How not to sound like a loser during your 1-min segment at the all-hands meeting?
I have a 4-step formula that can help you prepare a script in a clear, productive, and non-defensive way for the next company meeting when your targets are behind.
Did you ever have to explain why your targets are behind plan to leadership in a team meeting? Feeling your stomach hurting and cheeks getting red since admitting it equals to admitting failure and hence publicly admitting that you are a loser?
About Me
My name is Kate. I’ve worked in tech, banking, and consumer goods industries for the past 7 years. My employers include DoorDash and ByteDance.
I used to consider Wednesday the end of the world during one of these jobs. My employer hosted business reviews on this day to check last week's progress and pacing to plan. The specific metric under my scope fluctuates a lot and often became the center of conversation, especially when results are behind plan.
How Did I Address It?
There are 4 essential steps from my years of “being grilled” by team leads or senior managers among my peers and cross-functional partners.
Step 1: Know Your Data Inside and Out
If you are responsible for reporting on a business metric, you should have a dashboard that tracks all input and output metrics contributing to the success. For example, I owned the sales attainment target for a segment of restaurants at DoorDash.
Input Metrics Include:
How many restaurants are live in this segment?
Are their menus and open hours optimized for customer conversion?
How many customers are viewing their stores? What’s the impression to click ratio?
Output Metrics Include:
Conversion rate from click to actual orders
Average order value
Total order volume
If last week’s attainment was behind the plan, I need to drill to the lowest level of detail to understand the specific blocker to this result. The blocker might be due to hypothetically:
20% of restaurants have poor menu photos
10% had more than 20% downtime due to a snowstorm
Step 2: Avoid Sounding Defensive
We are all humans. Sometimes our natural instinct defaults to being defensive. Instead of explaining what caused the metric to fluctuate, you might lean towards explaining how your work isn’t supposed to cause the result or how your work was great regardless of the result.
Separate personal emotions from business results. You should totally have conversations with your direct manager about how great your work was or how you did everything in your power already but the result didn’t meet expectations. Those should be a part of your 1:1 development conversations that we will address in another blog.
For larger team meetings where the objective is to review progress and align on next steps to improve, read my structure in Step 4!
Step 3: Have a Plan to Get Back to Target
Before we talk about how to address the question in the meeting, we need to lay out the next steps to improve this target next week. Let’s go back to my sales target metric for DoorDash. Since I figured out the top 2 blockers, I also need to consider solutions for them.
Next Steps May Include Hypothetically:
Schedule free photo shoots for the restaurants with low photo coverage and collaboration with the operations team to ensure connectivity and dasher supply during inclement weather.
Step 4: Structure and Prepare Your Script
Now that we have some data on hand, let’s piece together our proactive answer to share this lowlight with the broader team.
Opening: Start with a concise sentence on the eventual result.
“Last week, sales attainment was 80% to plan.”
Blocker: Go straight to the point with data-backed results.
“This is driven by low photo coverage and high downtime. 20% of restaurants from the cohort had low photo coverage and 10% were affected by the snowstorm and had to close earlier than expected.”
Pause: Pause and allow room for questions before going to the “Next steps.” This allows your team to digest the data and react, while showing how thoughtful you are.
“Happy to voice over next steps to get back to plan but let me pause here in case you have any questions.”
Ending: Now share the next steps in 2 parts.
To Address the Blocker:
“To address the low performers from last week, my team will schedule free photo shoots for the restaurants with low photo coverage and collaborate with the operations team to ensure connectivity and dasher supply during inclement weather.”To Take a Step Back on the Big Picture:
“[Bonus point, if you got to the end of this blog]: this is important to show that you are not only able to understand the lowest levels of details in your current scope (what you can control) vs. external or cross-functional impact (what you cannot control).
“We already onboarded 20 new key restaurants this week so expect next week's plan to beat the target by 50%, especially since the snowstorm is expected to go away.”
Conclusion
I hope this is helpful. If you read the whole blog until the end here, I wish you all the best in the next corporate business review. Use data-driven insights and focus on future actionable items. The past is the past and has happened already. You will improve whatever metric you own by focusing on what you can control in the moment.