This is a key question I recommend asking at the end of every period business review. It’s not about what will be different eventually, or once we get through this busy period, but what will be different in 30 days.
It sounds simple, but most capability conversations in period reviews don’t answer this question. They’re well-intentioned, but they stay at the level of the weather forecast – broad, directional, and easy to forget by next week:
“We need to work on their commercial awareness.”
“They’re almost ready.”
“Great potential, just needs more experience.”
None of that tells you what happens on Monday.
The period business review is one of the most underused levers in multi-unit management. It gets filled with financial performance, compliance scores, and operational priorities – and rightly so. But the leaders who build genuinely sustainable businesses treat capability as a financial metric. Bench strength today is your labour cost, your recruitment spend, and your revenue protection tomorrow. With period reviews being one of the four operational disciplines to achieve operational excellence, it’s important to get it right.
The problem isn’t that multi-unit managers don’t care about development. It’s that the conversation happens at a level of vagueness that makes it impossible to hold anyone – including yourself – accountable for it.
Make it granular
When you sit in a period review and talk about someone’s development, you should be able to answer three things:
1. What do they do well, and how are we using that deliberately right now? Not “they’re great with customers” – but what specific situation are we putting them in, and when?
2. What’s the one limitation most worth mitigating over the next 30 days? And what does mitigating look like in practice – what will they do, observe, be coached on, or be responsible for?
3. What will we see in 30 days that tells us something has shifted?
This is where most plans fall over; they identify the gap but never define what progress looks like.
This blog is an excerpt from a LinkedIn article by Lee Sheldon. If you’d like to find out more and discover why succession and financial performance are the same conversation, and why breaking it down makes it real, you can read it here: What will be different in 30 days?
