MONTHLY REVIEWS: Are You Busy or Productive? Efficient or Effective?

Fall and winter can feel like one of our busiest times of year with school, activities, holidays, family gatherings, and the new year approaching.

As we gear up for this season and close out another month, it’s a great time for us to pause and reflect about what we’re doing and how we’re spending our time. 

Anyone who’s ever played sports or supported a child in athletics knows it’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect. 

Our repeated actions—whether positive or negative—are amplified over time. Working extremely hard at the wrong things can cause us to be incredibly busy, but not productive in our attempts to achieve our desired goals. Driving fast can make us efficient, but driving fast down the wrong road simply leaves us further away from our destination, faster, and ultimately ineffective in our pursuits. 

As leaders, our role is to help steer the hard work and efforts of our team toward the goals that matter most.

To amplify the impact of our Leadership Development clients, we’ve created a simplified leadership model, identifying four areas that will help these busy leaders be the most effective in their work: instilling personal and team resilience, increasing employee engagement, improving the patient experience, and inspiring operational innovation.

Within this model, building our personal resilience to fuel our work as leaders; building up our teams to help them stay active, engaged, and able to serve; improving the patient experience to deliver exceptional care; and innovating our systems and processes to continually improve our work become our guideposts and our filter on everything we do to help ensure we’re not just doing things right, but we’re doing the right things. 

When the to-do list feels long and you feel hurried and in a rush, it’s hard to pause and make room for your “10% Secret” time—thinking it will slow you down and decrease your efficiency. However, taking your time to plan, to strategize, and to visualize the next month ahead allows you to cast a powerful vision for you and your team, align your work, and make you incredibly effective as a group.

The alignment you’ll gain by setting your priorities around your core focus areas and the clear direction you’ll be able to give your team will help every effort be multiplied—in all the right ways. All of the work you do as a team will be amplified toward the greater good and will help fuel your mission.

Getting Back on Track with a Monthly Review

To ensure you’re working effectively and staying on track with what matters most, we recommend a regular cadence of monthly reviews.

Each month, our goal is to spend 2 hours of our 10% Secret time reviewing everything we’ve accomplished, setting plans and goals for the month ahead, and mapping out our big projects.

Though it may seem impossible to carve out that much time each month, you’ll find these intentional moments invested at the close of each month allow you to take back your time and regain your sense of control.

The best time to complete these reviews is at the start of each monthly planning session while the details of your key initiatives and projects are still fresh.

When you get into a rhythm with monthly reviews, you’ll gain more traction on your goals and stay more on track because you can see how far you’ve come and recalibrate your plans along the way when needed.

How to Conduct Your Monthly Review

To get started with your monthly review, be sure you’ve found quiet, uninterrupted time—silencing notifications on your phone and email and giving yourself the freedom to really dig in.

You’ll also want your planner and possibly your Outlook calendar open to help you remember what’s happened this month, as well as some extra scratch paper, pens, and markers if you’d like to get a bit more creative.

Throughout the review process, you’ll want to make note of how things went both personally and professionally, where you had to stretch your skills to reach the next level of success, which relationships and partnerships energized you most along the way, and where you’ll need the most support in this next season.

We recommend working through your monthly review in four sections:

1. Celebration:

As busy leaders, we don’t take nearly enough time to celebrate what’s gone well or to acknowledge all of the hard work and effort we’ve been putting in to growing our skills and becoming our very best.

In moments of great accomplishment, we can be too quick to jump to the next to-do, staying caught up in the flurry, and never appreciating how much we’ve done to make it to this point. 

These monthly reviews allow us a moment of pause for a slow victory lap to look back on everything we’ve done and who we’ve become in the process.

Some questions to consider:

• What are all of the key projects you completed during this time? Were these above and beyond your regularly assigned responsibilities? What was your favorite element to each of these projects? Did you learn more about the type of work you love to do? 
  
  
• Where did you grow as a leader during this past month? What skills have you been practicing? Were you always successful in implementing new habits or are you still learning how to lead in these areas?
  
  
• What is the one thing you’ll take with you into this next season? What key skill, practice, or behavior will you be sure to keep as an essential part of your work and leadership going forward?

When we’re caught up in the daily grind, it’s all too easy to lose sight of how much we’ve grown because we’re too close to our progress and the changes and growth can seem so small day to day.

Having everything in writing and looking back at the end of each month, quarter, or year may surprise you and, over time, you may come to realize you grew more and were more productive than you remembered.

BONUS: Keeping track of these accomplishments and wins while they’re happening also proves useful when you need to look back and prepare for your annual review. When you can clearly articulate how you’re contributing, you’ll help your leader recognize your value and importance to the organization and leadership team.

Create a system to save any positive feedback, meaningful patient reviews, and helpful data on hand as well. These will add additional depth to your stories and can be a great source of inspiration and encouragement on your more difficult days.

Don’t forget to celebrate your team as well! After you’ve reviewed your personal accomplishments, be sure to look back on everything your team and direct reports have accomplished, too.

Note how each team member has grown, which challenges you saw them overcome, and be sure to recognize their accomplishments in your next department meeting or one-on-one. Your team will be lit up and fueled by your acknowledgement and be even more motivated to chase the next big goal.

2. Anticipation:

Now that you’ve worked through what was great about the past month, keep the momentum going and outline everything that you’ll want to carry forward to the next month.

If your team is working through an ongoing initiative, make a note on upcoming milestones and deadlines, list out projects that are still in progress, and note the project owner and who’s ultimately responsible for the project’s success.

Four Focus Projects: Increase your effectiveness by ensuring your upcoming initiatives fit within each of the Four Focuses of a Leader: instilling personal resilience, increasing employee engagement, improving the patient experience, and inspiring operational innovation.

3. Vision:

Now comes the fun part! In this stage of your monthly review and planning session, you get to be a bit more innovative and dream up what you’d like to see happen in the month to come.

Get creative with space to brainstorm, scribble your to-do list, set aspirational goals, draw a mind map, or outline key projects for the month.

Put on some inspirational music and give yourself some time ask big questions and ponder what could be. Really let your mind wander and dream.

Then, gather your thoughts and begin to refine your planning. Note how you’ll make a contribution in each of the Four Focuses of a Leader. Also, be sure to prepare in advance for any challenges that may come and make a gameplan now for how you’ll overcome any potential obstacles.

4. Decision:

Finally, you’ll want to bring everything together and schedule your projects and to-dos to make them real.

In this stage you’re bringing all of your big ideas back down to reality:

• How exactly will you start moving toward achieving your audacious goals?
• What small actions will you need to take each week to move your projects and initiatives forward?
• How will you make progress in each of the Four Focuses of a Leader?
• Which week will you focus on each project?

Make your plans concrete by mapping out your key priorities for each week. Plan ahead for all work, vacations, and events. Look back at your annual and quarterly plans and carry forward any final tasks or initiatives that still need addressed.

Then, with your projects mapped for each week, schedule any meetings or check-ins that will be necessary to help you stay on track.

Strong Habits and Steady Progress

Implementing this monthly review and planning process consistently will help you ensure you are gaining traction on your most important goals and growing and improving as a leader along the way.

Carving out time to regain perspective and create an intentional plan will also help you avoid firefighting and getting lost in the urgent at the expense of what’s most important.

Also, keep your monthly planning notes on hand as you work through your quarterly and yearly reviews to capture any notable patterns and track your trajectory.

When you’re ready to get your whole leadership team aligned and leading more strategically, give our team a call. We’d love support you in launching Leadership Development initiative at your health system and help all of your leaders become more effective and take back their time.