The Key to Ensuring All Departments Stay Accountable (And How to Structure a Quarterly Review)

You want to keep all departments in your company accountable to your overall goals and mission. Find out how you can do just that.

Your company has goals and a mission.

It also has people who need to stay aligned to the goals and mission to make them a reality. Because if your people lose their focus, they’ll stray away from doing what you need them to do to keep your business on track.

In short, you need to know how to hold your departments accountable.

And in this article, you’ll discover the system you can use to make that happen. 

Then, you’ll learn how to structure the quarterly reviews that are part of that system so you can get the best possible results out of them.

Reviews Are the Key to Accountability

Accountability starts with meeting cadence. 

If you’re not making time to speak to the heads of your department regularly, you’re creating an environment where it’s easy to lose focus.

That said, we recommend holding meetings at least once every year. And these meetings must be one or two-day sessions where you revisit the organization’s objectives and long-term vision.

With those two things established, you then break the insights from the meeting down into quarterly objectives, which will form the basis of the reviews we talk about later.

Setting Quarterly Objectives

So, you now know that you need to set some goals for your people to keep them accountable. The question is…

How do you do that?

We can take a leaf out of Verne Harnish’s book and create SMART goals.

As you know, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. These are the five core principles of setting up critical drivers and attainable goals for every individual inside your business.

So, a SMART goal has to be specific enough for there to be no confusion surrounding what the person needs to do. It has to be something that you can measure and be realistic enough that the individual can attain the goal. Finally, the timely element comes in the shape of a deadline or period in which the individual must complete the goal.

Your goal here is to quantify the organization’s objectives so you can measure the progress towards them regularly.

Keeping Track of the Goals

Meeting cadence comes into play again when tracking the quarterly goals you create. And this is where Monday morning meetings come into play.

Here’s how it works:

Every Monday, gather the department members together to discuss the goals. If somebody isn’t reaching the goals set for them, you use these meetings to address the issue.

Ask about what’s holding them back from hitting their targets. It may be something outside of their control. Or, it may be something that they can control and that you can help them with. The point is that you get the issue out into the open so you can work together to overcome it.

While we call these Monday morning meetings, your actual meeting cadence may vary depending on the goal’s nature. 

If it’s a short-term goal, you may hold meetings daily to keep your people accountable. But if it’s something that contributes to a much longer-term goal, you may be able to hold the meetings monthly.

Whatever the case may be, you must establish a regular cadence so your people know that these accountability meetings are coming.

Structuring Quarterly Reviews

Beyond these general meetings, you will also use quarterly reviews as part of your meeting cadence. 

Every three months, block off a day in your calendar specifically for a meeting. Invite every member of your leadership team to the meeting and make it clear that you will focus solely on the organization’s goals and mission.

With the time scheduled, focus on how you’ll structure the review using four elements.

Element No. 1 – Look Back

Kick-off your quarterly review by looking back at what happened last quarter. 

What did your financial results look like? Were clients happy with the results they got? Did your clients accomplish what they set out to do with your help? 

Examine retention rates and any other metric that indicate how well or poorly your organization did during the last quarter.

Element No. 2 – Review the Annual Plan

With the information about the previous quarter established, switch your focus to the company’s annual plan.

Start a conversation about the organization’s overall performance. What’s happening with the company’s culture? Has it shifted? Or, has anything occurred that may cause you to revisit the objectives in the annual plan?

More importantly, is the annual plan still relevant?

Invite your leadership team to express any feedback or misgivings they have. In many cases, your quarterly results will reveal new areas of focus to build into your annual plan.

Element No. 3 – Provide Feedback

After reviewing the annual plan, hone in on each leader in your team. Talk to them about what they’re doing and how their performance impacts the organization’s objectives. 

These conversations are your chance to help your leaders stay aligned. If somebody has started to stray off-course, use these feedback sessions to bring them back on track.

Element No. 4 – Benchmark Long-Term Goals

Wrap the review up by benchmarking your long-term goals. 

Now, you may have altered elements of your annual review based on what your quarterly review shows you. Use this part of the session to integrate any changes to the long-term vision before reinforcing what that vision is.

Your Meeting Cadence Is Critical

Setting goals for your organization is just the start of a long process. To maintain accountability to those goals, you need to create a meeting cadence that allows consistent revisiting and evaluation.

To start with, your annual reviews focus on the company’s long-term strategy. They allow you to define your mission and objectives and figure out how the company’s work feeds into both of those things.

Quarterly reviews allow you to gather information and figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Know that sometimes, the realities of how your business operates will cause you to reconsider your mission and values.

Finally, Monday Morning Meetings help you track the SMART goals you set for each individual in your company’s departments. Use these meetings to keep track of the short-term work that feeds into your wider goals.

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