🥁 The OffBeat #69: How to Build a Plan on a Page

Jazz charts for the workplace

This is The OffBeat, from jazz drummer, two-decade marketing leader, and mom of two Allison Stadd: music-inspired answers for your leadership challenges, like how leading is like sound-mixing.

It’s a new year! Let’s talk strategy.

Ask anyone who’s worked for me in the last decade and they’ll probably mention my love of the “plan on a page.” As previously professed, I believe clarity is of paramount importance when it comes to leadership—and how much clearer can you get than distilling your plan for the year into a single, simple slide?

Here’s how I think about a plan on a page, since there are lots of different versions:

• Contains all the biggest-picture items your team and partners need to grasp your high-level strategy quickly: what work your team is prioritizing, why, measured by what, leveraging what cultural principles?

  • I like to adhere roughly to an “OIKR” approach: Objectives, Initiatives, Key Results

• Ladders up to the enterprise vision, objectives, and goals so that everyone on your team understands the role they play in furthering macro-scale progress

• Can be mapped out annually, quarterly, or by half, depending on the business

• Co-created with your leadership team, ideally including input from their teams, in order to incorporate perspectives and ideas from the broadest possible group and maximize buy-in; caveat = you, as the leader, need to establish the immoveable strategic guardrails within which the team can ideate

When I first started noticing the interoperability between music and corporate leadership, it wasn’t just strategic interplay between the two spheres that struck me (working as a unit, listening, improvising—all the ideas that make up The OffBeat’s content!), it was language itself. Words like signature, feedback, note, wavelength, brass, key, chart—these all play (play!) a role in both music and the workplace. It’s that last one, chart, that’s relevant for today’s piece.

A chart in workplace terms can serve purposes like representing the hierarchical relationships of a team, or visualizing the channel breakdown of a marketing mix. In jazz terms, a chart is essentially high-level sheet music. It shows the roadmap for the piece but each musician has some freedom within that framework. A jazz chart sketches out the big picture of the piece but doesn’t rigorously dictate every detail.

Source: MusicBanter

MusicBanter has a great description:

“[A] chart is something like a diagram of the music and its movement—a flowchart, basically. It essentially tells the musician to ‘start here by playing this and then move here and play this, repeat this twice and then go here and play this and then move onto this part and play this and then everybody take a solo and then go back and repeat the last two parts and then jump to this ending by playing this.’… [C]harts are, by their nature, rather loose. Rarely does one encounter a jazz piece, especially a standard, that is rigidly dictated on paper the way classical music is. The chart leaves a lot of open space for improvisation and personal interpretation.”

That ethos is how I approach building a plan on a page. I want to ensure everyone has clarity on the big-picture initiatives we’re driving against, and why, but flexibility in how they’ll tackle the work.

An executive coach a few years back shared with me the concept of “self-determination theory”; essentially, people have three basic psychological needs for growth and development:

• Autonomy: The feeling of choice

• Competence: The experience of mastery

• Relatedness: A sense of belongingness

It’s a framework, out of all the listening and reading and reflecting I do around leadership, that has stuck with me. Cultivating a team culture that allows people to act autonomously, develop proficiency in their work, and build trusting relationships with one another is a pretty tidy summary of what I’m trying to do as a leader. And it’s those aims that manifest in how I approach building a strategic plan.

Below, for paid subscribers, my editable “plan on a page” template.

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