High performance teams move your business towards your quarterly goals by creating weekly Who What When lists that keep everyone focused on the critical milestones that must be achieved during the week.
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Why Use Who What When Lists?
Hi Everyone, I am Coach David J. Greer. Today I want to talk to you about Who, What, When lists. Who is accountable? When is it going to get done? What is the outcome?
Every high-performance team that I’ve worked with has created weekly who, what, when lists. In your weekly team meeting start with your quarterly objectives and then work out what are the milestones that absolutely must happen this week.
Now there is a real art in choosing what these milestones should be. They should be ones that the majority of the team are involved with or are impacted by the outcome. You want to get the right level of granularity—not too fine and not too coarse.
Let’s take a specific example. Let’s say today is a Monday and we are doing our team meeting. A week Thursday is a Board of Directors meeting. For next week you want to have a milestone of the Board of Director [Meeting] and the CEO is normally the one that owns that particular activity. Then the Board package needs to go out by next Tuesday. The deadline for the board package is to have it delivered by next Tuesday. One person needs to own that particular task.
The Board package consists of multiple different things. That will include a financial package, typically a PowerPoint presentation and different people will be responsible for each of those pieces. You will need to coordinate together to make sure they are all reviewed and that the Board package goes out on time. From that you create your Who What When list to deliver the Board package on time so that you can be ready and have an awesome Board of Directors meeting a week Thursday.
If you use project management systems, you want to extract from those the very significant milestones that are going to have an impact on the entire team. Make sure those milestones are written down and part of the Who What When list.
What I’ve discovered is that if you want high performance, you and your team need to come to an agreement on Who What and When you are going to do every week. Then hold each other accountable to do it.
