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Do you want any of these for your business in the coming year? Peace of mind. Consistency. Efficiency. Scalability. More Fun. And of course, more profit. Every leadership team that I’ve worked with seems to have an instant eagerness to improve upon these areas in their business, regardless of industry.

The key to achieving these goals in the new year is a three-step exercise of identifying, documenting, and following your company’s Core Processes. It’s not a sexy solution, but it’s incredibly powerful. And it’s not as painful as you might think.

Annual planning season is upon us. This is the time of year that many of my clients have their two-day offsite annual planning sessions. It’s their opportunity to reflect on last year’s successes and misses, as well as getting clear on where to focus their time, energy, and resources over the coming year.

In a recent annual planning session with a financial services company, the six-person leadership team had an a-ha moment. They are all very polite, friendly people who are hard workers, but they didn’t fully trust each other. They trusted each other to do their jobs and get stuff done, but they didn’t have a vulnerability-based trust. What does this mean?

For a company to be successful, they’ve got to have great people on their team. Great people are people who fit seamlessly into your culture, they share your core values, and they’re very talented for their role in the business. Once they were hired in and brought up to speed, everything felt great.

Then one day something changed. You can’t put your finger on the exact moment, but suddenly they don’t feel as great as they once did in that position. This feeling is subtly nagging in the back of your mind, but you’ve got too many other things going on at the moment to address it.

The 5-5-5 quarterly conversation will give you a meaningful, real 1-on-1 time with each of your direct reports and will give you the opportunity to make course corrections along the way. You’ll both stay firmly on the same page, raising the level of accountability of your team.