Quarterly Calibrations

So when we talk about quarterly calibrations, or if you've been with us for a while, we used to call these quarterly conversations. I like, like the term calibrations better, and this is something that we pivoted to in 2024. But the, the format and, and the agenda and kind of the, the objectives of the quarterly calibrations is well laid out in the field guide. So I'm not going to repeat that here, encourage you to, to read that. The things that I tend to find happen in a lot of the organizations that we've worked with here at next level growth is this is something that takes a while to really get pushed out into the organization. And it's often because each of the individual team leads are left to be the one person accountable for their team to make sure they get done. So a good way to overcome that is whoever in the organization kind of leads your HR or your people function, whether you have an HR generalist or if you have a chief people officer or a VP of People and culture, whatever role you may have, that should be the person who ultimately is kind of the conduit for and the accountability partner for these quarterly calibrations. And so if, for example, if you have a. A people team and the person leading that people team has a most critical outcome that is something like percent right people, right seats to goal, then one of the key drivers of their ability to help us reach our goal for right people, right seats is that everybody in the organization is having a quarterly calibration with the person they report to, that all of that information is being captured and shared and communicated on so that we know who are the A players, B players, and C players. Who are we coaching up, who are we coaching out? Who do we need to be recruiting a replacement for? And we're really getting our arms around all the people issues. So I almost look at that HR person as like a compliance officer to ensure that they're happening. So you can create a rock every quarter, you can create action items, any sort of thing you want to do to create clear accountability for that person in the HR role or in the people role, to make sure everyone else is doing what they're supposed to be doing, setting schedules for their quarterly calibrations, turning in the data. And one of the great things I've seen a number of clients do is that person will then put together a presentation once all of the quarterly calibrations are done every quarter, and they'll actually present that to the leadership team to go over kind of department by department within the organization, what the teams look like in terms of the composition of A Bs and Cs. And for anyone that needs to be on a coaching plan, they're working with that team lead to ensure the coaching plans are happening. Supporting people as much as possible in that coaching process, but also creating some accountability that when the coaching process doesn't work because maybe someone's just not coachable, they're being resistant to change. Whatever the case may be, this creates some. Some dual accountability to make sure that we're addressing those people issues. The reason Great People is at the top of our model and the first thing we talk about in the five obsessions of elite organizations is because without Great People, everything else is more difficult to achieve. And so we really want to start with people and getting our people right and having clear core values with clear explanations of the behaviors that are associated with them, having a clear accountability chart that sets expectations for performance, and then having a system of these quarterly calibrations to keep tuning people in and making sure they're performing at a high level and smoking out where the issues are so that we can address them and deal with them and upgrade positions where we need to that will take you so far in building out an organization filled with great people so that everything else starts to come together much easier.