Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast, and today we are tying into all things midyear reset. So if you are listening to this live when this comes out, we are in the middle of June and I feel like so many leaders that I'm hearing from are in the. Oh shit. It's June Spiral. Like where did the time go?
I feel like just yesterday, it was January. We were setting goals, we were getting excited about what we were going to achieve this year, and then we blinked and here we are, half the year's gone. And it's I don't even know where those months went. I don't know what we did. I don't know how we got here, but we're here.
And how do we make the rest of this year impactful? How do we shift? How do we need to adjust in order to end 2025? Feeling proud, feeling confident in the results that we delivered with our team? And that's what we're gonna be talking about in today's podcast.
And of course, as always, I'm going to be giving you step by step, here's exactly what you need to go do with your team this week in order to shift things. So first things first. You are going to do this with your team, not to them. So this is not something that you are gonna go do, in your office by yourself, and then roll out to your team. We are going to have a midyear reset with our team because again, when we do it with them, not to them, they are 10 times more likely to be bought in and on fire to actually go achieve that thing.
And we as the leaders cannot execute on our strategy by ourselves, our team. Is who we execute through. Therefore, our team needs to be a part of developing the strategy. Now, what do I mean by when I say team? For my higher level leaders, if you're leading a team of teams, this is likely going to be that layer below you.
And any subject matter experts that truly make a significant impact on they own bodies of work, they might not own a team or have leadership responsibilities, but they own bodies of work within your team. I do not believe you need a leadership title to be in the room to develop strategy.
When you're determining who to include, this is the layer below you. Those who have, leadership responsibilities over people, and those who have leadership responsibilities over bodies of work, even if they do not have a management title, that is who is in the room For those of you guys who lead a function.
So you lead a team, or maybe you have a manager or two managers under you, but you have maybe I'd say 15 or less people. You can do it with everyone. Everyone can be a part of this, and I'm gonna teach you how to facilitate through the process to where it's still effective. But if you have a smaller team.
You're doing this with the entire team. I don't care if they're a coordinator or an analyst. I don't care if they're a contractor. If they have a role in executing the strategy, bring them into it.
So what you're going to do is you're going to schedule 60 minutes with your team and you are going, you can title it, midyear, reset, and there, or you can even tack it onto an existing team meeting. Maybe you do 30 minutes this week and 30 minutes next week. That works too. And now in that meeting, you're going to let them know, Hey.
Up until you know this point. Here's what's been going on. You recognize where we're at. So either, we've been making really good progress, but I just wanted to have a moment to recheck in it's mid-year. Make sure that we're still heading onto the same path, or, Hey guys, I know this year has been a complete crapshoot.
We've been all over the place. We've been fighting endless fire drills. I want to take time to intentionally set how we are going to utilize these last two quarters of the year to be more intentional, to be more focused, to be more impactful with our time. Lay the foundation upfront. Be open and honest.
If it's been chaotic, recognize it's been chaotic, and reset the intention. If it's been great. Awesome. Still room for improvement. Let's just do this as a check-in. And now the first thing you're going to do is we need to reaffirm our vision, your vision. Is not a buzzwordy filled statement that we throw on PowerPoint slides.
Your vision is your end destination. It is what are we trying to achieve? It is your finish line. It is the thing that all of the work that your team is doing day in and day out, this is what is leading towards it's culminating to achieve this one thing that is your vision. I know I talk a lot about how to develop your vision in podcasts, in posts.
We're not gonna go super in depth here, but if you do not have a vision or if you think or have a hunch that your vision may be more in that buzzwordy versus telling your team exactly the end destination, what we're trying to achieve, you can simply ask your team.
So what you do is you talk to your team. You're gonna start by identifying who your team's customer is. This seems really silly, but a lot. Shocking how many times we're not truly aligned on the number one group we serve. And who's the end receiver of our work. So for some of you guys, this is the external customer of the company.
For a lot of you guys, you are an internal serving team. So that means maybe you serve other departments that means maybe you serve the employee. Whoever it may be, it's getting clear on who do we serve as a team. I always like to ask who would be the most impacted if our team no longer existed? If we all won the lottery tomorrow and we walked out, who would feel the impact the most?
That's typically your customer, so pick one the most, the one most overarching, customer group that you serve. And then I want you to ask three questions. And an easy way to do this is you can put these three things on, three different flip charts and then just give your team sticky notes and they can move from one flip chart to the next five minutes per flip chart.
You can have the whole thing done in 15 minutes. You can do it virtually on a mural board. It doesn't gotta be that complicated. So the first question they ask is, what is this customer's? Biggest needs. So what do they need? What do they need to do their work? What do they need to do to better serve their customers?
What do they need? What their, what is their biggest pain points, their biggest gaps, their biggest frustrations? And then I want you to ask what is their, or what are all the ways that only we can meet those needs? So here's the thing. They have alternatives that can meet those needs. I like to say if you are the financial business partner.
They can pull financial data themselves. They could go externally and get a financial expert. I don't, they can use chat, GBT, I don't know. But what is the thing that only you can provide? Okay. You are the only one who has, the company knowledge, the greater context, the history of their function.
You can help them see how to leverage what other departments are doing. Like it's that advisory element that only you can do the data polling a lot of people can do, but only you can do that advisory element. So that's your unique purpose, your the unique value your team provides. And then the third question you ask is.
If we could only do one thing for this customer this year, what would it be? What is the biggest impact that we could have on this customer this year? So reflecting back on all of those pain points, those frustrations, all those things, and reflecting back on your unique purpose, because we're not trying to go solve something that's not within our unique purpose.
What is the number one biggest impact that you can have on them this year? What could you achieve for them this year that if you were able to knock it out the park, they would be like, holy crap. Singing your praises, can't get you out of can't shut up about you. Like they'd be talking about you in every town hall.
Like they'd be trying to get you into every meeting. They want you at every table. They want your opinion on everything. What's a number one thing that you could do? And now for some of you guys, maybe you're not there yet, maybe it's just you need to establish yourself as, a respected voice as that financial advisor to even get them to listen to you.
So maybe that's the first step that you need to tackle in order before you can get to that level. But it's getting clear on what's the one thing, the one impact you need to focus on this year that's going to best serve your customer or improve your ability to serve them. So the goal here is getting to the one thing.
So how you can do this is have everyone list out their stickies on how they think we can make the biggest impact, and then just give them all a sticker and say, vote. You get a vote on one. What's the number one thing you wanna go after? Boom. That's your vision. We exist to serve this group through our unique purpose, and the number one way that we are going to drive an impact on them in 2025 is x.
And if you wanna get into, a lot of the times in liberal. And in liberated Leader, we go way more in depth into this. So you get a mural board as to exactly how to facilitate your team through this process. We talk about how to develop, the metrics, the indicators as to how to measure this vision, all the things.
That's just like a four minute download as to how to get to a vision if you don't already have one. If you want the whole details the the board, everything. DM me about liberated leader, and you'll get all of that. So that is, if you don't have a vision, I want you to spend 15, 20 minutes on developing your vision for the rest of this year.
That's okay. You can have a vision for six months. Great. Next year you've built this skillset. You can now cascade a vision for the entire year, the following year. Great. Now let's do, a two year vision, a three year vision. I like to start small because we're building a skillset. We're not going to, cast our first vision for our team and develop a three year vision because we haven't built that skillset.
We're not probably very great at it yet. So let's give us some time to build that skillset. Cast a one year vision, a six month vision and let's slowly build that skillset of really identifying that one impact we want our team to achieve. Now, for those of you guys who are like. I feel like my vision does that.
My team's very clear on who we serve, the one problem that we're trying to solve for our people this year. Great. Then we're just gonna take a moment to reiterate that and reaffirm it, because here's the thing. We work in a corporate environment, in a world that is constantly changing. Demands are constantly changing.
The economy is constantly changing. Our consumer is constantly changing, and so therefore, the vision that we outlined a year or two years ago may no longer be the right thing, and we're not just going to be chasing after something just because we put it on a piece of paper. So this mid-year check-in is a great time to say, is this truly the highest impact that we can have on our customer?
Is this still what we need to be going after? If not, it's okay to pivot. It's great to pivot. We don't want to fall into, the sunk cost fallacy of just continuing to chase after something if it's no longer the right thing. And so this can be, you going through that same exercise I just gave around the vision, reaffirming what are our customer's biggest pain points right now?
What are their biggest frustrations? Where are their biggest challenges? Does our vision truly still align? As meeting those, or as having an impact on the biggest one, we're not gonna be able to solve all their problems. We're just trying to solve the biggest one the hairiest one, the one that's going to allow them to feel the difference by the end of this year.
So go through the exercise of just reaffirming your customer's biggest pain points right now, and does your vision truly hit that?
So now that we're understand where we're trying to go, what we're trying to achieve, what will be different because our team existed, because our team showed up each and every day and did the work at the end of this year, the next thing we need to do is reflect on progress to date.
What has gone well and helped us get closer to achieving this vision. And then what has been getting in our way, what's blocking us? And this is the part no one likes to do because no one likes to talk about, all the things hidden in the closet. We just like to move on and talk about, what we will do because that feels more productive.
That feels, easier. To just push everything that's happened to date, in the closet, forget about it and move on. But here's the thing, regardless of the past two quarters, were your best two quarters yet or your worst two quarters yet they are a treasure trove of information and I always say, I don't care if you had a shitty two quarters.
Fine, that's fine as long as you learn from them. What is not okay is if you have a shitty two quarters and you don't learn from what happened, from what went off track, from how you got off track from why things went so wrong. Because if we don't stop and learn from that 10 times out of 10, we're going to end up right back in that same situation.
So regardless of how the past two quarters went, we are going to take time to say what just happened through the lens of our vision. Now, if you just developed this vision, a okay, we're gonna say, okay, based off of this vision past the two, the past two quarters what's been helping us? What's been throwing us off track?
That's fine, but that's what we need to talk about. So a easy way to do this is just to put two boards. So put your vision in the center of the room, put a board, either a flip chart, it could be a virtual board, whatever it may be on each side of your vision. One that says, what's helping us get closer to achieving this vision?
And the other one's gonna say, what's getting in our way? Give everyone on your team a pad of sticky notes. Have them go to town. You've got, five minutes on one board, then we're gonna rotate and you've got five minutes on the next board. If you write something that's the same as someone else, group it together, put the sticky notes on top of each other.
That's great. Or sometimes I'll say if you see something that somebody wrote that you agree with, just star the sticky note. So that way you can start to see where people are like yes. Where you have themes, where you have patterns arising. So they're going to rapid fire off their sticky notes.
Now, when I talk about what's helping us, I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about. What projects are driving us closer? What work are we doing day in and day out that's actually driving an impact? Are we working on the right? Things, how are we behaving as a team? How are we showing up? How are we meeting, how are we, collaborating?
How are we, reflecting and providing feedback to each other? I'm talking about every little aspect of what your team is doing and how they are executing, how they are doing it. It can even be, allies, stakeholders you're working with that are big, helps, things like that. And what's getting in our way is the exact flip of that.
So where are we working on the wrong things? Where are we working on things that we thought were productive but actually aren't, that aren't truly driving an impact to our vision? Yes, there are things you are doing right now that are important but aren't driving an impact on your vision. So maybe those are things you need to pause or stop for now.
Those deliverables that you're producing that made sense previously, but no longer are making an impact on your vision. Where are you doing things that are just noise? Where are you participating in meetings that are just noise? Where are you getting pulled off track? So notice that I say we're doing all of this through the lens of our vision.
I think where a lot of leaders get caught up is they just make it an open-ended situation of just everyone give me your opinions on what's going and what isn't. And that's where we get overwhelmed because there's nothing focusing them. This isn't about your general opinion. This is about, this is the impact we're trying to make by the end of this year.
What is preventing us and what is helping us? So it focuses the information that you are getting and it's gonna be 10 times more valuable and it's gonna prevent you from getting in this place of everyone just opinion dumping onto you. So now we've done the work to say, here's where we're going. Here's our end destination.
We've reaffirmed that. We've done the work to say what is helping and hindering us to date, and now we get to think forward thinking. Now we get to talk about, okay, based off of that, what do we want to do in Q3? Yes, I said in Q3, I did not say the end of the year. I believe in planning quarterly, not annually.
So every single quarter you're going through the planning process and we'll talk about that at a later date. We don't get time to get into that, or you can jump into Liberated Leader and you got all of it at your fingertips. But so we're only planning for this quarter. So now we're going to ask our team what are the two to three things we want to focus on going into Q3.
Here's where this gets easy. You just outlined everything that is helping you or hindering you in achieving your vision. So guess what? The best thing we can do to achieve our vision is either to solve our biggest barriers. Because that's going to amplify our ability to, that's gonna help drive us forward in achieving our vision, or it's to amplify the things that are going well.
So if we know this thing is working on a smaller scale, or whatever it may be, how can we amplify, how can we do more of it? So this is as simple as giving everyone on your team three stickers. I like to just use the little circle dot stickers. You can get 'em at Target or Staples. They come in like the green, yellow, red, blue.
Give everyone three stickers and say, which three sticky notes do you feel will make the biggest impact on us achieving our vision if we execute on them this quarter and they can vote. Either they can vote on solving a barrier or they can vote on amplifying something that's going well, doing more of it, and they can put all three of their stickers on one sticky note.
Great. Love it. Cool. The only thing I prohibit is when they start ripping the stickers in half. Yeah. There's always someone who starts ripping them in half, and we're not gonna do that. So at this point, just based off of which sticky notes got the most stickers on them, you are now able to prioritize exactly what you need to go focus on these three things the three things with the most stickers now become your priorities for Q3, this is what you're gonna go execute on.
And you're like, but what about everything else? You know this one sticky note got five stickers and this one got four and that one didn't make the top three. Why don't we just do that too? Rewind it back to remember what happens when everything is a priority. We're not able to actually execute on anything if we try and spread our resources over tackling everything that we just outlined.
All of the barriers I. And usually there's a lot because people love to come up with barriers. If we try and divvy these out and try and tackle all of them, none of them will get done effectively. And therefore it's Imagine a giant wall blocking you from getting through. And so you give everyone on your team, pick axes and you spread them out in all different directions along this wall and say, start chipping. I. Sure by the end of this quarter, in each individual section, they've chipped enough away to where they can see through the wall, they can see through closer to your vision.
They can see the light on the other side, but no one's made enough progress to actually get over the barrier. To actually move closer to achieving your vision. We can just see it. We can see the potential. We can see how this could help, but we actually haven't made an impact. We actually haven't stepped through the wall.
Now, if you took everyone with their pick axes and said, we're gonna focus on this little section of the wall, everyone go to work. Then that power amplifies and now they're able to break through this barrier and actually make progress forward to achieving your vision. And sure, once we get through that wall and we make, 10% progress, we'll probably run into another barrier.
That's fine. 'cause we're gonna go through the same process. We're gonna overcome that one. And then the next one. But every single time we're strategically overcoming the barriers that have the biggest impact, that will, if solved, drive us forward the most. Because what we're looking for is forward progress.
And if we spread our team across all 15 barriers, we're not gonna make any progress. We're not actually gonna step forward at all. So we have to get clear what are the three, the two to three things we are going to focus on this quarter and everything else we are saying not yet. And guess what? The faster we go and implement these, the faster we can come back and tackle that one.
And this is the power right here, because we just brought our entire team together and we voted. On what those three priorities are, which means, guess what, marketing team, maybe your initiative that, that barrier that you would've helped solve. Maybe that didn't make the cut this quarter. Maybe it's the digital team who has, the big priority project or the fancy, objective that they need to go tackle.
And does that mean you are less important? No. It means that your role this quarter is supporting them and helping them deliver on that impact, on that objective, on moving us closer to the vision. And guess what? Once you help support them through it, then great. That clears the way to maybe yours is next up in line, so let's go tackle that.
And now you have the digital teams full support behind you. They're fully invested in carry, helping you carry that forward. Too many times do I see us end up in this place of everyone needs to have a part. Everyone's initiative needs to have a buy item on the strategy. No. That's how you're siloing your team.
That's how you're creating misalignment. That's how you're creating a culture of us versus them of my priority against theirs. Not everyone gets to be the superhero. Not everyone should be the superhero every quarter. That's a fast track to burnout. If you don't have a role, you don't even have a supporting role in this quarters two to three initiatives.
Great. That's awesome. Guess what? You need to be focusing internally to your team. What can you be doing to get your own team's backyard in order? To improve your team, how they're operating the day to day investing in their education, their continuous improvement, improving their skills, making them better, because guess what?
Next quarter we may be looking at you and you better be ready. So your role in the highest way that you can serve the collective team is by improving your internal operations. And that means no, you don't have a shiny buy line on the two to three priorities for Q3. That's fine. You know that's your focus and that's great and we love that and we see so much power in you doing that and how it's helping drive our team forward.
That's how we create alignment and focus around priorities is by saying, here's the two to three that we as a team have aligned, round, have committed to have voted on. Collectively, we are all in on supporting these, even if our role is just a support role or it's just on improving us internally. But we know that above all, these are the three things we must focus on doing this quarter and everything else is a not yet, it's a trade off.
It is what we are saying. Pause what we are saying no to. And that even means it, it's could be thing deliverables, it could be requests, it could be fire drill, it could be whatever. Every single thing you say yes to is saying no to these three things. These three things now become your filter, your vision and your quarterly priorities become your filter.
Everything that comes to your team is a no unless it is driving you closer to achieving these three things. And we can do a whole nother podcast episode on how to get respect for your, no, this is your filter. This should be the thing that you are focusing on Each and every meeting, each and every team meeting should be going through these priorities.
What is our progress?
These cannot just live in a folder that you then forget about. Your strategy that you just outlined is the filter through which every single piece of work comes through. Your team must go through in order to get your team's time and attention, obsess over it. If I can't ask every single person on your team, what is your vision and what are the two to three priorities you are focusing on this quarter to get there.
And they can't all tell me the exact same thing. We are not talking about it enough.
Talk about it relentlessly. The more you talk about it, the more that we focus on it, the more that we're able to block the constant distractions. Okay, guys, this doesn't work unless you go take action on it. Listening to this podcast does not help drive any change in your team. Do one thing. If you're like, oh, I can't even commit to doing that whole meeting, do one of them.
Go get your vision outlined. Go outline your two to three priorities. Just do one little piece, because even in doing one little piece, you'll be five, 10, 15% better off than you were the past two quarters. Take action. Do the work, have the conversation with your team. It's gonna be awkward, it's gonna be uncomfortable.
The first time you're building a new muscle, it's like the first time going into the gym. You feel uncomfortable. You don't know what the heck any of this machinery does, but the more that you show up, the more you do the work, the more you have the conversations, the more comfortable you get, the stronger you get the.
Easier this becomes, the bigger the impact it starts to have in your team. Go do the work. DM me, let me know how it goes. I wanna hear all about it.
Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
