The mid-year check in. Pr. 4

Welcome, and thank you for tuning in to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast. I'm your host, Ralph Owens, along with Terry Baylor. In today's episode, we'll cover topics such as why presenting your data is critical to your success, why identifying your stakeholders is also critical to your success, value uncommunicated is never appreciated, and the importance of reviewing your roadmap. Enjoy this show. Right?

Which is, the the next, bullet in this is how are you presenting your data to your stakeholders? Now keep in mind, defining the KPIs, great. Check that box. Okay. This is what we're gonna use to judge our performance.

Okay. Tracking the KPIs and the numbers. Okay. Now we're reviewing what we're doing against our goal. Oh, okay.

We're failing on this, but we're winning on that. Okay. These are the changes we need to make to do that. All of that means nothing if you don't show it to your stakeholders. Why is that Terry?

Why is it that the tracking and the measuring doesn't mean anything if your stakeholders don't see

Because you're not explaining or showing the value. It's no different than, I'm gonna give you just an anecdotal. It's no different than me as a husband. I'm getting up, going to work every day, coming home, doing. But if I'm able to say, Hey babe, let me show you what we've been able to accomplish because I've been doing this for the last six months.

And with that savings, I put it over here and now we're able to whatever, take this trip. Now we're able to do this for you know, both our moms. Right. Otherwise, if I just go and do it right and not really explain the detail in how I got there, then the appropriate level of appreciation just isn't gonna be there.

That's right. You have to first understand who your stakeholders are. Right? Because I keep using this term, but I realize some people may not really understand what that means. Who is it that's depending on you to do what you do?

Who are your customers?

That's a stakeholder, yes.

And who are your customers? Because remember customers can be external customers, they can be internal customers. Terry and I work in technology. The majority of our customers are internal. Other business groups within the company who do rely on our technology to do what they do so they can service our external customers.

Right? You have to understand who your stakeholders and your customers are. Right? And then you have to figure out how to show them your numbers, your KPIs, what you've been tracking. So that you can show them and to Terry's point, build credibility with them on what the value that you provide to the organization.

If you don't show it to them, it's almost to them, it's almost like you didn't do anything. Right? I I talk to my team about this all the time. I say, you know, we get to a point to where the network is like electricity. When and Terry and I both have worked in power generation, so we understand this on an intimate level.

When you hit a switch to turn on a light in your home, you have no idea how many thousands upon thousands of man hours went into ensuring the ability to make sure that when you turn that light switch on, it just came on and you didn't have any issues. Mean, thoughts about that Terry?

Yeah, right now it just seems like magic. Nobody's, it's become so dependable. There's no thought into what the thousands and thousands of transmission lines that it takes to get that electricity to your home.

You don't think about it and it becomes It kind of creates an expectation. Right? People expect when they need to use technology that it just works. But you don't know how many hours of patching and support it takes to keep these environments up and running. Therefore, if you don't present the data to them, then they're never gonna know.

They'll just take it for granted. Right? Which is why you have to understand who your stakeholders and your customers are and present to them your numbers in all transparency. But remember, when you do have bad days or bad months or whatever the cadence may be, you get to explain the narrative and control the narrative because you're the one bringing it to them. They're not the ones asking you about it.

If that makes sense.

So what I want to do, Ralph, is just really tie off on the stakeholder. Right? The definition is that a stakeholder is a person, group or organization with a vested interest or stake in the decision making and activities of a business, organization or project. Let's just break it down. If you got kids, your kids are a stakeholder.

Yep.

Your wife, stakeholder. Mother-in-law, stakeholder.

Yes.

Hey, I love my mother-in-law. Let me get it on record. Let me get it on record. But what I'm saying is that anybody who's depending on something that you are providing is a stakeholder.

So

the more you can be in front of them and really provide your value right to what their desired outcome is. You want to be there.

That's right. It's critical to understand who these individuals are. Because those are the ones you have the responsibilities to show the value to. So moving on to the next point on the business performance is what is your roadmap and what do you plan to complete in the 2024? Hopefully you took some time either at the end of last year or the beginning of this year to map out a roadmap of all the things that you want to accomplish.

And I'm glad we have this on here because one of my direct reports called me out on this the other day, not in a negative way, but we have a weekly meeting. And in those meetings he said, Hey, I think we need to go back to our roadmap. We promised the business that we were gonna do these things and we need to check-in against our roadmap to see how we're doing so we can keep our word, right? So I was like, you know what, you're absolutely right. I got so focused in all these operational things that I did not take the time to build that into our cadence, right?

But that roadmap is basically what you committed to do for the business for the year. And how well are you keeping to that? Terry, what are your thoughts on that?

No, I think it's great. And I think depending on what your businesses strategy is on how you track or how you align. I've been in organizations where they plan out for the year And if it wasn't approved in the previous budget cycle, don't think about it. Now I work in an organization which is more of uses a more of an agile framework. And really every 90 days we are readjusting to determine to Ralph's earlier point.

What is the most important thing? Right. Where do we what do we what are we on? What's what's going to bring the biggest value? Right.

For the business, and so in the in the in the agile framework, we do have a roadmap, that roadmap could change based on what the business need is over the next ninety days or whatever over the next six sprints that we have planned for the quarter. So our 12 sprints that we have planned for the quarter. Essentially what their roadmap does though, is it's your vision. It is a visual presentation. Sometimes we do them in what we call swim lanes or Gantt charts that says, okay, here's the next ninety days.

We're gonna do just throw some things out there. We're gonna do a sand refresh. We're going to deploy faster circuits. We're going to deploy new laptops. We have cybersecurity assessment over the next ninety days.

And then we start taking the chunks out of that to roll that into six week projects. So again, you gotta have it on paper. And having that on paper, what it will help you do is stay accountable, stay accountable to yourself, stay accountable to your team, stay accountable to your stakeholders. Ralph, you and I were talking about this earlier about the net promoter score. So we don't talk much about this, but we have to be accountable to the members or the customers that our internal customers are serving.

That's

right. Ultimately what we do is we enable the business to meet the need for their customers.

That's right. Nice. Very, very powerful concept that we were just introduced to, having that, net promoter score, or satisfaction, threshold, right? That you're measuring against which are internal customers. You see a lot more with bigger companies.

But if you can implement that in your space, right, to say, hey, just wanna check-in and see how we're satisfying your needs. Right? Are we meeting your needs? Right? If not, let us know and then tracking that score along the way.

Very very powerful tool to transmit the value that you give to the business. Right? That again, and I wanna stress this. I wanna stress this. You may not be asked for this.

Sometimes we think, why would I go through all of that if no one's asking me for? Well, number one, at a very minimum, it tracks your own personal performance. Right? You get to track basically, are you doing good or are you doing bad? The value to the business is the secondary product that you get out of that.

Right? And by introducing something like this, you now introduce, the value to the company that you work for in a whole different way that they would have never even thought about. So once they start to see it and it starts to make sense, you get all kind of benefits from it. But don't wait for someone to have to ask you to do something like this. Take it upon yourself.

Have initiative to say, hey, I just wanna start presenting these metrics to you all to show, you know, what I'm doing if you're an individual contributor or what my team is doing, in alignment with the company's goals and to create value for the business. Right? Thank you for listening to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast. We hope that you not only enjoy the content, but gained something to help you on your personal leadership journey. Feel free to reach out to us on x and Instagram under the handles Leadership Sovereignty.

Until next time, stay safe, peace, and blessings.