As a company grows, a founder stops seeing everything firsthand. That’s the point of building a team. But it creates a new problem: how do you know the business is on course without sitting in every meeting or asking everyone for updates?
The answer is a short weekly routine that reads the same signals in the same order. Clarion puts those signals in a few places. This guide is the order to read them in, and what to do with what you find.
Why a routine beats a gut feel
Founders usually have a good instinct for the business, but instinct is weighted towards whatever was loudest this week: the angry client, the exciting deal. A routine is weighted evenly. It shows you the quiet problem in a department you haven’t visited in a while, and it shows you the good news nobody thought to mention.
It also protects your team. If you check the same signals every week, you don’t need to ask people for ad-hoc updates, which is one of the most disruptive things a founder can do.
Step 1: The dashboard (three minutes)
Open the dashboard. Across the top are three tiles:
- Milestones On Track: how many of this quarter’s open milestones are on track.
- Metrics Hitting Target: how many metrics are at or above target this week.
- Open Challenges, with how many are escalated.
Below them are the quarter’s milestones, your Key Metrics, Upcoming Syncs and Active Challenges. Key metrics are the ones starred on the scorecard. If the dashboard isn’t showing the numbers you care most about, star them. See use the dashboard.
Treat the tiles as a summary, not the detail. They tell you where to look next. The metrics tile counts a metric as hitting target when it’s at or above target, so check lower-is-better metrics like churn or costs on the scorecard itself, where the colours account for them.
Step 2: The scorecard (four minutes)
Open the Leadership team’s metrics. Look at three things:
- Red this week and red last week. One bad week is noise. Two is a pattern.
- The trend line. A green number trending down is often more important than a red one trending up.
- Missing values. An empty “Current” value is its own signal. Either the number is hard to get, or nobody is looking at it.
Below the scorecard, the Team Roll-Up shows each team that reports to Leadership and how many of its metrics are on target. You don’t need to open each department’s scorecard. Just look for the team that’s slipping.
If the scorecard itself isn’t telling you enough, the problem may be the scorecard. See building a weekly scorecard.
Step 3: Milestones (three minutes)
Open milestones. Look for anything off track, and check its progress bar. Progress follows from completed subtasks, so a milestone at 10% in week ten is in trouble whatever its status says.
The Team Roll-Up here does the same job as on the scorecard: one card per team, showing how its milestones are doing.
If a milestone is slipping, don’t message the owner. Check whether it’s on the challenge list. If it isn’t, that’s worth a word with your operator.
Step 4: Challenges (three minutes)
Open challenges. Leaders see a card for each team that reports to them, with open, escalated and high-priority counts and the oldest concerning items.
Look for:
- Escalated challenges. These are explicitly asking for leadership help.
- Old challenges. Each one shows how many days old it is. Anything over a month is either not really a problem or not really being solved.
- Silence. A team with no open challenges at all is often a team that has stopped raising them.
Step 5: The sync recaps (two minutes)
Each team’s sync ends with a recap posted to its Hub: wins and notables, what happened, and “What’s owed”, the action items with owners and due dates. Skim the recaps from the week’s syncs.
Each sync’s details also show past sessions and their average meeting rating. A team whose rating is falling has a meeting problem, and a meeting problem becomes a performance problem soon after.
What to do with what you find
Most weeks the answer is nothing. That’s the routine working.
When something needs attention, use the system rather than going around it:
- A problem that needs leadership: raise it as a challenge on the Leadership team, so it’s discussed in the weekly sync.
- A question for an owner: ask in the sync, not in a side message. It keeps everyone working from the same information.
- A pattern across quarters: bring it to quarterly planning. If a number has been red for a quarter, it probably needs a milestone. See setting annual priorities.
A weekly checklist
- Dashboard tiles: any surprises?
- Scorecard: red two weeks running, bad trends, missing values.
- Milestones: off track, or low progress late in the quarter.
- Challenges: escalated, old, or suspiciously absent.
- Recaps: what was decided, and how the meetings rated.
Common mistakes
Reacting to one bad week. Wait for the pattern unless it’s urgent.
Going around the owner. If you message someone directly every time a number is red, people stop putting honest numbers in.
Only reading red. Green numbers trending the wrong way are early warnings.
Checking daily. The routine is weekly for a reason. Daily checking turns into daily interfering.
Skipping it in busy weeks. The busiest weeks are when a quiet problem grows fastest. Read solving challenges before they escalate for what to do when you spot one.