Leveraging Leadership

Using Flash Reports to Improve Leadership Communication and Keep the Board Happy

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 150

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Emily Sander discusses the benefits of flash reports in tracking company performance. Flash reports provide a quick overview with KPIs from each department and brief updates from department leaders. They help leadership teams stay informed and enhance board relations by facilitating clear and direct communication.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:57 The Role of Flash Reports in Leadership
01:17 Components of a Flash Report
04:37 Benefits of Flash Reports
10:42 Iterating on Flash Reports

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All right, as we wind down this discussion in this series on operationalizing strategy through the lens of balanced scorecard, I wanted to talk about flash reports. So flash reports have been enormously beneficial and advantageous for me, and have come up in so many conversations with chiefs of staff and executives. So I definitely wanted to make sure to touch on this. Flash reports can be a component of the balanced scorecard. methodology and program overall, they can also be standalone. So you can use them on their own. Let me talk about how we use flash reports and then what a flash report is comprised of. So how we use flash reports. We would go over this flash report every week as a leadership team. In our weekly leadership team meetings. And then we would also send a copy of a flash report to our board members every week. And they would look at that. A flash report is meant to be a quick snapshot of the company and how it's doing and the general performance of each department. It is not meant to be a like. Four hour, let's deep dive into every little thing. Nook and cranny type of deal. It's meant to be like, got it in my email. Let me scan it. Let me read through. Got it. Got it. Okay. Looks good. Or let me read through, scan, scan. Got it. Got it. I have a few questions. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Here's my followup questions. It's meant to be that cadence and exercise. All right. What. Is a flash report comprised of there's two main sections. So the first section and in our format, it was the top section was a, as a dashboard of one to three KPIs per department. So one to three KPIs for each major department. So like one KPI This is like, again, not comprehensive. This is a green light, red light. This is a, are we generally moving in the right direction? Or are there some red flags here that we have to know about? That's the first part, the dashboard with the high level KPIs. The second part, which was really cool, and I, like, this is my favorite part. It was a write up, so like two to five sentences, a quick, short, brief write up from each department leader about what had happened in their department in that week. And so like COO for us, it was like, it was the C suite member. So COO, CFO, CTO, et cetera, et cetera, would write some of them would do bullet points. Some of them would write two full paragraphs. Some of them had something in between. Some of them would always have this one initiative. And then like a few words that would give like a status update that everyone understood what that meant. And so just whatever made sense for them, but it gave them a chance. To, to convey and to say in their own words, what had been going on in their department and why you might be seeing certain things or certain trends in the KPIs or something that you should be aware that's happening. Um, and we were very transparent and our board loved this like challenges. Like, holy expletive, this came out of nowhere, we're having to deal with this right now. Or, oh my gosh, this product took off way faster than we thought, like now we're having to deal with these, like how do we deliver this thing? Because it's selling like crazy, which is a great problem to have. But anything that was going on in the department, um, candidate pipelines, how has our new marketing campaign going? Um, have we moved the, you know, office equipment over from the old office to the new office, everything across the board was talked about in this bottom section of the flash report. Again, this wasn't The sequel to war and peace that you have to write every week. It was like bullet points or two to five sentences. Didn't have to be fancy. It could just be like in your own words. It was really nice for both the leadership team to be able to do that. And the board loved it. They love the KPIs, of course, the numbers, but they loved hearing from the leaders in their own words. All right. So you've got this like one page, like one to two pages. It depends on kind of how you want to format it or what tool you're using. We started in a word or a Google doc, and then it moved to a spreadsheet. And then eventually we had it come automatically out of salesforce. So whatever you have, if it's. It's like a spreadsheet. If it's a sauna, if it's money. com, if it's whatever other tool you have, um, that can generate this thing, you can make the template what you want, but it's a quick, easy snapshot. It's a flash report that has these two main sections in them. And here's the benefits of a flash report for the leadership team in our weekly meetings. We would have a round robin portion of the meeting where everyone gave an outbrief of what was happening in their department. The flash report, the draft of the flash report would be collected and sent to the leadership team prior to that meeting. So I'm not going to say every leader read it beforehand, but they had the opportunity to read the flash report before they got to that meeting. And so everyone should. Be informed about what was going on, and then they could have a quick verbal debrief from the department head, and then people could have questions and have discussion and just open conversation about those topics. But those were kind of like the the flash report and the. little write ups and KPIs on the flash report could serve as the starting point for those types of discussions in the round robin part of the part of the meeting. The other thing we did in that meeting was say, okay, let's make sure we're all synced up and we're all aligned amongst ourselves amongst the leadership team. And if we need to make some edits or adjustments to the flash report, Before it goes to the board, we can. And this wasn't like in a manipulative way, like let's lie to the board. It was just like, Oh wait, you're counting that number like this. We're doing this on a different like time horizon. So, um, if you didn't know that these numbers would look like, wait, what marketing is saying this and sales is saying this. That doesn't make sense at first blush, but oh, if we switch the time horizon, so we're both doing last 30 days or whatever, then they sync up. So things like that we would catch in those, in those types of meetings. If we knew that something was going to be a hot topic with the board, um, and our CEO and our CFO would have Would have touch points with the board separate from our quarterly board meeting separate from, um, the larger leadership team meeting with the board. So if, if we knew that they were going to get questions about something, we would give them information to hopefully be helpful in those conversations. but we would do that alignment and have those conversations. I, or perhaps our CFO or CEO would make the quick edits to the flash report and then send that up to the board. The board loved flash reports. Love flash reports. So they would look at it every week. They would read every number, read every word. Oftentimes they would have quick follow up questions, on email. And more often they would in their subsequent calls with the CEO and CFO have more, um, I don't want to say like. Better questions, but just like more informed questions. Like their questions would be closer to the pin because they had read the flash report and cause they knew why this was happening and what was going on in general, and then they would have a more specific question that was just, it led to, um, more, I don't want to say engaged, but just, uh, You could get to the core of an issue quicker on those conversations because they had read through the flash report. So it was really cool to have our CEO and CFO be able to have those types of conversations, which just helped the relationship with the board and the board members, which Is, is hugely important and lots of good things come from that because of the flash report and then even in the quarterly board meetings where some of our C suite members would only interact with the board at those quarterly board meetings, the board would be able to say things like, Hey, you know, so, and so I, I, you know, I've, I've been reading, or I know that you've been working on X, Y, and Z and some of our, Team members were like, they remembered, like they know that I'm working on that and it's like, yeah, they do because it's tied to what they care about. But yes, they've been tracking kind of how that's going and how that's progressing. So it was really cool to have to have those types of things going on. In fact, our board loved that. Flash report so much. Um, we had a private equity group, um, We were PE backed and they had all of their portfolio companies do a flash report because they liked how it works so much with us. So that's how much, they liked it and that's how powerful it can be. And so the benefits are, it's a good exercise for the leadership team. To go through and put together a flash report every week and look at the numbers and be able to talk about what's happening in your department. Be aware of what's happening in other departments. And I would sit there and like, clearly as chief of staff, I'm interested in all departments, but I could see people who. We're in one department and like what another department was talking about wasn't directly, affecting their day to day, but it was just good for them to know. And you could see they really appreciated being made aware of like, Oh, okay. That's happening. That's happening for you. Okay. Okay. That might be coming down the pike. To us that we have to have a heads up. Okay. Got it. Or, Oh, Hey, when I do this, I've got to let this person know. Cause that they depend on this from my team. So you could see all of like the light bulbs, clicking all the little latches, like clicking into place across the team. And that was, that was, um, very, just cool to watch from like a team, like chief of staff, like watching your team, but also very effective for us as a group to be able to have that conversation. Visibility and information sharing. And then of course helped our board relations and board governance. It helped the conversations be more fruitful at the individual kind of one on one CEO, CFO calls. Also, if they were to interact and want to talk to another team member. Um, they would be closer to the pin on those conversations and then also in our quarterly board meetings. So all, all across the board, no pun intended, these flash reports were super, super helpful. The accountability was built into it. Um, the transparency was built into it and everyone just knew like, Hey, if we're going to put this in the flash report, here's what that means. all this to say, if you are taking on balance scorecard as your overall methodology, then I would absolutely include some sort of flash report. If you are like, I have nothing to do with balance scorecard, but, Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. Emily, I would highly encourage you to have something like a flash report because they're so cool. And. They can be super, super simple, and then you can iterate on them over time. And what I mean by that, if you're like, Holy cow, that sounds amazing, but I don't want to have this like heavy lift for the team, then make it super simple. Like do the thin slice version, do the MVP version just to get this concept out to the team and just to get this like cadence going with the team, and then you can like build on it over time. So it might just be the dashboard portion, or it might just be like, Write me like three bullet points of what happened in your week or in your month or whatever is gonna be easiest for you to implement. Um, and it might be, uh, you can put this on a sticky note. You can put this on a napkin. You can screenshot with your phone and send it to me. You can send me a carrier pigeon. You can send smoke signals to get this information to me. That's V one. And then over time you iterate on that where, okay, now we're gonna automate some of these data sources and we're gonna spend a little, uh, a little time, maybe a cycle or two. with the infrastructure tech team to get this information automatically ported in from this system to this one in the way we want. And that's how our flash reports are automatically generated now. So you can start small, but get it going and then iterate as you go. But I would highly encourage you to have something like a flash report in place. Okay. other major takeaways as we close out, this series would be just kind of in the same vein, like have something like the balance scorecard. Okay. Ours are totally fine. EOS is great. Um, there's many, many other strategic planning, um, tools out there, but make sure you have something where people are, um, rowing in the same direction. They're speaking a common language. They have a shared model that everyone is bought into and built into. So like when we had balanced scorecards soup to nuts at one company, I worked for everyone from our senior board member to our most junior to like a new hire, like day one, new hire, they would get an overview of balanced scorecard. So everyone across the company was, integrated into balance scorecard and everyone knew what people were talking about across teams, across functions, across levels, across whatever, when we talked about balance scorecard and like, it sounds kind of dorky, but it was fun. Like it was fun to be able to like, okay, here's the system we're operating with. And everyone's bought into this. It's not just like checking a box or putting a number in a spreadsheet or like rattling off reports here and there. It needs to be like a management system. Like a whole, a whole ecosystem that you build. All right, next and final takeaway here. This goes for a balanced scorecard for anything you hear in this podcast. And honestly, anything you hear in life, if something is helpful. And relevant to you right now, go use it. If something isn't, then discard it. So anything in this discussion about balance scorecard and operationalizing strategy, if you're like, Oh my gosh, that's gold. Like, yes, we need to be doing that right now. Then go do it. If it's like this part's gold and this part is not for us, that would not work for us. Ooh, like, no, that would, that would be bad for us. Then, then don't use it. That's totally fine. So I would encourage people just to have that mentality across the board and whatever they're doing. sometimes people get in these mentalities where like, I have to use all of something or it's all bad or all good or whatever. Just, I would, I would dismantle that pretty quickly and say, just take the pieces that work for you out of anything and discard the rest and make it all your own. There's a Bruce Lee quote about this. I'm not going to try to quote it now because I can't remember, but it's something to the effect of like, take what works, discard what doesn't and make it all your own. So I would say that certainly for you. Strategic planning for operationalizing strategy, but with scorecard flash reports, but also a myriad of other applications across business and life as well. and with that, I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.