By Robby Kukler
As we head into the 2025 planning season, it is time to take planning and communication to the next level across your company, not only to improve the health and well-being of your organization now but also to build a more effective and productive company long-term.
After 40 years in our business, I know it takes a team of people to successfully run and manage your company, whether that’s a single restaurant or a multiple-concept restaurant company. These teams are usually diverse, with varying levels of experience and ways of thinking, making alignment across the company key to your 2025 planning success.
Alignment ensures your entire restaurant team or company is working toward common goals. Alignment helps to optimize resources by removing inefficiencies, and alignment improves collaboration through shared systems and performance tracking across departments. Following is my road map to alignment that will jump start your 2025 planning by focusing on three actions.
Create Strategic Clarity
Simplify strategic goals and objectives in a concise and understandable manner so that the leadership team and company as a whole are aligned on what is most important to accomplish over a defined period of time.
As I presented in a previous article “The Power of Planning”, decision-makers across your company should discuss, refine and align on 3-5 key objectives in your 2025 planning to move the company forward. This number really depends on the size and bandwidth of the team doing the work. However, by prioritizing and focusing on only 3-5 objectives, you can create a realistic plan that can be accomplished at an 80%+ level, thereby boosting morale and momentum rather than over-shooting a team’s bandwidth leading to discouragement.
Meeting and determining these top 3-5 objectives depends on your structure and size but could be accomplished in a daylong session or multiple two- to three-hour meetings over several weeks or months. These meetings are for the decision-makers to brainstorm, discuss and bring ideas to the table that are thought to be the most important in driving the success of your company over the coming year. The vetting of and ultimate alignment on these objectives is essential to a successful plan.
Once you’ve accomplished strategic clarity and alignment, incorporate the objectives into your annual plan in stages by breaking them down into smaller, manageable pieces called strategies, actions and individual priorities. These can then be tracked by the quarter, a process I’ve also detailed in “The Power of Planning” article. Next, communicate the plan.
Over Communicate Annual Objectives
Strategic Objectives, and any new systems being incorporated to achieve them, should be discussed on a regular basis throughout the company across all levels of management.
If you want buy-in and a resulting improvement in business acumen, efficiencies and accountability, then you must consistently communicate, teach, promote and track your company’s annual objectives, beginning with how you plan to accomplish them and what’s in it for every team member.
Generally speaking, a successful leader publicly commits to their organization’s plan and role models a focus on the top objectives, sharing the rationale behind the objectives’ importance and the benefits to the teams and the company as a whole. I practiced this everyday as an owner – it’s called leadership accountability and makes the signs of success clear to all team members – no excuses!
Again, depending on the size of the company, the bandwidth of leadership and management in general, your consistent communication of your objectives could be in all-company meetings one to four times per year, in restaurant team meetings on a quarterly basis or you could, if need be, communicate to your team members in writing via e-mail or other digital communication tools, and follow-up in person during team or menu meetings. Ongoing, defined and transparent communication from the top down through your organization is essential.
Creating and implementing a cadence (frequency and format) for managing your 2025 planning Objectives, Strategies, Actions and Priorities leads to the third action.
Reinforce Through Systems and Ways of Working
Implementing a planning system that tracks objectives and their defined outcomes requires a system of regular communication and priority management in order to continually assess what has or has not been accomplished by each responsible team member.
If you don’t already have a regular communication schedule in your company, introduce a basic system now to create consistency within your teams working from and communicating the annual plan. Like operational SOPs, your company should use communication systems and schedules with standardized semantics (terminology) at every level so everyone is “on the same page.”
Align the cadence and content of weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to review the progress of the objectives and get them on the calendar for the year. I would recommend a cadence and content plan similar to the following:
Weekly One-on-Ones (Partner Meeting; Partners/Directors; Directors/GMs & ECs; GMs & ECs/Assistants & Sous’). One standard priority/time management-type document should be used as the agenda for all one-on-one meetings. This document guides your discussion of progress on personal development goals, monthly Individual Priorities related to Strategies and Actions, ongoing tasks and responsibilities that a manager needs assistance or guidance with or something a supervisor just wants an update on. Try to keep this meeting to one hour!
Monthly. This meeting would include partners and directors and is the forum for each person to report on the top three items they have completed or moved forward from their designated Actions/Priorities over the last month as well as the top three items they will be working on in the coming month. This is also the forum in which to discuss obstacles a person may be having with their Priorities and to ask for help from someone in the group if needed.
This meeting is also a good opportunity for the responsible partner or other designated manager to review the overall financial performance of the restaurant or company from the previous month.
Quarterly. This meeting includes partners and directors (possibly GMs and Chefs if appropriate to your company) and is similar to the monthly meeting but goes into more detail.
Each person reports on the status of their Objectives and/or Strategies from the entire previous quarter and informs the group on their level of success (green, yellow or red) related to accomplishing their Objectives and/or Strategies. If yellow or red, explain why and what will be done to catch up and get it on track or not. They should also briefly give the group an overview of the top objectives and/or strategies they will be working on in the upcoming quarter.
Step-by-step, day-by-day, next-level consistency in using these strategies is the key to your success. Peter Drucker famously said in 1956, “unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes – but no plans,” a sentiment that rings just as true today as it did a generation ago.
It may at first seem tedious and difficult to fine-tune and clearly document your objectives, then communicate them clearly across the company on a relentlessly consistent schedule, but after a short period of time you will enjoy how productive you and your teams have become. Remember, improving the health and well-being of your organization starts by becoming a more effective and productive company.
Sustained effort wins!
