Strategic planning in any size organization if done correctly becomes a critical component to growing the business. The strategic plan is meant to focus the employees (from the top down and bottom up) on doing the right work that will have meaningful impact on the company’s purpose!
Yet, strategic planning is typically a significant investment by your Executive Leadership team to establish. It is usually done annually if at all and involves members of Senior Management and C-Suite. Often the strategic planning process is labor and time intensive and far too often the following happens after the strategic plan is written down on paper:
- It lives there… on paper. The Executive Leadership team is so relieved to have completed the process of conjuring their brightest ideas and writing the plans using SMART goals (SMART criteria definition) across the functional areas of the company, no one really bothers to check it so it sits until the next planning cycle collecting dust.
- It contains the viewpoints of only the Executive Leadership team – they know what it is and the priorities, but no one else in the organization does.
- It does not become the core focus of the organization – these key targets from the plan plus additional targets outside the strategic plan are asked of the members to work on.
QUOTE “If everything is important, then nothing is important.” – Brian Mulroney
- It becomes a stone, something forbidden that cannot be changed no matter what even though we know as humans we are not very good at predicting into the future.
If you recognize these situations, either as someone involved in the creation process or you are someone that has been impacted by this process, we’d like to hear from you, to understand your situation and we’d like to know if you feel you are in a position to do something about course-correcting this process so your company can reap the real benefits of their strategic plan!
Next up in this series, we will start explaining the ways to address each of these situations one by one over the next few weeks! Don’t hesitate to give us your thoughts on the topic!