Below I present to you the full process of what it looks like with us, in a team of several people. It may be similar or different for you. Treat this text as an inspiration that needs to be adapted to yourself.

How to prepare for the summary

If we want to summarize a quarter, half a year or a year well, it is worth looking at three areas of Change Value Process, which are always present when working with companies and leaders:

1. Mentality and emotions – what is going on inside our head, in emotions, feelings, in our psyche;
2. Communication – what the flow of information looks like, the atmosphere in the team;
3. Strategy – do we achieve results, what sells, what is the market situation, what is the idea for growth, what business model we develop, what products we focus on.

The purpose of the summary is to define clearly and precisely the conclusions we have for the last period and, above all, to make a decision – what we change, what we improve, what we give up, what we press.

This is a very important mindset. Seems obvious, but many people either do not summarize at all, or do them poorly, or do well but do not make decisions, or make decisions but do not implement these arrangements.

To get a good summary we need:

• courage to be honest with yourself and others, to be able to say what went wrong, what we failed, admit a mistake, take responsibility, draw conclusions and act
• focus and analysis so as not to slip over your heads, but to bite into the nuances
• to stimulate your creativity and open your head to new ideas.

To make it possible, we prepare a summary in several stages:

1. Collecting data, information from Google Analytics, Facebook, website, mailing system, notes from the last months
2. Putting data and applications in a cloud file for others to access
3. Create the first applications and describe them in a file
4. First team meeting where we go through all the main data and first thoughts
5. After about a week of break, we have a second meeting, the so-called strategic follow up. Once the thoughts have settled, we discuss the key conclusions and bite into the essence
6. After about 3-7 days, we do a second strategic follow-up to make decisions and set up an action plan
7. During or after all this, I have development talks with employees, about which a little later.

To prepare for the first strategic meeting, each team asks itself strategic questions. Of course, not every question is relevant to everyone.

You can download the exact content of the strategic document that we send to our employees at the end of the article.

I am not putting it here because it would take up too much space. Additionally, if you download and save the file to your hard drive, you will be able to return to it quickly and easily.

Development meetings with colleagues

An important element of the summary are 1v1 meetings with colleagues. Before such a meeting, I recently sent an email with the following content. I have marked my comments for you in bold.

In order for us to fully summarize everything important it is important that:

1. 1. Make a formal-financial-numerical summary (already behind us) [here I mean the joint strategic meeting that I described above]
   2. Draw operational conclusions – what should be changed in actions (we have some of this after the last summary, but we need to finalize it + clarify overdue actions that we want to make up for from the list of “outstanding topics for the future”
      [here I have provided a link to the list of matters that we note in one cloud file, for which there is no time within a given period. In the periods July-August and December-January we try to catch up on this list of important not urgent or less important, not urgent but important]
   3. Draw strategic conclusions and make strategic decisions – what to bet on, what direction to give the company, products, offers
      [here again, I encourage the team to return to the strategic conclusions from the first meeting or follow up to re-examine the essentials with a fresh head]
   4. Summarize the cooperation in ILZ, draw conclusions and make decisions, what we want to change in cooperation
      [here I am sending a link to the table, which I ask them to complete and evaluate our company and us as founders, but also their feelings about working with us and the team. You can download the table at the end of the article.]
   5. Summarize your own development, your CEMKs and set development goals for yourself.
      [here I ask the team to look at themselves and at the list of Traits, Emotions, Mentality, Competencies from my book “The Wall – How to Overcome Resistance and Make Change”, analyze themselves and ask themselves development questions. You can download the list of Trait, Emotions, Mentality, Competences and development questions at the end of this article.]

When the employee prepares himself for the meeting, we have 1.5-2h conversation. Sometimes, after 1-2 weeks, a follow up meeting is needed to summarize, extract the essence and establish actions.

This is how, at the moment, each of us in the company goes through a semi-annual and annual summary. Every year we improve this process, simplify it or develop it so that it corresponds to the company’s challenges and the stage of our development.

I keep my fingers crossed for your summaries alone or with your team.

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And if you want to develop the best management methods, make decisions, build a competitive advantage, and strengthen your self-confidence in business, I recommend the CVP Business School. We are opening registration soon!