QBR Anti-Patterns
We’re closing in on the end of the first week of the quarter. Hopefully by now, monthly invoices have been sent and the dust has settled on the previous quarter.
Maybe your team has a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) scheduled in the coming weeks. There will be bottomless coffee, but will you leave it energized and engaged, or will you head home with a jittery sense of having seen this movie before and knowing exactly how it will end (and start again) in 3 months?
Here are some of the anti-patterns to avoid this QBR season:
Too much data, not enough discussion.
Especially with leaders early in their careers, they sometimes struggle with “bringing others along for the ride.” They’re so in the weeds on their area of expertise that they don’t know what others don’t know. This can lead them to present data and assume that everyone else around the table knows how to interpret it.
By leading with a hypothesis around action the agency should take in the coming quarter, and then using data to back that up, presenters must contextualize the data for the others. It also helps them filter out unnecessary data, as only data supporting their recommendations is brought into the conversation.
Too little data, too much “let’s just see.”
Agencies need to experiment. They need to do weird shit sometimes that fills their souls, and I’m all for that. I believe in decision-making based on intuition, but with caveats:
It needs to be a collective intuition.
Intuition in the absence of data is good; intuition that’s contrary to data is just obstinate.
Caveat #1: The life of an agency founder or owner can be quite solitary. And in many cases, they’ve gotten to where they’re at by following their intuition alone. But they also tend to have selective memories that downplay when or the degree to which their intuition has been wrong. This is actually a good thing in many cases, because it maintains their confidence. But when it becomes an issue is when that owner is surrounded by other very smart and capable leaders. These leaders are not mere executors. They want to leverage the experience of everyone in the room, and they want to see collaborative decision-making. They know that when two or more strong leaders have a shared intuition – that’s far more powerful than any one individual’s gut.
Caveat #2: There is a difference between ignoring data and not having data. Making a decision based on intuition, when there is existing data that argues against it, is just stubborn. Unless you have reason to believe the data is invalid or others are extrapolating it erroneously, you shouldn’t allow intuition to override data. Get lucky is not a strategy. But that doesn’t mean that all decisions need to be justified with data. Make decisions based on collective intuition when there’s no data to indicate that you shouldn’t.
Reinventing the agency.
Tackle the existential strategy questions in retreats and keep QBRs for tactics.
If the team is asking Good to Great-type questions at a QBR, the CEO has some work to do:
Why do our clients work with us?
Why do our people work here?
What are we working towards?
These questions are best tackled in a retreat setting, ideally off-site with limited distractions and inspiring environs.
Alternatively, a QBR should be answering tactical questions in the uninspired, windowless bowels of a Marriott:
What are our delivery, financial, and people targets for the next 3, 6, or 12 months? What projects will hold that work and who will lead them?
Has the quality of our services increased, decreased, or remained the same?
How well are getting in front of clients who could work with us?
Is our team size appropriate? And if we’re hiring, what roles will we need to bring on?
Hopefully you can see how the headspace for a retreat and a QBR are quite different. Even if the team can shift gears quickly from strategy to tactics, there’s something to be said for the time it takes for team members to internalize new strategy. You don’t want half-baked goals or internal initiatives resulting from rushed strategy.
If you’re coming up on QBR season, but the agency really needs to do some soul-searching, my recommending is: cancel the QBR and replace it with a retreat. After the retreat, do an ad-hoc planning day for your team to create just enough goals to get the agency to the next QBR.
Too many goals.
Agencies like to joke about clients who have the budget for a Volkswagen but ask for a Porsche. Yet at QBR, agency leaders themselves often try to fit too much work into the next quarter. I think the work is a Porsche and the quarter is a Volkswagen in this analogy...
Nevermind the analogy! The point I’m trying to make is that teams need to head into QBR understanding their capacity.
Senior team members don’t knowingly carve out more work than their plate can fit; rather, they don’t know how much room they have on their plate. (I think this analogy works better).
By looking at the projects they completed in the previous quarter, and then ballparking a similar amount of work for the upcoming quarter, your team can start to right-size their workloads. Even better, have team members hold dedicated time each week for internal initiatives. Make it time that can’t be scheduled over. Then folks arrive at QBR knowing they have 8 or 16 hours each week for the work they’ll be scoping out.*
*I’m not naive to think that this is practical. This can actually become the primary responsibility of a Managing Director or Chief Operating Officer – acting as a sort of internal program manager for the agency’s leadership team.
One other thing I’ll call out here: too many goals can be a sign of issues with the business strategy. There are only so many mountains that a team can move. Some work should actually be easy, because the business strategy is tailored to the team’s strengths. So, if the goals are many and wide-ranging, reconsider if they’re appropriately focused on the vision and the vision itself is realistic.
“Offline” decision-making.
When you have your entire leadership team together, that’s an expensive meeting. But it’s also an investment in alignment that you can’t afford to miss, so push back on efforts for team members to back-channel decision-making into 1:1 meetings.
“Let’s take this offline,” will be the natural inclination of folks when disagreement arises in a group setting, but as long as the topic at hand is high-value, let it play out.
Not only does the resolution keep everyone on the same page, but the interaction itself can be hugely valuable from a cultural perspective: with the facilitators guidance, it demonstrates to the leadership group how they’re expected to work through disagreement. The discussion should remain respectful, and the agency’s leaders should arrive at a mutually agreeable solution relatively quickly.
Discussing urgent, but not important matters.
Kindly ask that folks save urgent, but not important discussions for break time or after QBR. Common culprits will include low-level drama on in-flight client projects, overdue client invoices of $500, and intractable “HR” matters, which honestly, are never going to get resolved until so-and-so just develops some emotional intelligence.
If you could use a hand with the planning or execution of your agency’s next QBR…
