Business Planning and Building an Effective Rhythm of Business with Maggie Olson

Jeremy · 0:00

Everyone is talking about Nova Chief of Staff, and it's no surprise when graduates walk away with huge benefits, like greater confidence and the validation that they can do the role. There are over 300 students in the Nova Chief of Staff Certification course, many of which are growth-minded executive assistants like you. Many of the Leader Assistants taking the course aren't necessarily looking for a promotion, they simply want to become more effective, strategic, and game-changing assistants. Over 18 countries around the globe are represented by students in Nova's course, so I highly recommend you join the club. Visit leaderassistant.com/nova to learn more about this amazing professional development resource.

Speaker 2 · 0:51

Thank you The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 1:07

Hey friends, welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's episode 267. You can check out the show notes for this conversation at leaderassistant.com/267, leaderassistant.com/267. And today's another fun chat with my friend Maggie Olson. We're gonna talk about building an effective rhythm of business today. So Maggie, welcome back. Thank you. And we've had a lot of conversations to date and we have a lot more to come. I hope you all have enjoyed these topics that we've covered. We talked about the journey from EA to Chief of Staff in episode 257, the EA and Chief of Staff relationship and working, navigating that relationship and how to work with a Chief of Staff and an EA. That's episode 260. And then we talked about the power of networking in episode 262. So let's dive right in. And Maggie, why don't you take it away?

Maggie · 2:13

Awesome. Well, I'm happy to be back. And this topic is really kind of the backbone of Chief of Staff work. And I say Chief of Staff, Jeremy and I usually kind of preface that with also high level strategic executive assistance. There's a lot of crossover. There's a lot of blending of territory and responsibilities. So if you're somebody that wants to add more value, loves what you do and wants to have a greater impact or think about things differently in new ways, I might be saying the words Chief of Staff, but I'm talking to you too. So just know that. But essentially, so we're going to talk about business planning and a term called Rhythm of Business. I don't know if I've shared this before, but when I was interviewing for the Chief of Staff role that I was in, in my last corporate role, I had never heard of the word Chief of Staff. I didn't know what it was. I'd never heard of the term. It was a little too late for me in life. That's why I created the Nova Chief of Staff Certification course. So people had resources and learned about these things earlier. But I hadn't heard about it before. And I also hadn't heard the terms Business Planning or Rhythm of Business. I didn't understand what those meant. I heard things like team collaboration and driving visibility and making sure people are organized and that we're meeting at the right time. Things like that captured me. And thankfully, I said yes to the Chief of Staff role. But today, we are going to demystify all that and talk about what is business planning and how do you build and what is an effective rhythm of business. So I believe that the backbone of a business is really its ability to get needed information to the leader. And that truly comes down to when teams are talking about what. Said differently, some advice that I received when I was just starting out at T-Mobile, gosh, many years back from a leader I had, Tracy, she said that the best leaders build systems and processes to get the information that they need without asking. And my little twist and take on that is like, okay, but how do leaders do that? They hire effective chiefs of staff and strategic EAs who figure it out. So that is what the purpose of business planning and rhythm of businesses to feed leaders information without them having to ask for it. And from a chief of staff perspective and a strategic EA perspective, it's also being able to see things clearly and make strategic recommendations to improve the business. Does that all sound good, Jeremy?

Jeremy · 4:52

Sounds like a great plan.

Maggie · 4:55

Very cool. Well, we're going to dive into business planning and tools and templates and a few other things. But first, I want to share what I talk about a lot, which is my suggestion to create a walking deck. So with coaching clients, with our Nova students, it's something that people learn about and do and come back and they say, oh my gosh, thank you. I love this idea. It works great. So I try to talk about it a lot so that you all can do it. Basically, what a walking deck is, is it's one deck that houses 90 percent of the tools that you need. So tools, templates, resources, anything that you want visibility to easily instead of hunting and pecking through all of your individual folders. Like where does this live? Is it in Notion? Is it in this folder, that folder, an Excel document, this PowerPoint? Where is everything? As a chief of staff or strategic EA and probably a lot of other roles as well, if you have a walking deck where you keep things like for our industry, for our roles, org charts, your calendars, your meeting agendas, your upcoming meeting agendas, maybe a couple past ones, engagement pipelines and planning for what your leader is up to and doing, your project management tracking, maybe even board meeting decks. It's essentially a one-stop shop where you and your team can reference things as needed instead of having all of these individual things saved different places. So it sounds easy, sounds simple. It's the best way to start with this is to truly just open up a PowerPoint if PowerPoint is your tool of choice and drag the things in there that are most relevant to your role. So like I said, the agendas, the templates, the planning, the project management, 90% of it lives there. If you have a project that's gotten really big or separate kind of work streams and things, keep those somewhere else. That's great. But this enables you to have everything at your fingertips because executives ask often for things and expect them to be delivered very quickly. This is a way that we've solved for that, for the folks that have taught me how to do this and that I've passed along to others. Jeremy, do you do this?

Jeremy · 7:07

Yeah, I don't know that I necessarily do it in the same form that you do or the same format, but it's probably a Google Sheet is my base, if you will, for all this kind of stuff. And if you're a Google person, Google Slides can work too, for sure.

Maggie · 7:26

Yeah, it's definitely the concept versus the exact application. So create a walking deck. I'm happy to share more resources about that. Really anything that we talk about today, if you're looking for a little bit more information, you can always reach out to us at hello at novachiefofstaff.com and we can send you what you would like. If you're like, what's that one template you were talking about? Just email us. Totally fine. Okay, so business planning. The key functions of business planning are ensuring that your leader is prepared every time. So briefs, prep sheets, decks, speaking notes, summaries, the leadership team and the leader you work for is prepared for all touch points. Next, it's really the purpose of business planning is to drive business forward. So you're engaging in key sessions, you're bringing teams together, you're providing actionable summaries to driving towards milestones and deadlines. The third pillar for business planning is really consistent visibility of business priorities. So through organized process and consistent communication, the executive and their leadership team can clearly visualize the priorities and the intake pipeline and all the workstreams going on and all the things that you are executing on. And organizing for your leader, even if they're not your direct responsibility. Fourth here is driving an effective rhythm of business, which we'll get into a lot more deeply today. So that means visibility into the rhythm of business, meaning what's happening when and other key touch points. And making recommendations to drive efficiency whenever possible. And then finally, kind of the last key function or pillar of business planning here is strategic alignment. So ensuring that your messaging, everything that you're touching and that your leader's working on is unified. Unified messaging and content development across lines of business, including reviews and deep dives and special projects. So as a chief of staff or strategic EA, if you are working on a lot of different projects, you want to make sure that your leader and the verbiage and the articulation and the story is showing up consistently in the right ways, in the same ways, across all of those different materials. So those are kind of the key pillars of business planning. I'll pause there, Jeremy, and see if you have anything to add to that. Are you ready to elevate your career in 2024? I'm Maggie Olson, founder of Nova Chief of Staff Certification, the first of its kind online course for aspiring and existing chiefs of staff. With curriculum taken directly from on-the-job responsibilities, Nova's self-paced learning modules provides you with hands-on experience so you can feel competent and confident moving into a chief of staff style role. It's the perfect next step for executive assistants. Head to leaderassistant.com/nova to learn more, grab the syllabus and enroll today.

Jeremy · 10:25

Yeah, I mean, what is the, maybe it's a little bit of both but who dictates this? Like, in other words, the rhythms and the planning, are they something that the company maybe already has rhythms and, you know, processes in place and then you just kind of organize and synthesize everything and get it templatized and all that? Or are you having to essentially come up with those and try it out and see if this rhythm works and this process works? I don't know if that makes sense.

Maggie · 11:06

Yeah, it's, that's, I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah, it's, it is a bit of both and generally at the beginning, it's more about the documenting and the organizing and making sure that everyone's on the same page. I don't believe that as a chief of staff, you can walk into an executive's back office and not get everything documented. It's too chaotic of an environment. If you can't, if you don't have a place for everything, a way to document things and a way to see things clearly, you won't be able to do what we do best, which is then make strategic recommendations to improve. So as you get further in your role, testing and learning and trying and implementing new and failing fast and moving on is a huge part of the role. At the beginning, it should be documenting current state. Glad you brought that up. Okay, so tools, templates, components of business planning. I'm just going to list some things off. Calendars, short term. None of this is new. These are all familiar things. But if we think about them in terms of business planning, tools, templates, components, calendars, short term and long term, different views, agendas for key sessions, week by week views for different things, like your staff meeting, for example, this week and next week, visibility could be helpful. Engagements and engagement planning will dive into rhythm of business. What's coming down the pipeline? I call those pipeline views, whether that's strategic initiatives or meetings coming up. Briefs, making sure your leaders prepared every time. I think Jeremy and I will dive into briefs and engagement recommendations the next time we're together. Meeting planning, so agendas and off-sites and all hands, project management tools and more. Clearly, there's a lot. My goal here is not to overwhelm you. It's actually just to give you choice and the freedom to understand that there's a lot of different ways to do this. I always say, a few things. Don't reinvent the wheel. There's probably a template out there that exists. Nova Chief of Staff has many. We're happy to help. And adapt it for the need that you have. So somebody else's need as a chief of staff over in the telecom industry is going to be a lot different than your need in, let's say, the nonprofit sector. But you're probably doing things for the same core reason, to prepare your leader, to provide visibility. So don't reinvent the wheel and adapt things to work for you. There's a lot of options here. Okay, so now we're going to get into really the meat of building an effective rhythm of business. And I'm going to do my best to describe some template options here so that you can pick and choose and use one of these and try to visualize what these look like. Again, feel free to email us if you want a little more information or a template, we're happy to provide that for you over at Nova. But let's dive in. So I'm going to talk through, I think, five different template options for building a rhythm of business. And your rhythm of business to remind is really what is happening when. You're going to take an audit of all of the meetings that your leader has on their calendar, and you're going to document them. The next stage, we'll talk about it in a little bit, is then figuring out what are you seeing and making those strategic recommendations. But first, let's work on documenting everything, organizing everything, and providing visibility to people who need it. So at T-Mobile, in my last Corporate Chief of Staff role, I used all of these templates for different reasons, all of these views that I'll describe, but you may only need one. You may need a few. So let me dive in here. Okay, so a Monday through Friday template. Imagine Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in columns along the top, and then meeting squares below for each day of the week, with different formatting to dictate weekly, bimonthly or monthly. Okay, that's an option. Another template option would be categorizing by weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and quarterly, each with their own rows. So down the left side in your rows are weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and quarterly, and across the right in each of their own box are the individual meetings that fit within that meeting cadence. And then to add on to that, you can color coordinate based on what the focus of the meeting is. Is it something that we're talking about past business, current business or future focus? For example, this template would be really, really good to see how often are we thinking about future strategy. Okay, so I've documented all of the... As an example, I've documented all of my presidents' key meetings, all their meetings that they have with their executive team, let's say. We can exclude the one-on-ones here. And then I've color coded them based on, are we looking at past business, current business or future? And I notice that we are only talking about future business once, and it's only monthly, and it's only about this future product launch that's coming up. Or it's only about long-term planning once a year. This is an opportunity to dive in and make a recommendation that we probably need some more future strategic meetings. Another template option would be something like months as columns across the top and then your monthly meetings below. Two more here, a simple list of all meetings within just each individual rows and in the columns you're listing the cadence and the meeting details. That's an easy one. And then finally, this one is kind of an interesting view, basically a heat map option. So this is a good option to give kind of that executive visibility into how often they're showing up in different areas of their business. So for example, here you can list all of your executive direct reports, all hands meetings in individual rows down the left side of your page and then list your months across the top and then format each cell to show which month your executive is showing up to which all hands. From here, you can say, okay, are there months where they aren't showing up at all? Are there too many things happening in one executive's group or in one month? This is the first step. Document your rhythm of business. And then after that, you're going to really dive in and reflect on what could be missing. What's repetitive? What's something coming up in the future that's not represented that you need to be planful for? This is where being a strategic EA and a Chief of Staff shows their value. You're making strategic recommendations. You're finding gaps. You're solutioning things before they become a problem. So I'm going to pause there, Jeremy. I went through a lot. I hope that it was semi clear to follow along with, but hopefully Rhythm of Business has been made us a little bit clearer for you.

Jeremy · 18:16

Oh, yeah, this is super helpful. And again, people can reach out if they have questions or they want to see a specific template. Yep. Reach out to you. And I will put obviously your contact info and everything in your links in the show notes at leaderassistant.com/267. So you can reach out to Maggie and get a hold of some of these awesome helpful templates. Have you experienced any or any of your course students experienced any resistance to, you know, these processes? I mean, I know the first part as far as documenting everything. I feel like that would be really, you know, rare that anybody would have resistance to you documenting things, because most places don't have documentation of what they need to have documentation of. But I could see resistance of, hey, you know, this is what we've done, and this is what we recommend, or I've done some research, and we should have this kind of a rhythm where every quarter we do this, every quarter we do that, etc. So, yeah, any thoughts on if you experience any resistance?

Maggie · 19:32

You know, I think there's always going to be a push-pull between a new process and a new idea and an existing person or school of thought or even an existing way to document things. I think that you have to test and learn a lot. And sometimes we don't, I say sometimes laughing, but sometimes we don't have our executives' time at our disposal. So we don't necessarily know if we're on the right track or if this is going well, or if we should test something. And I always believe that we should just do it and then put something in front of our leader. I generally talk about making that assumptive recommendation. I'm going to move forward with this. We're going to test this out. If you have an issue with it, just let me know. You're assuming that it's fine. You're moving forward. You're testing something on behalf of the better of their business. I think it's a good move to propose things that way. But yes, there's definitely going to be resistance. Something that does come up more specifically a lot is, okay, but why PowerPoint or why Google Slides? And it's a really good question, especially as there's more and more software options out there with Monday and Asana and Notion and all of the things. And those tools are really good, and they should probably be used based on what you're doing in your business. However, the problem is, if you're in an elevated role working with an executive team who has a certain level of polish and expects things quickly and has to present things to boards or external partners, if we keep everything in software tools, at this point, there's not a tool out there that I have found that has an executive level summary that's polished and elevated and ready at the drop of a hat. So I do a lot of those executive level project management components and work in PowerPoint or Google Slides, because it's customizable very easily and so that it's executive ready at any time, so that I don't have to spend two hours pulling it from a software tool to make it ready to distribute to whoever needs it. So that's definitely some questions I get pretty often, but it's not necessary for everything. Jeremy and I, we both run companies. My team is not executive level polishing things for me. We don't have time for that, right? I don't expect that. But depending on your industry, you probably do have situations where you need that polish and elevation and things to look really good. And so that's why I use slides often for executive project management work kind of like this.

Jeremy · 22:05

Yeah. Nice. Well, again, people can reach out if they have any questions or want to learn more about the templates and obviously explore more about the Nova course as well. Any final thoughts you have to share?

Maggie · 22:24

You know what? If you haven't done this yet, just start. Just try it. See how it goes. It's okay if you've been in your role for a year or two and you haven't done this yet. There's just nothing too late here. So give it a go and let us know how it goes.

Jeremy · 22:38

Awesome. And I would encourage everyone listening to give it a shot and be flexible and be adaptable. I know we have these audacious goals every year of, hey, this is what our rhythm is going to look like. This is when we're going to do the strategic plan and we're going to do leadership team retreat and we're going to do all this stuff. And, you know, most years it's like kind of, well, okay, we didn't exactly do all that, but let's figure something out. And I work at a smaller company in the software space, so things change a lot. So don't get too discouraged when you miss one of those boxes on your nice, clean business plan or rhythm.

Maggie · 23:24

Create it knowing that it will change. I created a beautiful rhythm of business when I first started at T-Mobile, and then I think I got my executive excited about this whole rhythm of business thing, and he came through the next quarter and gave me a whole long list of how he wants it to look, so we rebuilt it, and that's fine. And I'm glad he was engaged, but definitely build it for flexibility and just know that like anything else in the C-suite, it's probably going to change soon.

Jeremy · 23:47

Perfect. Perfect. Well, thanks again, Maggie, and we'll look forward to our next conversation. And yeah, check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/267. Until next time, we'll talk to you soon.

Maggie · 24:02

Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, Amy.

Speaker 2 · 24:13

Please review on Apple Podcasts. goburrows.com.