The mid-year check in. Pt. 1

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty. I'm your host Terry Baylor along with Ralph Owens. Today we'll answer questions pertaining to the Mid Year Check-in. Have you defined your key performance indicators? Telling your story with metrics and how leveraging your team will make all the difference.

Enjoy the show.

All right, we are live. Mr. Baylor. It's good to see.

Yes sir. Yes sir, we're back at it, man. I'm excited. I cannot believe we are in June.

Yeah, I know half the year is already gone. You believe that?

I know, you know what, I wanna give you a congratulations in that. You've made it to June on Leadership Sovereignty.

Yeah, hey, same

to you. Right, man, we didn't know what we were, where this is gonna go, but it has been a pleasure. Thank you to everyone out there for your encouraging words. And just, I'll take a churchism, They say the saints pull it out, they go pull the anointing out of you.

That's a good one.

But you guys have been pulling it out of us, man. It has been a joy. It has been a joy.

Absolutely, absolutely. Definitely did not know what to expect going into this, but it's definitely been a blessing to give more than to receive.

Yes, sir. Yes, So since we are in the middle of the year and you've put together a really nice, format for us today. You want to go ahead and give the, intro on what we're talking about today?

Sure, sure, sure. So to Terry's point, we are halfway through the year. If you've been listening to us long enough, you know that we talk a lot about, principles and concepts and things on how to deal with people and work and management and things of that nature. So, we wanted to touch on the topic of the mid year check-in. The mid year check ins, what does that mean?

That is how are you doing from a business performance perspective at year I'm sorry, at month six? How are you doing at a personal development perspective at month six? As we know, it's good to have check ins and feedback because that gives you, an idea on if you headed in the right direction. Right? You don't want to wait all the way until December to find out, you know what, I wish I would have focused on this a little bit harder.

I could have got this done this year. Right? So we try to focus on on the mid year, midpoint as a check-in period for some things for and these are not just things that we're suggesting to you. These are things that we're doing for ourselves, right, to drive our performance and our personal development. Before I get into the subtopics, any other, thoughts on that there?

No, think that's perfect. That's perfect, right? I mean, we just want to be very intentional about where we're going. So I think the things that you're about to hit will definitely help us do that.

All right. Awesome. Awesome. So just as an overview, so you get an idea of, the bullet points we'll be talking about in each one of those sections. In the business performance section, we'll talk about, have you defined your KPIs, your key performance indicators for the year?

Have you been tracking your numbers? How are you presenting your data, your numbers of your performance to your stakeholders? What is your roadmap for the rest of the year? What do you plan to complete in the 2024? And have you conducted a mid year check-in with your boss yet?

All very, very important topics in order to be able to drive your business performance. And then on the personal development side, we're gonna touch on how many new business relationships have you built? How many books have you read so far? How many other people have you helped to achieve their goals? Which role have you found yourself taking?

And this goes back to the empowerment dynamic, that we covered in the previous episodes. And have you established your personal board of directors yet? And, have you been meeting with your mentors? So, any any thoughts on that Terry before we dive in?

It's a great list. It sounded like a two hour show.

Good thing we break it up at fifteen minutes.

Exactly, exactly. No, this is good. You know what, I could probably, this may be two recordings in itself because there's a lot of good content here.

Good stuff. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and jump into the first one. Have you defined your KPIs for the year? So a KPI again is a key performance indicator.

These are the indications that you are effectively performing your job well. We all have them and the very fact that we are paid to do something means that there is a criteria that determines if we're successful and there's a criteria that determines if we're not successful. So those key performance indicators are those pieces that determine that you are doing what you were hired to do. Right? So let's say and we'll use it in a very simplistic example.

Let's say your job is to count green M and M's. Right? So you have thousands of M and M's coming through and you need to inspect every green one. Right? So that means that you need to have so many identified, so many green M and M's identified and inspected, within an hour, which translates into so many per day, which translates into so many green M and M's per week, and then per month, and then per year.

Well, per quarter and then per year. Right? So identifying your key performance indicator is crucial for you to know if you're winning or if you're losing. I mean, Terry, what are your thoughts on that?

Here's the thing, right? Just like, and I'm always gonna take it back to everyone, just about everyone loves some type of sport. Right? And we know, let's just use softball for instance, right? That watermark, whether you are an exceptional or elite player is 300, right?

Anybody batting below 300, yeah, you're a good player, but you may not be defined as an elite player or exceptional player. Well, how are they doing that? Right? They're doing it by, okay, I've had, let's just keep it simple, 10 at bats. If I've had 10 at bats, then I'm going to measure out of those 10 at bats, how many hits did I get?

Right. So if I got four hits, then I'm a 400 batter. Well, let's take it a step deeper. Right. So they have something called a quality at bat.

They call it a QWAB. Now we're getting deeper into the metrics. So we understand that there are high level metrics and then let's really get down to where the rubber meets the road kind of Right? And so down to the point where they are analyzing, okay, how many pitches did you see? Right?

You have at least, if you see at least seven pitches, they're going to call that a quality at bat. I think it's seven. Going to call that a quality at bat. But of those seven pitches, then they're going to dig even deeper into those metrics. How many pitches did you see were strikes?

How many of those did you take? How many of those did you swing at? Right? I mean so the more detail you can get in your metrics the better you can tell your story the more refined you can execute on that item, the better you can tell your story. So the more detail you can get into that metric.

Now, how do you do that? As leaders, typically we're not going to be the ones with boots on the ground with those types of metrics. We're going to be the folks asking for the metrics or helping define those metrics. So if you're going to be successful in in metric gathering, my advice is to request the input of your teams. You want to get the subject matter expert involved in gathering those metrics.

Now let's bring it into the tech world, which is where I live. How many vulnerabilities do we have on the network?

Right.

Okay. How many of those vulnerabilities are less than ninety days? How many of those vulnerabilities are less than sixty days? How many are less than thirty days? Right.

How often are we patching? That's a metric. How long does it take us to normally patch our whatever? Let's just say this store even number out there 20 sites. How many network switches are we actually patching?

These are all metrics. And so the more detailed we can become in those metrics, the better we can tell our story, the better we can plan our future because we understand what it is that we have to address in order to get to success. Employ your teams, your subject matter experts involved because you as the manager or leader of that department, quite honestly, you won't have the time to really be trying to hunt that stuff down. The next thing I would add to that is if you can automate it, that's even better. I've been in situations where I have people filling in spreadsheets, which I really don't like to do it that way but sometimes the technology is not present in the environment to do that or the expertise to do that.

If you can automate it, makes it even better because what can you do from that standpoint? You can feed it into a dashboard.

That's right.

Right. And we all know, right? We've heard it say a picture tells a thousand words, a dashboard tells 10,000 words.

It sure does. Sure does. It sure does. I love that. I love that.

Thank you for being with us today on Leadership Sovereignty. Stay connected with us on X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Instagram by searching for Leadership Sovereignty. And just like this podcast, let's all collectively grow as we go. God bless.