The downtime of summer provides organizational leaders with the perfect opportunity to assess where their organization is in terms of achieving its goals.
Here are our hacks for reviewing your organization's progress and performance:
Review the goals from your plan. Mid-year is the perfect time to dust off your business plan and metrics and spend time evaluating your progress. A discussion of your metrics and goals will identify areas that need attention and improvement. This may require some prioritization. For a mid-year review, only the most pressing areas should get your attention.
Focus on what is working. This is a mid-year review, so one approach is to focus on what is working. Obviously, if there are significant challenges, those need to be addressed. However my experience has shown that you will see real successes during your review and a good path forward for the rest of the year is to focus on figuring out how to leverage or extend areas, activities, etc., that are already generating the results you want.
Take the temperature of your staff. Summer is great time to check in with your employees and have a discussion about their progress on their goals and their performance. For you as the leader, doing this provides an opportunity to discuss any roadblocks that are preventing your team from achieving goals and help them develop a plan for making adjustments.
Check in with key partners and funders. Mid-year is also the perfect time to meet with key partners and funders. Your goal is to confirm the value each party is bringing to the table. Be honest about your expectations for each partnership and whether or not they are being realized. Better to discover a disconnect now and address it, then get to the end of the year and have these relationships end badly.
Look outside your organization. It’s not necessary to do a comprehensive environmental scan. The goal here is to evaluate whether or not there are external factors that need to be discussed. Focus your external scan to relate to issues you are already addressing or the areas of strength where you plan double down.
