Before Your Budget Meeting
Five tools to show your leadership team what your management development program changed, and to keep the program going for every manager you promote or hire.
You get a PDF guide and five editable Word templates, all free.
When the CFO asks what changed
Imagine you're in next year's budget meeting, and the CFO asks what your management development program changed. Attendance and workshop ratings are easy to report, but a 4.6 out of 5 rarely settles a budget question.
What changed on the managers' teams is harder to show, because the answer depends on decisions you made months earlier: how you answered the leader who asked for a team day, what you wrote into the facilitator's agreement, how you protected the program when leaders changed, what you measured before the first session, and whether the program kept going after the first group.
This toolkit gives you one tool for each of those decisions.
What's inside
The 30-minute conversation
Reach for it when a leader asks you for a workshop or a team day.
Four requests for any outside proposal
Use it in the weeks before you sign with an outside facilitator.
A one-page continuity plan
Write it while your current leaders are in place, or in the first weeks after a new CEO or executive director arrives.
A measurement tracker
Set it up before the program starts, so you have a starting point for your six- and twelve-month comparisons.
A plan to keep the program alive
Agree on its ground rules before the first group starts, and have the rest in place by the time that group finishes.
Five editable Word templates
Each tool comes with two worked examples, one set in a company and one in a nonprofit, and a template you can open in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Get your free copy
Tell us where to send it, and we'll email you the toolkit and the five Word templates right away.
- Five tools for the decisions that come before a budget meeting
- A Word template for each tool
- Two worked examples for each tool, one set in a company and one in a nonprofit
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About the author
Frank November, Founder & CEO, Symphony 100
Frank has worked in senior HR roles in technology, nonprofits, consulting, manufacturing, and entertainment. He has been an Everything DiSC® Certified Practitioner since 2014 and is a Five Behaviors® Certified Practitioner.
© 2026 Symphony 100 Ltd. The toolkit is general guidance, not legal advice. You're welcome to copy and adapt the templates for use inside your own organization.