June is the month that sneaks up on you.
You blink and suddenly the weather is warm, the kids have approximately one million end-of-year events on the calendar, and someone in your office has already started talking about beach weekends. It feels celebratory and it feels light. But underneath all of that, if you are paying attention, it also feels a little like a reckoning.
Because Q2 is over. And Q3 is here whether you are ready or not.
I think about this every year around this time, and not just because it is my job to. As the Integrator at 57th Street Partners, my role is essentially to be the person who makes sure the things we said we were going to do actually get done. Our Visionary looks at the horizon and I look at the road. I track what is moving, what is stuck, and what has quietly been pushed to "next week" for the last six weeks in a row.
June is when that accounting gets real.
In EOS, we organize quarterly priorities around what we call Rocks: the handful of things a team commits to completing in a given quarter. The idea is simple. The follow-through is where it gets interesting. Because somewhere between a strong Q1 close and a busy spring, a few of those Rocks tend to get a little dusty. Not dropped. Just... parked. Waiting for a less chaotic week.
Here is the thing I have learned: that week does not show up on its own. You have to go find it.
So right now, as Q2 closes and Q3 kicks off, I am doing what I always do this time of year. I am looking at the gap between where we said we would be and where we actually are, and I am getting honest about what that gap is telling us. Sometimes it is a timing issue. Sometimes it is a resource issue. And sometimes it means a goal that made complete sense in January needs to be renegotiated now that we know more. That is not a failure. That is just how real planning works.
What I try not to do is let things sit quietly in the corner while Q3 planning starts happening around them. Because if it mattered enough to commit to, it deserves a real conversation before we move on.
I think this is true for any leadership team, not just ones running on EOS. Every organization needs someone, or ideally a few someones, who are willing to look at what is stalled and ask why. Not to assign blame, but to figure out what it would actually take to move it forward. That one question, asked honestly and without defensiveness, tends to unlock more than any planning retreat ever will.
The other thing I keep coming back to is this: the way you close one quarter sets the tone for how the next one starts. When you carry unresolved decisions and half-finished projects into a new quarter, they do not disappear. They just compete with everything new you are trying to launch. And that is when teams start feeling perpetually behind, even when everyone is genuinely working hard.
So as Q3 gets underway, it is worth carving out even an hour with your leadership team to ask: what did we commit to that never got real attention? What is stalled because of an actual obstacle, and what is stalled because we just kept kicking it? What decision, if we finally made it, would move three other things forward?
You do not need a perfect framework to have that conversation. You just need to have it.
And honestly, June is actually a great time for it. People are energized by the change of season. There is still plenty of runway before year-end to make something meaningful happen. And there is something about the start of summer that makes things feel possible again, if you use it well.
The quarter is just getting started. Do not let it get away from you.
Warmly,
Katie Perry, VP of Operations & EOS Integrator, 57th Street Partners
Want to discuss your executive search or fractional leadership needs? Scroll down to start a conversation with our team.