Megan Hyatt Miller: Hello, this is Megan Hyatt Miller, and this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today, I’m really excited about talking about how to ensure your leadership team still achieves your most important goals in 2021. This is a hot topic right now, because we are closing in on the final quarter of the year, and I bet, like most people, you have some really important goals to achieve, maybe the biggest goals of your whole year, including your revenue and profit goals…things like that…that you can’t afford to miss.

So, the question is…How do you get people aligned and all pointed in the same direction, where they are ready to perform at the top of their game in the final quarter of the year, so you can cross the finish line and know you’ve achieved your most important goals? So, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m so excited, because I have a brand-new guest on with me: Chad Cannon, our chief sales officer. He has never been on Lead to Win before. Chad, welcome.

Chad Cannon: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been listening for years and finally got the invitation.

Megan: I know. I was like, “Why have we never had you on?” You’re going to be the most amazing guest. Here’s what I love about having you on. Guys, you don’t know this because you don’t know Chad yet, but you will see what I’m talking about in a second. There is about nobody I know who loves a goal more than Chad. Chad is a rabid goal pursuer if I’ve ever met one. So, Chad, I feel like you are the perfect person to have on to talk about this.

Chad: Yes. As you know, competition is my number-one strength, and achieving goals and having that as one of your strengths is helpful. Let’s just say that. I love nothing more than having the opportunity to work with a team toward a goal and the importance of not only doing it yourself, but how do you rally other people around, especially the most important people on your team, to achieve that? That’s the magic that hopefully we’ll get to talk about today.

Megan: That’s right. It’s not enough at this point of the year to be able to have one or two people on your team who are achieving goals. Maybe you have one or two people on your team who are like Chad, but how do you get everybody on your team really performing at the top of their game? Because there’s not a lot of time left on the clock, but there is enough time to accomplish the things that really matter. There’s a certain science to it, and that’s what we’re going to get into today. So, Chad, thanks again for joining me. I’m excited to dig in with you.

Chad, one of the things we hear from our clients who are in this position of “Okay. It’s the last three months of the year. I’m trying to make massive progress…” What typically happens, particularly if you’re in the CEO’s seat, is that your executives or your leadership team, at this point of the year, come to you, and they have a handful of problems that tend to present themselves.

As a CEO, it can feel frustrating and overwhelming to know how to resolve this problem so you can clear a path toward the accomplishment of the most important goals in your organization. What we’re going to talk about today are what some of those problems are, but more importantly, what some of the best solutions are that we’ve found to help make that easy for CEOs and for senior leaders to really get their people performing at the top of their game but, in doing that, remove the obstacles that are standing in their way, because sometimes that can be a little bit mystifying.

Chad: Totally. One of the things you’ve done so amazing this year stepping into the CEO role is empowering us, as leaders, to achieve these goals, continuing to ask us really hard questions about “Hey, how are we doing against our goals, and what’s keeping you from that?” As I’m prepping for our one-on-one next week, the question I have to come with an answer to is “What are the things that are keeping you from achieving the goals as we head into Q4?” I can’t show up to that and not have some type of thought process behind it.

What it does is it really forces me to think differently about “What am I responsible for, and what is it I’m doing on a daily basis?” We’re going to talk about five universal problems that make the leadership team really struggle to focus on those most important goals and ultimately accomplish the things you set as an organization early on in the year.

That first one is the never-ending to-do list. I know it’s really easy to say, “That’s why I can’t achieve these goals. Do you know what’s on my plate, Megan?” The reality is, if I’m honest about what’s on my plate, I have allowed certain things to show up on my plate that aren’t the most high-leverage work that I’m responsible for and that I’m getting compensated for, which means I’m potentially doing something that someone else should be doing. I’m not delegating well. One of the things you do really well is questioning if I should be doing that. Should we be delegating?

As the leader of our sales team, I’m responsible for X, Y, Z. Obviously, hitting two revenue goals this year. That’s what I’m responsible for. If what I’m doing on a daily basis isn’t driving toward that, I need to be challenged by that. I think there are a lot of CEOs who don’t do that. I was on the phone with a leadership team today with this very thing, and the number one reason why people… They even said, “There’s so much now we’re doing that we didn’t have visibility into when we built our plan last year.”

I think of Mike Tyson’s famous quote: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” And if there’s anything that’s true about us, as business leaders, since March of 2020, we’re repeatedly getting punched in the face. We have to pivot, and our to-do list is only getting bigger. We can always have more things to do than the time allotted, which is why we have to get clear about the most high-leverage work.

Internally, we use the Freedom Compass. We think the Freedom Compass is the most powerful tool a leadership team and a CEO can use to get people around “What’s in my Desire Zone?” which is most passionate and proficient. The proficient work isn’t just that you’re good at it, but it’s actually driving the greatest amount of profitability inside the organization. I have to come back to that. You always ask me, “How much time are you spending in your Desire Zone?” because you want me spending the majority of my time there, because you know that’s what’s going to be best for the company.

If you don’t have clarity as a CEO for your leadership team of what their Desire Zone is and the things they’re doing that drive the greatest amount of profitability toward your company, that’s a tool you need to be extremely familiar with. We even take companies through that. It has become a very powerful tool for leadership teams. It’s something we love to be able to do and facilitate that exercise with companies.

Megan, you’ve been part of creating the Freedom Compass, but what would make possible for you…? Think about before you had the Freedom Compass. As a CEO now, maybe knowing how that’s powerful, from your perspective, how has the Freedom Compass helped you, as a leader, in leading the leadership team better?

Megan: I think that’s a great question, Chad. One of the challenges CEOs have is their job is to drive performance. Their job is, among other things, to deliver the annual plan, to deliver the results they’re committed to. In order to do that, you have to develop your executives or your senior leaders to make their greatest contribution. The only way that can possibly happen… It’s not the job of one person. It’s the job of one person to orchestrate the greatest contribution of an entire leadership team. But how do you do that?

Well, one of the best ways to do that is to help your people get clear on what their greatest contribution is. Now, you may not know how to do that. That’s okay. That’s why we have this tool, the Freedom Compass. But if you can create an opportunity for people to discover, “Okay. Where am I most passionate, and where am I most proficient…?” What’s amazing about that is that’s going to keep your top performers, your most valuable players on your team…your executives, your senior leaders…happy and engaged, but it’s also going to keep them driving results and have a lot of clarity around what’s driving those results and what’s not.

The hardest thing that happens when you have a lot of responsibility is that it can be difficult to get clarity. You can feel overwhelmed, as you were saying, Chad, by the never-ending to-do list, and that is a real problem. I have had plenty of conversations with our executive team in these one-on-one meetings and with our clients about their executive teams about this problem that shows up where people feel overwhelmed.

I think it’s my job, as the CEO, to create the space for that clarity. Again, you may not know how to do that, but you can create the space, and that’s really what we’re advocating for with this tool. What happens then is, all of a sudden, Chad, if you’re coming to me and you’re struggling with something… If I can point you back to what your greatest contribution is and you can reorient yourself around that, then all of a sudden, you can reorient your team around that. You can do the appropriate kind of delegation that’s necessary, which we’re going to talk about later, and you can start delivering results.

When you’re planning your day, for example… This is really where the rubber meets the road. If you know your greatest contribution is generating leads in your particular area, then you can make sure if that’s not showing up in your plan for the day, we have a problem. If you’re spending all your time on something operational, for example, and you’re not cultivating new business, then there’s no way you’re going to reach your goal. So it becomes very clear how to tweak things to drive performance. That’s what I love about the Freedom Compass. You multiply that times a whole leadership team… I mean, the power is exponential.

Chad: It’s incredible to see, when we have the opportunity to walk teams through this, what it unlocks for them, and talking to them two or three quarters later when they’ve really implemented this inside their organization, what it does to free their leaders up and have clarity is extremely powerful. So, I highly recommend the Freedom Compass.

Megan: Chad, the other thing about the Freedom Compass that I love in the fourth quarter is this. This is the time of year where, typically, we’re the farthest away from the setting of our goals that we’ve ever been. We’re the most disconnected. We’re also the most weary. What I love about the idea of the Freedom Compass… When you focus the majority of your time and attention in the area where you have the greatest proficiency and passion, it’s reenergizing.

So, if you feel like the energy of your leadership team is flagging, like you’re not sure they’re going to be able to go the distance, you need to reenergize them so you can gain some massive momentum. The best way to do that is to engage the things they’re the most proficient at and naturally passionate about. If they’re focused in areas other than that, it’s going to drain their energy, it’s going to drain their effectiveness, and their performance is going to suffer. So, this is the perfect tool to pull out in the eleventh hour, in the fourth quarter. It’s ideal.

Chad: The second problem we see time and time again when we’re coaching other businesses is ineffective delegation, where projects are half done, they’re done badly, or they’re just dropped altogether. Especially here as we’re heading into Q4, this is really easy to have happen. Gone are the plans of “Hey, I’m going to delegate these projects or certain parts of this project to my team,” because I have successfully hit goals my whole career. We’re in Q4. It’s really easy to say, “Man, I’m just going to buckle down, and I’m going to achieve this, do everything in my power to make this happen.” Let’s just say that does not always work.

We’ve developed a tool that really helps implement taking this vision of what you want accomplished and being able to articulate, whether it’s to a team or an individual, what you want to have come to life so you can be doing effective delegation, so that you’re…you know, what we talked about on the Freedom Compass…spending more time in your Desire Zone. That’s one of the things we talk about.

Once we’re clear about the Freedom Compass, those areas that are outside your Desire Zone… One of the first ways you can get those things off your plate is to delegate. The tool we do that through is the Project Vision Caster. When we teach this to people, it feels somewhat overwhelming at first, because you sit down and it’s like, “Man, this is going to take me an hour to do it.” But it never takes an hour. That’s always the first assumption, that it’s going to take an hour. It’s because it’s something we’re not trained to do, or we don’t do it often enough, that when we actually sit down…

What’s so great about the Project Vision Caster… All the stuff that has been in your brain… You know how many times I’ve told you, Megan. “It’s all in my brain. I just need to sit down and write it.” The hardest thing to do is to sit down and get it out of your brain. The Project Vision Caster literally prompts you to pull all that out of your brain that probably all of us, as leaders, are keeping up in our brains, and it’s just muddying it all up. The Project Vision Caster helps bring clarity so you can effectively delegate that.

I know, Megan, you’re one of the best in the company at delegation and writing Project Vision Casters. One of the things I made a stand for in my coaching program this year was just saying, “I’m a master delegator.” I have to become good at using and leveraging the Project Vision Caster. If I would rate myself at this point, I’m probably like a 6 out of 10, which is nowhere near mastery. I have a ways to go. So I’ll ask you, the master. What are some tips around the Project Vision Caster? Maybe even share a story around something you’ve done just in this last year. I know you’ve done this multiple times to help us get clarity as a leadership team through a Project Vision Caster.

Megan: Well, here’s the reason I love this. Basically, imagine this as a template that, as you said, prompts you through a series of very simple questions that elicit answers from you so that you can take what’s in your head and make it explicit and concrete, which then enables you to hand it off to someone else with the reasonable expectation that they can execute on it.

Usually what happens is we have unarticulated, not explicit, non-concrete expectations or ideas for things that nobody could ever execute on because they’re either not clear enough to ourselves or we haven’t gotten it out of our heads in a way that someone else could execute. The Project Vision Caster is for that purpose. Really, it’s about delegation.

What I love about it as we look at, “Okay. How do we accomplish these major goals we have for the rest of the year…?” Here’s the thing. We don’t have any time to waste. We have to make sure we get aligned with people, that we hand things off, and that we’re on the same page and are clear about what we’re trying to do from the beginning.

For example, if you need someone to go create a plan for something, Chad, you have to spec out what that plan needs to be so they can bring it back to you and it’s 80 or 90 percent right the first time. You don’t have time for them to get it 20 percent right and then fix it. That’s where what happens is… As you were saying, you kind of come in, and you think, “I’ll just do it myself because it’s faster.” It’s not faster. It’s only faster if you don’t articulate the vision.

What I love about this is it enables you to hand off things with the expectation that you’re going to get an excellent result back, thereby freeing you up, as an executive or a senior leader, to focus on higher-leverage work. An example of this is we are in the process of designing a headquarters, a physical office space. I knew this was not just going to be any office, especially post-March 2020. This was going to have to be a really special kind of space. There were outcomes in terms of our culture and the kind of collaboration I wanted.

I wanted to hand that project to my chief of staff, Erin Perry, because I don’t have time to manage that. It’s not the highest and best use of my time to work hand in hand with the architects all along the way, but it needs to come from my vision. So, I created a Project Vision Caster outlining what this building would be like when it’s done.

Let me tell you, that has gone through so many people now…all of our executives, the entire architectural team of about five people we’re working with, our real estate person, our broker, on and on. What that enables them to do is they can take this idea I have, and they can run with it. I’m working on other stuff. I haven’t met with the architects in about two months, but Erin and the broker and all of the other people have been working on this on my behalf, and what I’m getting back is fantastic.

That’s the power of a clearly articulated vision. It doesn’t have to take long. This is a 30- to 45-minute process to create one of these documents, but when you empower your leaders to be able to do this, you teach them how to do delegation at this level, what happens is their capacity becomes almost limitless. That’s what you need in the fourth quarter to really make massive gains.

So, Chad, another problem I hear a lot of executives and senior leaders talk about a lot is the overwhelming calendar. Their time is stuffed with meetings, and they don’t have any time to focus on their highest-leverage work. Is that something you hear also from our clients and people we’re talking to out there?

Chad: Never. We never hear this as an issue. Yes. This is about as common of an occurrence as anything you can imagine. I know I still struggle with this, and I know we, as a company, have done a lot of work over the last few years to get clear around developing, what we would call, an Ideal Week around deep work time, internal meetings, external meetings, so that we have clarity around allowing our EAs to book our time where they don’t have to say, “Hey, are you available for this?” or whatever.

When they collaborate, they know that the company, and especially the leadership team… We’ve gotten on the same page as to say, “Hey, here’s the time we’re going to do internal meetings, external meetings, all that.” Here’s why that’s important. Time and time again, when you’re trying to schedule time on your calendar, and you have four or five people, and they’re responsible for a lot of team members, getting on their calendar can be the most painful thing.

We don’t really have that problem inside our organization, our leadership team. If something gets to the point where we need to schedule a meeting, we can make it happen, because there’s already time set aside on the calendar around this idea that constraints drive innovation. That’s something we firmly believe. You say this all the time. What having constraints on our calendar does is it allows us to innovate with the time we do have.

We block off certain parts of the day for internal meetings. One of the things we’ve gotten clear about is that our company needs to have one full day of deep work time. No matter what else happens the rest of the week, we are meeting-free on Wednesdays. So, you get out of that meeting, and you don’t have to have another meeting about the meeting or what needs to come out of that meeting.

We’re really clear that at least for a six-hour day, now that we’re doing a six-hour workday as best as possible… Six hours just dedicated to head down, doing the things that actually move the ball forward…not just executives, but everyone inside the organization. I think it’s one of the secrets to our productivity, and what has allowed us since COVID to be able to go from an eight-hour workday to a six-hour workday is the Ideal Week.

When we talk to companies, and they feel like, “Our people are just burnt out…” We’re dealing with one of the largest companies here in Brentwood, Tennessee, in their finance department, and since COVID, they’re just like, “Man, we are burnt out. We want the double win for our people, but we are burnt out. You know, kids are at home. People are working until midnight. We’re responding. It’s not what we want.”

The problem became really clear: there are no boundaries. The Ideal Week creates those boundaries. That’s one tool that can really help them. I’m excited. September 30 is when we get to spend time with their team. They’ve invested in this. Why I’m so excited about it is because I know what’s on the other side of it for them. Hearing their CFO literally on the call tell me, “I do not want this for my team, and I think my team doesn’t see a way out…”

That was really sad for me to hear, and I know there are a lot of companies that feel that way right now in the midst of this, still trying to go after big goals but also value their people. I can tell you right now. One of the best tools is the Ideal Week. I know it has been that for us. That’s a real-life example (I wish I could say the name, but I can’t) that we just had this conversation this week because it’s so, so powerful.

Megan: Chad, this is a tool that was originally designed for individual executives. What we’ve done is, over the years, we’ve adapted that original idea we had and have created a solution for teams to synchronize their most important work. Like you said, often we’re vying for time on the calendar. It feels impossible. But also, we don’t have enough time to do the work we need to do that we know drives results.

So, what we’ve done is we’ve said, “Okay. What are all of the different kinds of work we do?” We have team meetings. We have one-on-one meetings. We have internal meetings, external meetings. Then we have this need for something that almost never ends up on anybody’s calendar, which is deep work, an idea that’s popularized by Cal Newport, this idea that when you’re doing highly creative, innovative work in whatever context that is…

It’s very beneficial when you get into that kind of work that you don’t pop in and out. You’re not answering emails and then writing a vision for something or going to a financial meeting and then coming back and trying to create vision or create a new product or something. You really have to stay in that creative head space to make the kind of progress you need. What we’ve realized is that has to show up on our calendar.

If you can create the opportunity for your entire leadership team and, eventually, your entire team to have a synchronized, time-blocked calendar every week, then what happens is there is… First of all, it’s way easier to get those meetings in a timely fashion, which is really important when you’re trying to drive goals. Maybe you’re just one meeting away from the breakthrough you need on a big goal you’re pursuing. It’s also important to have that time for your executives and senior leaders to focus on the projects that are their contribution toward the goal. You have to make space for that. That’s where this Ideal Week tool, especially done in a team setting, is really powerful, as you said.

Chad: Absolutely. The word you hit on there that’s so powerful with the Ideal Week is the synchronization of work. Developing this allows that synchronization of work. So, let’s jump to the fourth problem, which I think is the problem that attacks synchronization of work the most, which is the tyranny of the urgent, those constant interruptions. I know this is one of those… When we talk about the Ideal Week, it’s like, “Oh yeah. That would be great, but you don’t understand. It’s just interruption after interruption after interruption.”

So, share with me a little bit about what we do to try to combat this tyranny of the urgent, the constant interruptions, and even why we called it the Ideal Week…because it’s ideal. It’s not going to happen all the time, because there are going to be five-alarm fires that happen that, as a CEO, you’re going to have to step in, and it might blow up your day, but if you have an Ideal Week, why that can be really powerful.

Megan: You’re able to go from “Okay. Here’s this fire I had to put out… But I can always bounce back to the ideal.” It’s kind of like… I try to be really intentional about my nutrition. Every day I plan my food. Every now and then, I might have a day where I have to go get a kid early from school or some emergency pops up at work, and what I planned to eat I can’t eat, and I’m eating at Chick-fil-A. Not that we don’t love Chick-fil-A. We do. It just might not be the healthiest choice all the time. Right?

What’s great is that when I have an intention and a plan around my eating… Maybe it’s Chick-fil-A today, but tomorrow it’s going to be a salad with grilled chicken, which I guess you could also get at Chick-fil-A. But I can revert back to my bigger picture. Well, that’s kind of like the Ideal Week. When we think about this, it really takes me back to the Full Focus System. This is the system that powers two things for us. It powers our Full Focus Planner, but it also powers our Full Focus Enterprise system, which is basically the application of that system for the Full Focus Planner in an organizational context.

There are three components of that. There’s vision, there’s alignment, and there’s execution. So often, we get frustrated that people are not executing on their goals when, really, they have a bigger upstream problem. It’s really not a performance issue. What they have is some issue with alignment or some issue with vision. We’ve already talked a little bit about vision. I think where this comes down to is alignment. Your company has a set of annual goals, and you’re pursuing those. You’re after them right now in this fourth quarter.

Well, what we need is for there to be alignment between those goals and the weekly objectives your teams and your leaders are pursuing and their daily tasks. If we can draw a through line in this last quarter between the daily tasks and the weekly objectives and the goals you’re pursuing this quarter, your team is going to win big. The problem is there’s usually a huge disconnect between what we’re working on on a daily basis…

You know, whatever fires come up or whatever priority someone else sets, or whatever, that is what we’re working on, and there’s not a through line back to the goal. What we need is a process, what we call the Weekly Big 3 and Daily Big 3 in our Full Focus System, where you’re identifying, “If I can only get three high-leverage objectives accomplished this week that are nonnegotiable…like, no matter what, these are going to happen…what are they?” They should be relating back to those goals you’re focused on this quarter.

Then for the day (today is a Friday), “What are the three tasks I’m committed to accomplishing that are going to help me accomplish those weekly objectives?” If I can do that, and if you, as the CEO, can help provide a process for your leaders to identify those things, their performance, their execution, is going to go through the roof by focusing on aligning their daily tasks and their weekly objectives back to the quarterly goals.

Chad: Absolutely. One of the things I’ve seen by us adopting this practice in sharing our Weekly and Daily Big 3…not just keeping it in the planner but actually sharing it with our team, whether it’s in Slack or Voxer…is that it gives everyone visibility into what you have identified as the most important things you have to get done that day or that week.

What it has helped my team realize is that the thing they think is an important fire at that moment… It actually gives them a filter to say, “Hey, actually, it’s not as important as Chad getting accomplished one of his Big 3 today or for the week.” All of a sudden, they become a problem solver for their own problem, and they don’t feel like it’s just coming to the leader, who in a larger organization is a fire extinguisher…

You hear all the time, “As a leader, literally, I’m a professional fire extinguisher.” Working in the corporate environment, that’s what we talk about. “Literally, this week, that’s what I did.” But that’s not going to help you get to and achieve the goals you want. What’s beautiful about this… What I’ve seen in our culture and our company is it has diversified responsibility, and it causes people to think before they interrupt people upstream or downstream, because they know it’s interrupting their Daily and Weekly Big 3.

What’s important to be able to do this and adopt this as a team or a company is there really does have to be a reckoning with this becoming a priority. Part of that is alignment. This is something we’re always challenged by when we come in and coach a leadership team through this, because it’s really easy to say, “Hey, just identify three big things weekly and daily,” but there’s so much psychology around it. There’s nuance. There are these limiting beliefs people have that just won’t happen.

You have to have this kind of reckoning conversation with the leadership team to say, “Hey, we’re going to make a stand for this.” By having someone come in and share what is possible when you can get on board with this… That’s where it can really be unlocked and leads to the fifth problem we want to talk about, which is maintaining alignment and making progress week after week. The tyranny of the urgent… That’s tackling the day to day, but how do we think about this on a weekly context as a leadership team and what we’re accomplishing?

The tool we would talk about or the solution that is in the Full Focus System that you just teased out is the Weekly Preview. I’ll be honest. The first two years I used the planner… I was part of the original construct of the planner. I didn’t use the Weekly Preview for two years, and I was an idiot for doing that. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that, so, I’m sorry. It unlocked something for my leadership and my ability when I started doing it. I know you’re the adamant user of the planner, but also the Weekly Preview, because it does something for you and your leadership that is powerful. So, I’d love to have you share that with the listeners.

Megan: Well, first of all, I taught a whole class on this this morning, and I got fired up all over again about the Weekly Preview, because I love this tool so much. If you have a short list of things… And that’s really what we’re talking about today: levers you can pull to drive performance in the fourth quarter for your leaders. How are you going to make a pathway to your most important goals?

Getting yourself and your leadership team to complete a Weekly Preview every week is one of the most powerful tools you can use. Why? Because otherwise, we are in firefighting mode. This is a process by which we do a couple of things. First, we catalogue the wins we’ve had in the previous week. This may sound like, “Oh, yeah. I could just dismiss that.” No, you can’t. Not if you’re serious about performance. One of the most important components of top performance is confidence, and confidence comes from remembering the wins you’ve had.

Chad, this happens to me every week. I get to my Weekly Preview, which I’ll do this afternoon, and I guarantee you there are great things that happened that I was a part of accomplishing that I have forgotten now that it’s Friday as we’re recording this. I forgot what happened Monday or Tuesday. I barely remember what happened yesterday. I have a full life and a bunch of kids. You know what? I need to remember what I’ve accomplished so I can feel confident about what needs to be accomplished in the coming week. So, I need to be intentionally cultivating my own confidence. That’s one part of it.

Second of all, I need to be analyzing my performance, and that is the After-Action Review component of the Weekly Preview process. I need to be making sure I’m clear on “How is this working?” How am I making progress toward my Weekly Big 3 objectives that we talked about a minute ago? If there are things that are getting in the way, I need to know about those, because those are early warning signs that I’m going to have trouble accomplishing my goals.

Remember, the goals you’re focused on for the quarter are being driven by your Weekly Big 3, which are being driven by your Daily Big 3 tasks. So, if you’re having a hard time accomplishing your Weekly Big 3, that’s a leading indicator that you may not accomplish your quarterly goals. Let’s resolve that on a weekly basis and not wait until we get to the end of the fourth quarter. Let’s get into it now.

Then I need to look at my week, what’s coming, so I don’t feel overwhelmed, I don’t feel anxious… You know, that whole Sunday night anxiety I used to have and, Chad, you can probably relate to, where you sort of have that dread and anxiety about “I don’t really know what’s coming, and I feel like I’m forgetting something. It’s going to be Monday, and I can’t sleep.” That thing. So, we’re going to look at the calendar and get our head wrapped around that so it’s not overwhelming.

But the most important part of the Weekly Preview ends in identifying, as we’ve reviewed our goals we’re focused on for the quarter, “What are my Weekly Big 3?” I have to be very clear on my Weekly Big 3 objectives that I have to accomplish this week no matter what. Then also, what is the self-care plan that’s going to support my performance? This is not warm and fuzzy. This is not like “Go get a massage” unless that drives your performance. It’s not about that. It’s really about “What do I need, when I think about myself holistically, to perform at my best?”

That unlocks a whole level of performance that most people don’t think a lot about, but it is an absolute edge you can get. There’s a lot of research about that. So, when you, as the CEO, start doing this practice yourself but also give your leaders the space to do this and really ask them to step up and do this, what you’re going to find is they’re more focused, they’re making progress on the things that matter, they’re not overwhelmed, and they’re confident. That’s exactly what you need to accomplish your goals in the fourth quarter.

Chad: Absolutely. One of the things I love hearing you talk about there is that through line between this Weekly Preview (which, you know, for two years I didn’t do) and performance. I can tell you, since I’ve started using it, my performance has gone to a whole other level. I heard someone say early on in my career the most successful people spend time thinking about their thinking. Really, what this tool does is it automates that process on a weekly basis.

It automates your leaders spending time thinking about their thinking. “What caused these results to happen?” It gives them the ability to take ownership of those things. “What worked? What didn’t work?” Ultimately, as a leader… You put me in this role. If the results aren’t there this week, I have to change that next week. I have to put that on myself. That’s not something you need to be doing weekly with me. That’s something I need to be reckoning weekly with myself and we, as leaders, should be doing.

If you’re listening to this and you’re challenged by some of this and you feel like, “Yes, our team is struggling with this” or “I’d love more clarity on this,” we have a team standing by of business consultants who talk thousands of businesses every year through this stuff…the challenges you have, the things that are keeping you from achieving these goals and results that you really want to. When you come to January, you can look back, and “Man, 2021 was a banging year.”

I want to offer up our team to you. If you go to leadto.win/call, you can book a 45-minute coaching call. We call them discovery calls. We really do just want to dig into your business and help you identify… Really, the heart of our team is to make sure you’re leveraging the tools and resources our team has developed for the maximum performance inside your organization.

There are many different ways we can do that based on where you’re at, but I would just love for you… If you’re listening to this and some of this rings a chord with you, just go to leadto.win/call, and there will be a form there you can fill out so our team gets more information prior to that call. Megan, any final thoughts? I’ve always wanted to ask you that question on the podcast.

Megan: That’s so funny.

Chad: So, I had to beat you to it.

Megan: Okay. Well, yeah. First of all, there is enough time left on the clock to accomplish the things you set out to do at the beginning of the year. Even if you haven’t made the progress in your business that you hoped for… Like all of us, I’m sure, you’ve hit some roadblocks. There have been a lot of unexpected obstacles and challenges that have come along the way this year, just like there were last year. This has been a wild time. Yet you, as the business owner, as the CEO, as the senior leader in your company… It’s not too late to drive massive results by empowering your leaders. I mean, there are things you can do.

Maybe your most important job is to leverage, to call out, to develop the greatest contribution in your leadership team. I’m telling you, these tools we’ve talked about today are tried and true. They are battle tested, and they deliver big results. So, I hope this is encouraging to you. I hope you’re excited, and I really hope you’ll book this coaching call with our business consultants, because if you feel excited and encouraged now, on the other side of that call, there is going to be a very clear path for you to achieving extraordinary results this year.

Well, Chad, thanks so much for joining me today. May this be the first of many guest appearances on the podcast with you.

Chad: Absolutely my pleasure. I would love to come back. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to finally have an opportunity to speak to the Lead to Win audience. It has been such a blessing to me, so it feels totally weird to be in this seat having a chance to share back with the audience. So, thank you.

Megan: Guys, thank you for joining Chad and me today. It has been a pleasure to be with you. Until next week, lead to win.