Over the years of coaching mid-size service firms, those with 25-100 staff, I’ve encountered a curious situation. When engaging with a new client, I like to interview line-staff from different departments. I ask questions like: how do you think things are going, is this a company on the rise or decline, do you see yourself here in 10 years? What’s interesting is how wildly different the answers can be from one department to the next. Some departments seem to have a cheery outlook on the business while others have a droll and uncertain view.

Why do I bring this up? Lopsided sentiment, particularly at departmental edges, is an indicator of a lack of alignment between leaders, creating drag and stunting growth. Usually, employee sentiment is a direct reflection of leader sentiment. When leaders have substantially different outlooks on the business, it creates confusion and uncertainty in staff, inhibiting them from taking autonomous action in line with your goals. That slows growth. I’d like to show you how to fix this.

A Monthly Operating Objectives Scorecard

The best solution I’ve ever discovered to this problem is a simple tool I call a MOOS—a Monthly Operating Objectives Scorecard. This is an important part of the Leadership Operating Model I now recommend and implement for all of my clients. A MOOS is pretty simple to operate but very complex in what it does for service firms. First, I’ll describe how a MOOS works and then I’ll outline five reasons I believe you need this tool.

I now use MOOS almost exclusively with leadership councils at service firms. This tool documents the sentiment of council members about the current state of the business by giving key metrics a score. The metrics can be anything that matters to the council. None of my clients have the same metrics. I recommend that you use a simple red, yellow, green moniker to score each metric.

• Green means things are going well.
• Yellow means things are okay but need work.
• Red means things are not going well.

Clear enough right? So what do you document every month? It’s entirely up to your team to decide what you want to grade. But the key thing is that this is about monthly operations. This is about specific operational areas of the business and how they’re performing against what you expect. Here are some examples of the kinds of things my clients score every month:

• Revenue and expenses. Are we coming in at or under budget and is revenue where we hoped it would be?
• Marketing. Is our marketing plan producing the results we hoped to see and how can we know this to be true?
• Growth. Are we on a growth arc or is growth declining?
• Pipeline. Is our pipeline fat with prospects and deals or is it drying out?
• Client experience. Are we delivering the client experience we promised and are our clients happy?
• Morale. Are our employees engaged and working together like a well-oiled machine or are there problems that we must address?
• Operational stability. Are our IT systems, facilities, processes and overall operations working smoothly or are we encountering bottlenecks?
• Compliance (for those in regulated industries). Are we at-risk in any area and what would happen if we were audited right now?
• Happiness. Are we happy as a leadership council or is anyone in danger of burning out or wanting to leave?

How To Use A MOOS

Leadership councils get together every month to give each metric a grade. Sometimes they get together in person. But during COVID, most of my clients held these meetings remotely. These sessions tend to last about an hour, but that depends on several factors. The more council members get to know each other, the faster the meetings seem to go.

Most of my clients have seven leadership council members. During the session, I will randomly pick a council member and ask them to score a metric. Then I open the floor to other council members to see how they would score the same metric. If I hear differences, I dig in to discover why the sentiment between the leaders is different. (By the way, it’s really helpful to have a coach do this, not an employee).

In nine out of ten cases, both perspectives have merit. But here’s the thing. There can only be one score for every metric—the team’s score. This means team members have to explain their reasoning and where they’re coming from. This process actually creates alignment and illumination between departmental leaders. Council members walk away with a far greater sense of what’s happening overall with the company.

Why Your Firm Needs A MOOS

1. Different leaders see different things. It’s easy to be myopic in business. The dialogue that this tool fosters tends to produce a much more well-rounded perspective on almost any topic. When council members weigh in on the same topic but with different perspectives, this reduces the likelihood that you’ll miss important details that the council should be aware of. But it also tends to balance out how council members overall see the firm. They walk away from these meeting with a far more wholistic perspective that is aligned with other leaders. Staff in different departments can feel this alignment and it gives them confidence in the leaders and the firm.
2. Scorecards help you spot and address problems before they hurt you. There is a simple rule I recommend to clients that has delivered a lot of benefits. If a given metric is scored red three months in a row, it will automatically be a candidate for a Collective Objective. This one simple rule has helped my clients foreground problems that are often only visible to one department leader but that could impact the entire organization negatively. It has also helped them solve problems before they do the business real damage.
3. It’s easy to forget why you made certain decisions. Collective memory is a tricky thing. But with a MOOS, you can go right back to a month or two before you made a decision and look at the scores you put forward. For instance, some clients have made sizable investments in technology and the reason they did so is because three months in a row their Operational Stability metric received a red rating.
4. Scorecards foster sympathy between council members who then make better choices. I once had a client-service leader agree to postpone a major upgrade for a year simply because he could see how the budget could be better spent elsewhere. If he had not been hearing from other leaders, his mindset would have been focused on his department’s needs.
5. There can only be one grade—the company grade. This requires leaders to compromise and come to alignment—even when they have differing perspectives. If one leader sees morale as red while another sees it as green, they cannot both be right. Usually, in these situations, leaders will compromise on a yellow rating. In my experience, the compromise grade comes closest to the actual state of affairs for the business overall.

A Good Next Step

If you’d like to learn more about how leadership councils can leverage a MOOS, I’d like to recommend a resource. I’ve written an eBook on this topic that goes into much greater detail about the situations discussed in this article. If you found this article insightful, I know you’ll love the eBook.

About The Author

Randy Shattuck is a seasoned entrepreneur who works hand-in-hand with senior leaders of mid-size professional service firms to grow revenues, acquire clients, open new markets, increase profits and effectively position their brands.