The restaurant business is a fast-moving, dynamic business that has hundreds of moving parts, many that are predictable but just as many that are unexpected. Successfully leading in an industry with high uncertainty requires sound understanding of your current business conditions so you can PLAN for future conditions more accurately, adapt and thus succeed and grow.
If I were to ask you and your leadership team today to name your company’s top three priorities or goals at this moment, would the answers be the same? Maybe not.
Leadership alignment is crucial, and the act of simply writing down those goals as part of a plan has shown a more than 40% likelihood of achieving the goals. According to Harvard Business Review, “organizations with highly aligned team members are more than twice as likely to be top performers.”
Plans are not perfect and there needs to be flexibility, but they work and are essential to having a healthy, successful company and – I believe – a healthy, well-balanced life as well. As Winston Churchill famously said, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”
Planning for your future and articulating what success looks like is important, but having a time management system to keep up with all this information is also essential and enables you to take action on that plan, accomplish your goals and lead your team to success. If you just write a plan but don’t have a companywide time management system to discuss it, act on it, report on it and be self-accountable to it, little will come to fruition.
First let’s look at the building blocks to a successful annual plan:
OBJECTIVES are significant, specific, action-oriented goals of the company. They need to be defined enough to know when they are accomplished. What’s the most important things you need to get done? What do you need to start doing or change? (Example: Increase sales by 15%.)
Decision makers should discuss, refine and align on only three to five top objectives to move the company forward. This number really depends on the size and bandwidth of the team doing all the work. It’s important to write a plan that can be accomplished to at least an 80% level or you and your team will feel like you’re failing and become discouraged.
Depending on the size of your company and the number of people involved, and their availability, there could be a daylong session or multiple two- or three-hour meetings over a number of weeks or even months for the decisionmakers to brainstorm, discuss and bring ideas to the table that are thought to be the most important in driving the success of your company over the upcoming year. The vetting and ultimate alignment on these objectives is one of the most critical steps to having a successful plan.
STRATEGIES are bigger picture milestones that, when executed together, will capture progress and accomplish the objective. Each strategy must be written as a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time based.
At the end of the process, the team can look at a strategy and clearly determine if it was accomplished or not. (Example: Enhance the dining experience therefore guest satisfaction, resulting in an increase of our average shopper report scores to 95 by the end of Q3.)
ACTIONS are specific efforts that work together to drive the strategy towards its defined goal over the allocated time. By breaking down what needs to be done into more achievable, incremental steps, the actions can then be assigned to individuals across the team. (Example: Improve service quality: Rewrite and clarify our service standards. Enhance our FOH new-hire training protocol to deliver exceptional customer service. Improve our ongoing server training through better-planned pre-shift meetings. Implement regular performance evaluations and provide feedback to staff members.)
INDIVIDUAL PRIORITIES are the step-by-step work that an individual team member needs to execute to accomplish the action that was assigned to them. This is where the power of the team comes into play. The team is aligned on the original objective, strategies and actions so they are all in the same boat, rowing towards that objective. Because this has been created by them or minimally communicated to all of them, they are now accountable to one another to do their part to move the business forward.
Now that the building blocks of how to accomplish an annual plan have been laid out, this leads me to the necessary time management system previously mentioned. The concept of writing a plan and having major objectives with strategies and action plans is not the only work necessary to operate your business.
Annual plans are intended to make big leaps or changes to drive your company forward. Because there is so much more to do, there should be a time management system in place for all team members to keep up with the three Key Areas of Productivity: The individual priorities that were assigned from the action plans, personal development goals and all their ongoing day-to-day tasks that need to be done related to their areas of responsibility. It’s also a place to take notes and get things off their mind so that they may go about their day-to-day business with a clear head.
The time-management system could be as simple as a single piece of paper where all this information is organized and the status is literally updated with checkmarks, or it could be something as complex as project management software. Regardless of format or complexity, it should be created, taught and used across your company from top leadership all the way down to the management-level team members. This time-management tool should be used as the basis for your regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings and should be updated and refreshed monthly.
Personal time-management tools can be very difficult to implement because they take discipline and require establishing new habits that will most likely take many months of practice. Having a common language and a common communication tool to keep up with one’s work across an entire organization forms a level of trust as well as mental freedom for everyone involved. Research studies show over and over that clearly documented and shared goals and expectations build employee engagement by creating alignment, clarity and job satisfaction.
Like all things that have big upside, it’s hard work and takes time. But once this habit is formed, you will wonder how you ever worked and lived without the power of planning.