Sometimes our post will arise from a skill we already have and want to share; sometimes it’s from a wish to learn something new so you can learn it too. Often, we’re inspired by talented bloggers who generously share their ideas and their uplifting spirits. We want to highlight a few of our favorites in this post — and what more appropriate time to show our gratitude than the week of Thanksgiving?

3 Blogs That Inspire Us

1. Speaking About Presenting: Lena and I presented a workshop at a conference last month. We started our rehearsal by checking out Olivia Mitchell’s great advice on effective presentations. (A “hat tip” to our colleague Joan Starr for introducing us to this blog). This is a rich resource of public speaking skills that new and experienced presenters can both utilize. We happily absorbed her confidence-building advice about How to Look Authoritative When You Feel Anything But.

2. Innovate on Purpose by Jeffrey Phillips is dedicated to ideas, conversations and approaches for sustainable, repeatable workplace innovation. His advice is eminently practical in its focus on creating a culture of innovation over the long term. We were particularly struck by his recent post explaining the importance of finding the right people to innovate and getting them into the right roles.

3. Pick the Brain is a blog about self-improvement — personal productivity, motivation, and self-education. A small team of experts provides advice that is great for the workplace but also works well in many facets of our lives. Lori Taylor’s recent advice about How To Stop Focusing On People & Focus On Issues (It’s Easy If You Do This) gave me a path forward in a sticky situation.

Now It’s Your Turn

What blogs do you follow (besides this one, of course)? Share your inspirations in the comment section below!

For more about what inspires us to blog and how we choose our topics, see our interview in University of California’s LINK newsletter.

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A post-mortem is generally conducted at the end of the entire project, but it is also useful at the end of each phase of a multi-phase project. The agile development method uses a brief post-mortem at the end of each short phase or “sprint” to improve the success of the next sprint.

An honest post-mortem takes a certain amount of trust among the project team members, so you’ll want to work throughout the project to ensure that people’s concerns are heard and they feel they are owners of the project success.

9 Steps for Holding a Successful Post-Mortem

1. Ensure the project post-mortem is listed as a task on your project plan. When you review the project plan with the team at the beginning of the project, explain the concept so everyone knows what to expect at the end.
2. Think about the outcomes of a successful post-mortem and work backwards to plan the meeting. Who should be invited? What are the “rules of engagement?” How will the results be used?
3. Develop a set of possible questions as a guideline. These questions might refer to different phases of the project or different topic areas such as communication, planning, vendor management, or user feedback. Reading these questions gives participants a structure to help them think through the issues they want to bring up, so no key project areas are missed. See these Project Post-Mortem Review Questions.
4. Engage a facilitator and a scribe if possible. Especially for a large project, this provides a neutral presence so that everyone is on equal footing and in the same role as a participant.
5. Invite the participants. Remind them of the purpose of the post-mortem and send the questions in advance. The goal is to make everyone feel comfortable, so provide enough information beforehand so participants know what to expect.
6. State the “rules of engagement” either in your invitation or at the outset of the meeting. The goal is to maintain trust throughout the exercise; you may want to change these guidelines based on how well the team has worked together throughout the project. Sample guidelines:

• We all understand that the goal is improving the next project, so we’ll try to be as honest as we can.
• Everyone gets a chance to talk and all perceptions are equally valuable.
• Respectful listening is key. This is not the place for rebuttal or push-back.
• We’ll start each discussion section with “what went well” before we analyze what we could do better next time.

7. Conduct the post-mortem. Make sure the room is comfortable and that participants won’t be disturbed. If possible, ask them not to multi-task or use laptops during the process, so everyone is equally engaged. Make sure you have flip charts and pens (or the high tech equivalent) to record key concepts.
8. Compile the report. It’s helpful to have a summary section where you discuss the process, share major findings, and list the lessons the team can apply to the next project. In the appendix, you can share the details. Be sure to send all the participants a draft of the report to make sure their ideas were heard. Once the report is final, store it in a place that is easily accessible to everyone.
9. Share the “lessons learned” with your organization. This kind of sharing helps all the project teams to do a better job — to learn from your successes and avoid some of your missteps.

“A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.” — Scott Allen

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Read more about conducting a successful post-mortem:

• Conducting Effective Post-Mortem Meetings (Part 1 of 2)
• Conducting Effective Post-Mortem Meetings (Part 2 of 2)
• Looking Back, Looking Ahead (The Project Retrospective)

2. Ensure you’ve included a post-mortem in your current project plan.

3. Go back to the notes from your last project. What were the lessons learned? What can you apply to your next project? This is particularly valuable for software upgrades, since the lessons from the last upgrade may be directly applicable to the next upgrade.

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This was an epiphany to me. Everyone on the team needs to understand the goal of the project in simple terms so they can care and be energized. Until this time, I had always insisted on stating clear goals for projects, but I hadn’t gone this extra step and distilled the goal to its essence for the benefit of the team.

A project objective statement should be:

• SMART (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, time-based)
• Short (25 words or less)
• Energizing (simple, easy to remember)

Here’s an example of a good project objective statement:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.“— President Kennedy, May 25, 1961

The goal (highlighted in bold text) is nineteen words. It’s memorable and audacious, and it inspired a nation.

On the other hand, here’s an example of a weak project objective statement:

“We will demonstrate the viability of the test system to produce increased outputs with minimal effort, thus reducing our dependency on the existing system.”

The goal is vague and overly complex. Are you inspired — or asleep? This is a bit of an exaggeration, but unfortunately many project goals read like this. The only thing this goal has going for it is it’s fewer than twenty-five words. Worse yet, it would likely be the preamble of a much lengthier and arcane goal statement.

Don’t let this happen to your project. Whether you are the project manager or a team member, insist on a brief energizing goal for your next project.

photo credit: NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

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Last week, Leslie outlined the basics on managing meetings in her post on How to Host an Effective Virtual Meeting. This week, we’ll narrow our focus to a few easy ways to capture what really matters in your meetings — critical decisions, actions, and next steps. If you absolutely need a literal record of who said what, consider doing a voice recording or video of your meeting. (Most conferencing software products offer recordings as an option at a small additional fee.)

Try one or more of these tips for your own note taking:

3 Tips for Taking Simple & Effective Notes at Meetings

1. Type the notes during the the meeting. It takes a little practice, but it’s much more efficient. Use a numbered agenda as the starting point and capture action items and brief notes under each numbered agenda item. The benefit is combining the agenda and notes in a single document (that’s one less document to keep track of), and best of all, your note-taking duties are done when the meeting’s done.
2. Keep the notes as brief as possible. Only capture what’s most critical. Too much typing can be distracting. Record decisions and actions. Avoid statements like “discussed [fill in the blank] topic.” This is not informative. Was a decision made? What action will be taken? What was the upshot of the discussion?
3. Save the meeting notes in a shared space like a wiki page or a shared document in Google Docs for easy access and editing.  In the past, you had to distribute the notes to meeting participants and then collate everyone’s changes. This was time-consuming and a poor use of everyone’s time. Today, you can have participants edit directly in a shared document (and one that will even show you the revision history.)

Example of An Agenda and Notes

This approach may sound simplistic, yet it’s effective and fast. With the time you save, you can devote your energy to making sure meeting participants know what they have agreed to do and what their deadlines are.  A simple way to do this is to create a table at the top of your meeting notes that pulls out this important information.  Here are the essentials to track:

• Who is responsible.
• What is the action.
• When is it due.
• It’s useful to have a general Notes column for brief comments or status updates.

Example of An Action Table

Your action table might look something like this:

Be sure to get your team’s agreement in advance before trying these methods. Find out how much context you are expected to record about decisions, actions, issue background, etc. For example, do you need a record of whose idea it was and what the alternative ideas were, or is it sufficient to simply record the final decision? Talk with your team and manager beforehand.

“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.” – James T. Kirk (12 Leadership Lessons From the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise)

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Briefly skim these articles:

How to Record Useful Meeting Minutes

4 Top Tips on How to Take Meeting Minutes

2. Read our previous post How to Embrace Innovation for why it’s good to share meeting notes on a screen during the meeting (see “Start with a Simple Innovation”).

What Method Works for You?

Do you have a favorite method for taking notes or tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear them. Send an email to us at yourlifeatwork@gmail.com or comment below.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

How to Manage a Virtual Meeting

1. Before the Meeting

• Send an agenda in advance. If it’s a lengthy meeting with many people attending, your agenda should also list the timing and outcomes (or objectives) for each agenda item. If you don’t know why you are holding this meeting — don’t hold it. It’s your job to make sure people don’t waste their time. Your advanced preparation shows respect to the participants and to the organization.
• Appoint a backup facilitator and review the agenda with them. Make sure they know the host code to your conference call or virtual meeting software, so they can run the meeting if you are absent.
• Practice with the technology. Most companies have a favored software for webinars, online demonstrations, and web-based meetings. Make sure you can navigate confidently and use the features you need for your meeting. And prepare some contingency plans, because invariably the technology will fail you at a key moment. Best advice: talk to an experienced web presenter in your office and learn their technique.

2. At the Beginning

• Be there early (in the room, on the phone, and online) so you can boot up and test — there’s nothing worse than watching and listening as someone fumbles with the technology; you can feel the energy dissipate before the meeting even starts.
• Greet each arrival as they “beep in” to a phone meeting by asking, “Hi, who just joined the call?”
• When everyone is assembled, introduce the attendees and their roles. Make sure everyone knows why they are at this meeting.

3. During the Meeting

• Begin the meeting on time, and don’t start over for late-comers. It is unfair to the people who make an effort to arrive on time, and it stops the meeting dead in its tracks. Add a note to the agenda that late-comers should wait for the facilitator to check for new attendees (perhaps at the 15-minute mark).
• Do not multi-task. You will quickly lose focus and lose control of the meeting. You already have a big job: watch the clock, take brief notes, and make sure the discussion is moving. Your goal is to help the group reach a specific objective or outcome they need to move forward, so keep your eye on the ball.
• Keep the pace lively. You don’t have the luxury of visual cues the way you might with an in-person meeting (cues like sighing, eye-rolling, doodling, dozing, etc.), so be sensitive to pacing and don’t let the air leak out of the meeting.
• If you are sharing your desktop as a presenter, avoid excessive scrolling, sudden rapid cursor movements or jumping too quickly between pages; it can be disorienting for viewers.
• Make sure everyone gets their say. Keep track of who is not participating and call on them periodically in a gentle way. You can ask: “How might this apply to your area?” or “What factors would contribute to making this work?” Virtual meetings can devolve into a conversation between the host and one participant. Try to get all participants to engage with each other, not you.
• If there are some attendees in the room and others on the phone or online, the remote attendees will invariably feel left out. Keep down the private jokes, side conversations, or facial expressions. Be sensitive to their isolation and explain any activity they can hear but can’t see.
• Don’t let the discussion drag on; gauge when you can move to the next topic by asking, “Do you have enough information to move the process forward, or do you need more time?” Enlist the attendees to help keep the meeting on track — it gets them to take ownership of meeting success. Ask, “Are we in the weeds? Can we take that offline (especially if it doesn’t involve the whole team)?”
• Recap at the end of the meeting. Make clear the next steps or due dates, and ensure people know what tasks they are responsible for.

4. After the Meeting

• Send out brief meeting notes and ask for corrections.
• Post the webinar online and send everyone the link.
• Follow up on the items people are responsible for.

Managing meetings isn’t easy and it’s not a science; you learn more every time you do it. One of the best ways is to watch a good facilitator perform. You can analyze what they do well, and copy their moves the next time you run a meeting.

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” — Thomas Sowell

Now It’s Your Turn

1. If you are a meeting participant, read and follow these Ten Ground Rules for being an Effective Virtual Meeting Participant.
2. Practice your facilitation skills by volunteering to run a small meeting, then asking for feedback.
3. Master your company’s virtual meeting software, such as ReadyTalk, Elluminate or WebEx. Try the online tutorials, then enlist a colleague to act as your audience and use the features so you can perform smoothly.
4. Read these previous posts on Envisioning Successful Outcomes and How Meetings Steal Your Productivity (and 6 Ways to Get it Back).

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1. You’ll save money. Rather than buying books, magazines, music, and movies, check them out of the library.  Make a list of all the publications you currently subscribe to and all the books you’ve purchased in the past year. How many of these things do you read more than once (be brutally honest)? Are these publications available at the library? You will be amazed at the breadth and depth of the library’s offerings. They even have ebooks for your Kindle or iPad (or another digital book reader), and audio books for people who listen while driving or who are vision-impaired.

2. You’ll save space. You can buy used books from your local Friends of the Public Library at their annual book sale, read them, and donate them back. Saves money and gives back to the community, plus it reduces clutter at your house.

3. You’ll finish what you start reading (and read more). Having a due date encourages you to finish reading the book more quickly. We have all had partially finished books languish on our nightstands for months (or even years). You will have an incentive to finish that book now — or admit that you are done with it and move on.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

Now, It’s Your Turn

Make your library experience even better:

1. Create an account on your library’s website so you can request items throughout the system and have them waiting for you at your neighborhood branch.  It’s so convenient, you’ll never set foot in the stacks again.

2. Subscribe to a newsletter like Wowbrary to alert you to the newest books, music, movies and other publications at your library, so you can request them quickly. Popular new items usually have a waiting list, so you’ll have a head start if you know about them early on.

3. Don’t forget about music. Vow to rediscover your love of music and check out CDs in your favorite genres.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

We’d like to share one easy tool for team participation and engagement. Whether you’re in a business, academic, or non-profit environment, you are facing a competitive environment where money and resources are scarce. This analysis tool can help you focus your attention on the specific success factors that are right for your team.

The tool is called a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Here’s what it means:

• Strengths are those positive internal attributes that strengthen your business or team. You can develop plans to capitalize on those strengths.
• Weaknesses are those negative internal attributes that are working against your success. You can shore up those weaknesses so they don’t stop your success.
• Opportunities are those external conditions that can have a positive effect on your goals. These opportunities can point you in the right direction.
• Threats are those external conditions that can have a negative effect on your goals. These threats will affect you less if you can identify and minimize them.

How long will it take? You can do a simple SWOT analysis easily in sixty minutes.

There are many different ways to conduct a SWOT analysis; a large corporation will do this very differently than a small non-profit. We’ve given you some valuable how-to information below in the Now It’s Your Turn section so you can choose your method.

A rigid technique is less important than a well-imagined result. The important outcome of a SWOT is your understanding of the particular strengths you can count on, the pitfalls you might be facing, and the outside forces that might seriously change the landscape going forward.

What Does a SWOT Analysis Look Like?

We thought it would be helpful to show you a sample SWOT analysis for a business you can easily visualize: a small independent bookstore in a university town. The store owner brought the team together to think about how the bookstore could survive during the continuing financial downturn. After an hour of brainstorming, this is the SWOT analysis they developed.

Who Benefits from a SWOT Analysis?

Everyone who participated got something valuable from the exercise. The owner got enough actionable information to guide his planning efforts over the next 2 years. Once he developed the strategic plan, he posted it on the back office wall so that everyone could see it. The team members understood for the first time the challenges the bookstore owner was facing. They felt more engaged in the store’s success, and started suggesting additional opportunities the owner might try to build his business.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Take a look at these websites to learn about SWOT analysis. We’ve provided general information as well as some examples of how it’s used in academia.

• How To Do a SWOT Analysis

• SWOT Analysis Resource Page from Idaho State University

• Strategic Planning Example from SUNY Plattsburgh

2. Try conducting a SWOT analysis. Don’t limit it to the workplace; you can just as easily provide valuable planning support to the board of your non-profit or to your child’s school. In fact, you can use it to plan your own career development!

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How can you make sure you do it right more often than not? Effective communication is one of the toughest skills to master, since our individual personalities vary so much. The key is to build a strong communication bridge with your manager so you can be mutually successful at sharing and managing the effects of important news.

7 Ways to Build a Communication Bridge with Your Manager

1. Set the groundwork: During a time where things are quiet and peaceful, discuss with your manager what types of news should be shared and how.  Ask them what they expect to receive from you, and how you should deliver it.  For instance, which things can wait for a regular check-in meeting and which things need to be shared immediately?

2. Never let your manager be surprised. Remember that your manager’s manager doesn’t want to be surprised either, so think strategically. Review possible scenarios and play them out.  For example, if there’s a major problem with a service, your manager might want to be informed the same day or within three hours or immediately. They might want to be texted, phoned, or called out of a meeting.

3. Give a bit of advance notice. Let your manager know you have something important to discuss and ask for a time to meet. Try to pick the time of day when your manager is at their best and not facing an imminent deadline.

4. Take the time you need. Allow enough time to frame the issue, discuss it, ask questions, and come up with a solution. Don’t let your anxiety stop you from getting the feedback and support you need. It helps to write down your main points and frame the discussion before you meet. Before you leave the meeting, be sure you know what the next steps are.

5. Don’t shy away from delivering bad news. Most of us are eager to share good news but more hesitant to share bad news, hoping we can resolve the problem quickly. If something is not going right, it’s better to share the bad news up front. Every manager would love to hear your news paired with a solution, but don’t be afraid to say you don’t have one and you need their assistance in crafting a solution.

6. Keep your tone calm and respectful. Your approach should be strategic and planned, not emotional and reactionary. Your demeanor will keep your manager calm as well.

7. If you are a manager: The most important thing you can do is to create a climate where your staff is comfortable communicating important news to you. Show them that you don’t “shoot the messenger” but instead welcome all news.

“The relationship with your boss is a partnership. It takes effort to built the relationship and nurture it. You have to communicate well, avoid confrontations and resolve differences in a positive way.” – Jane Boucher

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Make an appointment with your manager and work together on #1 and #2 above.

2. Read our related post on 3 Ways to Be More Effective in Giving and Receiving Feedback.

3. Look at a few of these articles to get more tips:

Top 7 Tips on Delivering Bad News

Tips for giving your boss bad news

How to deliver bad news to your boss

eHow’s How to deliver bad news to your boss

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

In a recent post we looked at ways to keep a focus on what’s important today. In this post, we explain how to use these Key Performance Indicators to keep a focus on what’s important long term.

What are Key Performance Indicators?

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are a small number of agreed-upon measurements that reflect your organization’s critical goals for success — a numerical snapshot. They are measurable, objective, and actionable. You may have heard the term “metrics” and wondered if it’s the same thing. Think of it this way: you have dozens of metrics that let you know that things are running fine on a daily basis. With KPI’s, you elevate a few of your most important metrics to become strategic touchstones for your team or service — Key Performance Indicators.

You might think KPI’s are only for managing a process or service, but you can measure anything your organization cares about: percentage of new ideas that are turned into innovations; number of software updates delivered on a timely basis; or revenue per patent.

Here are a few examples of KPI’s and some questions to show what we mean by actionable:

• Cost of service measures overall value: What is the cost of the service you are providing? A simple calculation is to total the cost of staffing and infrastructure, then divide that by the number of transactions. What is your cost per item, service or product? Does the cost match the value you are providing?
• Percentage of technical support tickets closed within a specific time measures timeliness: Are your new procedures allowing you to close tickets for your service more quickly than before? Will that reduce your cost of providing service?
• Percentage of satisfied users measures user satisfaction: Can you provide better FAQs to improve user satisfaction scores in the next quarter?

It’s important to make sure that your KPI’s are aligned with each other to avoid unintended consequences later. For instance, you may announce happily that your ticket closures are more efficient, so you are saving money on the service. Looking at the next quarter’s KPI’s, you then discover that you’ve angered your users by closing tickets without solving the real problem and therefore your satisfaction scores have plummeted.

7 Steps to Get Started with Key Performance Indicators

1. Ensure your team understands KPI’s. You’ll be an expert once you read the information linked below in “Now It’s Your Turn.”
2. Determine what indicators are important. What are those vital few indicators that tell you things are working as intended?
3. Assess which data elements can be collected easily. If it’s too difficult, you will lose interest and stop.
4. Express the KPI as a formula (e.g. cost/searches=cost per search) and make sure you calculate it the same way every time.
5. Create a simple “dashboard” — a place to track the data on your internal website or on a shared Excel document.
6. Discuss the results every month with your team and make changes to your KPI’s until you are satisfied they are correct.
7. Dig down to analyze the KPI’s for your planning efforts.

KPI’s are one measurement technique in your arsenal. They can be a quick and useful tool to let you diagnose strengths and weaknesses in your process, make strategic decisions, and ensure you are heading in the right direction. Don’t forget: the real value is in the discussion of results with your team, not the numbers themselves.

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” –
Albert Einstein

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Read these articles to learn more about KPIs:

• The basics of KPIs: Key Performance Indicators for Nonprofits: An Introduction (PDF)

• Advice on web KPI’s from Avinash Kaushik of the blog Occam’s Razor:

• Six Web Metrics/KPI’s to Die For

• Four Not Useful Web Analytics KPI Measurement Techniques

• Especially for Libraries: Library Key Performance Indicators from Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)

2. Look at what other institutions are doing: check out the KPI Library website and sign up for their free newsletter.

3. Begin to develop KPI’s within your group or service.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

In this third installment in our series on the power of visuals, we’ll dive deeper into using visuals specifically for strategic planning. The real challenge is not creating the infographic chart; it’s making sure your strategic plan has all the right elements to keep you focused.  First, let’s consider why a visual representation of your strategic plan is worth the effort.

Why Is A Visual Strategic Plan Good?

• Clarity. Creating a visual map of your strategic plan offers another way to ensure your plan makes sense. I was surprised by how many questions I had about Leslie’s and my blog marketing plan when I was translating it into a visual.  It’s better to clarify your plan sooner rather than later.
• Quick reference. Your chart is basically a cheat-sheet to your plan; it’s everything you need to know in one easy-to-print 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of standard letter-size paper.  Making it easy to print makes it more useful — you can pin it on your bulletin board or keep it in a project folder for quick reference.
• Easy to show relationships. A written strategic plan with hierarchical numbering can be daunting to read with its jumble of numbers, letters, and roman numerals. It’s often more difficult to show the various connections among the goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.

Leslie and I were impressed with Ben McConnell’s one-page strategic plan infographic on the Church of the Customer Blog. It inspired us to create a strategic plan infographic for Your Life@Work so we could try out this visualization technique (see below).  For simplicity’s sake, our chart has only one objective and one strategy for each goal.

Here’s how to build your own chart:

• First row: Goals. List your top goals for the period — no more than five goals and three is better — across the top of the page (e.g., “Attract more readers”).
• Second row: Objectives. Position your objectives under the first row to match them with the appropriate goal (“1% of readers comment”).
• Third row: Strategies. Detail the strategies you’ll use  to reach those objectives (“Encourage readers to comment”).
• Fourth row: Tactics. List your tactics to implement those strategies (“Publish our email address on our posts”).
• Draw arrows to connect everything (e.g., match objectives to their goal and strategies with their objectives).

Finally, don’t let your lack of Adobe Illustrator or other specialized design software stop you.  Many commonly-available software packages have easy-to-use drawing tools including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.  Moreover, a simple hand-drawn chart is just as effective — and it might even be more compelling.

Goals vs. Objectives and Strategies vs. Tactics – What’s The Difference?

You may have noticed that our marketing plan chart (above) has goals at the top while the Church of the Customer example has objectives at the top. Your plan will not implode if you call a goal an objective or vice versa. The important point is to have a desired outcome that you are seeking and to outline the progressive steps that will get you there.  Before you get started, reach an agreement with your team about which terms you will use and how you will define them — it’s vital to your plan.

Do I Really Need All Four?

Our impulse is often to set a goal and jump right to tactics (the detailed “how” part of executing the plan). So? We miss the chance to consider several possible strategies; more importantly, we neglect to state a measurable objective (asking “what does success look like” to develop a desired outcome.) For more on defining desired outcomes, see our post on Envisioning Successful Outcomes. Bottom line: You will have a stronger plan if you cover all four bases — goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics.

“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” — Tom Landry

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Find out more about Ben McConnell’s Church of the Customer one-page strategic plan infographic (link above) and read his previous post on defining goal, objective, strategy, and tactic and why it’s important to agree what they mean.

2. If you have a strategic plan, turn it into a visual infographic (see instructions above) and share it with your team.

3. Read this brief article on strategy vs. tactics from BrandInsightBlog.

4. For more tips on using visuals, see our previous posts: Use the Power of Visuals to Get Your Point Across and Going Beyond Pie Charts: More Ways to Use Visuals.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.