The Quarterly Theme is a fun motif you can use in your internal marketing to rally everyone around achieving your Critical Number. Especially for those new to the process, start with a few initial themes that last no longer than a quarter. It takes several quarters to master choosing and setting Critical Numbers.

It’s amazing what a little excitement can do to galvanize the troops. A team I work with had a health and fitness challenge which created terrific interaction among the employees. This emphasized what a quarterly theme can accomplish and they are now ready to create one for their company. I think of mastering the Rockefeller Habits as a continuum – once you perfect the cadence of meetings and the setting of priorities it’s time to add themes.

What if in the middle of a Quarterly Theme or an annual one, you feel the team is going to miss the Critical Number, maybe substantially? Do you adjust midstream? Do you lower the target?  If, in the middle of a Quarterly Theme or an annual one, you feel the team is going to miss the Critical Number, you have three options:

1. Repeat the Critical Number in the next quarter if it’s still crucial that the organization achieve the target.
2. Move on to another Critical Number if you sense that enough momentum was created with the previous target to keep the organization trending in the right direction.
3. Do a root cause analysis to uncover the reasons your organization didn’t achieve your Critical Number. Choose one of those reasons to fix in the next quarter.

Think of the scaling up process as a continuum. Companies can not embrace the entire process out of the gate. Theme creation usually is more likely to happen in year 2 or 3. That said, it is a terrific method to rally the team and bring core values and priorities to life.

Why have a theme?

Having a theme breathes excitement into a challenge. And accomplishing something important gives you a great reason to celebrate. There should be a time to celebrate, to enjoy some of the fruits of your victories along the way. You can’t go through challenges  sacrificing yourself with no benefit. Teams need rewards and acknowledgment after a big push toward the achievement of some goal.

How to create a theme:

Delegate the actual creation of the theme to a nonexecutive team. Almost every company has a team member who is skilled in using a computer to create videos, posters, and other themed collateral. The senior team doesn’t need another job, and it’s best if an employee –run team drives the theme activities.

At the celebration, ask the most powerful question a leader can pose when a team has successfully completed anything: “How did you do it?”

Nothing builds momentum and energy like having specific targets. It isn’t uncommon for teams to fall short of their goals in the beginning. Don’t change the goals. To encourage the team have three potential targets – Super Green, Green and Red – ups the odds that the team will earn a medal. Even if you don’t hit the minimum goal, convene the team for an event to announce the results.

As the company matures in the use of quarterly and annual themes, you can dial up the rewards. One team offered a company picnic with hotdogs escalating to steaks depending on the level of achievement. The important thing is to make it fun!

If you are wondering what the picture has to do with this tip. It’s my personal annual  theme reminder  – kicking the ball down the road!

The magic of the Scaling Up process is getting everyone in the company to accomplish one additional thing that is aligned with the company’s focus every 90 days. i.e. each employee has one Critical Number that aligns with the company’s Critical Number for the quarter, illustrating that there is a clear line of sight.

Like the company, all employees or teams need to set a handful of priorities (known as rocks) that will help them achieve their Critical Number (i.e. each individual/team should have three to five rocks that align with those of the company.)

The concept of “Big Rocks” is based on principles outlined by educator and author Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the popular book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The idea is that in your role, you have all kinds of responsibilities and tasks that need to get done each day. Some of them are critical and must get done in order for you to reach your goals. These are your Big Rocks and they are usually ongoing projects that cannot be rushed.  Other things in your role may not be quite as important as your Big Rocks, but they are certainly time-consuming! These are the day-to-day tasks like plodding through your email and filing an expense report that are your Small Rocks.

Now, imagine that you have a glass jar that you need to fill up with all of your rocks, big and small. Is there enough room for them all? If you fill the jar with pebbles first, you’ll never be able to find space for the bigger rocks. However, if you put the big rocks in first, then your small rocks will fill in the spaces between the larger rocks, and indeed you’ll find that everything successfully fits. It just depends on what you prioritize first.

If you get easily distracted by “noise” then at the end of every day, make a list of the three most important things to accomplish to support your priorities the following day. Start your day by working on those priorities and before long you will feel in control of your life!

Rockefeller Habit #2 starts with identifying this Critical Number. While all your metrics are important, the Critical Number designation is specific to one metric each year. A key step in achieving the annual critical number is determining, the quarterly critical number.  For instance, a manufacturing client set a specific cash target for the year. He then chose a Critical Number in process improvement for the quarter. The goal was to reduce the dollars spent on parts to repair machines, therefore saving significant money and contributing to the cash goal.

The Critical Number concept was introduced and popularized through Jack Stack’s classic book The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company. Though you may consider all your metrics to be critical, reserve the term “Critical Number” for your measurable #1 priority, even when other metrics are nearly as important. To derive the one Critical Number, imagine the hundreds of important things you need to accomplish lined up like dominoes. Find the lead domino: the one initiative that, when pursued, makes it easier to accomplish everything else. Or identify the bottleneck — the choke point or constraint — and address it first. This is why it’s called “Critical.” For example, Facebook’s CEO, Zuckerberg, it was going mobile.

Look for opportunities to refocus activities on a critical number for the quarter, which should support and align with the company’s vision. Defining individual outcomes for team members in the context of the One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) assures alignment with the company’s strategy and its long- and short-term goals.

In general, you’ll pick a Critical Number that will address either an opportunity or a challenge on the People/ Balance Sheet side of the business (e.g., reduce employee turnover, improve customer service scores, or dramatically reduce a credit line with the bank) or the Process/ Profit & Loss side (e.g., improve gross margins, reduce production cycle time, or increase sales close ratios). And depending on which side you choose, you will want to pick a counterbalancing number from the other side to monitor (e.g., you want to improve relationships but don’t want to give away the store, or you want to improve processes but not impact relationships.)

Are your meetings boring? How would you like to have these outcomes instead?

• Have lively, interesting meetings
• Extract and exploit the ideas of all team members
• Solve real problems quickly
• Minimize politics
• Put critical topics on the table for discussion

Engage in healthy debate!

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni emphasizes that all great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business.

Healthy constructive debates are the answer to produce the best possible solution to issues in the shortest period of time. Ironically, teams that avoid conflict often do so in order to avoid hurting team members’ feelings, and then end up encouraging dangerous tension. When team members do not openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.

One of the most difficult challenges that a leader faces in promoting healthy conflict is the desire to protect members from harm. This leads to premature interruption of dis­agreements, and prevents team members from developing coping skills for dealing with conflict themselves. Our advice to leaders is to have one rule: never make it personal. Come back to a place of safety so people will speak up and not shut down. One reprimand from the CEO can shut down a team’s innovation and desire to speak up. Healthy conflict is actually a time saver. Contrary to the notion that teams waste time and energy arguing; those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without res­olution.

What conversation is your team avoiding? The first step is ac­knowledging that conflict is productive, and that many teams have a tendency to avoid it. In fact is important to “mine” for conflict in the spirit of making things better as a result. Often the loudest or most senior leader prevails when people are averse to making waves.

Read more in Pat Lencioni’s the Five Dysfunctions of a Team or ask me about The Five Cohesive Behaviors of a Team Assessment to check out the health of your team.

If you thought that learning stopped when you graduated from high school or college, think again. Continuous learning is a critical part of personal and business life in today’s rapidly changing world. Learning is a competitive advantage and you can avoid it only if you prefer to become a dinosaur prematurely.

Jack Welch knew how to win. During his forty year career at GE, he led the company to year after year success around the globe in multiple markets, against brutal competition. Crotonville, GE’s global leadership institute, was GE’s solution to advance an evolutionary culture—a culture where learning shapes strategy and leaders are equipped and inspired to succeed now and in the future. They bring together thought leaders from around the world to create a learning environment that educates and enriches.

Clearly continuous learning worked for GE and many leaders emerged to become CEOs of other organizations like James McNerney who became CEO of 3M, and Robert Nardelli who became CEO of Home Depot.

While a training center might be a dream for your company, there is nothing stopping you from deciding what your leadership, managers and team need to learn and then sharing insights from a minimum of one book a month. In my experience many leaders (before they meet me) have only read one or two leadership books. One of my favorite teams is thirsty for learning (my filter for engaging) and take great pride in listening to Audible books at 3X speed to take it all in.

Incorporate learning into your culture – why wait?

Instead of thinking about strategic planning it’s helpful to think about breaking planning sessions down into two parts: strategic thinking and execution planning. The 7 Strata framework developed by Gazelles International is one of the key tools guiding the strategic thinking agenda of a company.

The first step in completing the 7 Strata and working through the 4Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) or 4 Es (Experience, Everyplace, Exchange, and Evangelism) is designating a strategic thinking team. Choose three to five people to meet for an hour or so each week to discuss each of the Strata and other issues of strategic importance.

It’s all about iterations: making a few decisions, testing them, and coming back to the table the following week for discussion.

Besides a few key members of a leadership team, you might include someone with specific industry or domain knowledge underpinning your strategy. It’s always important to have eyes on the new trends emerging in the market place.

The council doesn’t accomplish its work in isolation. The council members are expected to spend some time each week talking with customers and employees and checking out competitors, extracting insights and ideas to fuel their strategic thinking.

In the end strategic decisions need to be made, and it’s the job of the CEO to make them. Yet it’s advisable to recruit several pairs of eyes and to have frequent contact with the market to help you navigate.

The Boys in The Boat is the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, they were never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler.

The reason they won? The team was healthy and aligned. They strategically decided who should sit in which seat on the boat, they understood each other’s strengths and they had a strong desire to win. They all knew what they needed to do to support the team and most important of all, they kept their mind in the boat.

What does it take for a leadership team to be fully aligned? Pretty much the same thing. The team needs to do the tough work of exploring each other’s strengths, weaknesses, styles and priorities. Too often team members don’t have a deep understanding of each others priorities. This can lead to siloes and an ineffective team lacking the necessary cohesion required to win!

CEOs and executives of growth firms want ideas and tools they can implement immediately to improve some aspect of their business — and want to enjoy the ride along the way!  The Rockefeller Habits 2.0 are foundational. More than 20,000 executives and their leadership teams use the proven Rockefeller Habits 2.0 to Scale Up smarter and burst through the barriers to growth. This is the first in a series of tips to interpret the 10 Rockefeller Habits that were the keys to JD Rockefeller’s success and which allowed him to become the richest man in the world.