We all have one big, headline line that we want to see move up and to the right—that could be revenues or profits, funds raised or grant dollars dispersed, or number of people reached through our programs.
Underneath this are the gears of our enterprise, the everyday of what we put in to get that output.
Three conversations you can have, either alone with your notebook or with your team.
- This leads to that: What are the most important things we do to make the numbers we want to go up go up?
- We do a lot of this, but it doesn’t create that: What are the things we spend a lot of time doing that we could strip away without impacting the results that really matter for us.
- These things create short-term results, but might hurt us in the long run: What are the things that are going up today (stress, eroding trust or joy, command-and-control) that create results in the near term but risks in the long term?