The Strategic Plan—Preparation for Long-Term Success
Strategic planning is at the heart of how to make long-lasting changes in your organization. The process begins by looking at where you are now, where you want to go and how you will get there. Done well, a strategic plan provides an indispensable focus that energizes and moves your organization toward its goals. The plan is a valuable guide to concentrating your time, talent, and resources into a successful enterprise.
The following is a general outline of organizational strategic planning process. The most important rule of thumb is to make sure your strategic plan is clear and easy-to-understand so you will be able to communicate it to your employees. Without a clearly outlined strategic plan, your employees will not understand where they fit in and how their role supports the execution of the overall corporate strategy. Companies whose employees understand the mission and goals enjoy a 29 percent greater return than other firms (Source: Watson Wyatt Work Study).
Steps Involved in Strategic Planning
The basic keys to effective strategic planning implementation:
- Executive support
- Thorough competitive analysis and organizational planning
- Effective communication company-wide
- Employee awareness and involvement through goal alignment
- Creation of a pay-for-performance culture
Cultivate executive ownership and support in the strategic planning process:
Successful strategic planning implementation requires a large commitment from senior management, whether the strategic planning is occurring in a department, office, or within the entire organization. Executives must lead, support, follow-up, and communicate the results of the strategic planning process.
Assess the business's existing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT methodology):
Identify all of your internal strengths and weaknesses and evaluate how the external opportunities and threats will affect the business. You’ll want to use the SWOTs to help identify possible strategies as follows: Build on strengths; Resolve weaknesses; Exploit opportunities; and Avoid threats.
Design your best case scenario of your vision of the business in the next year, 3 years, 5 years:
The strategic plan should focus on what you want your business to look like. Do you want to increase revenue by 10%? Increase productivity by 20%? Create and fill a new business space? Dream BIG. You aren’t looking to maintain the status quo; you are looking to become MORE successful. With this premise, this stage should be one of exploring possibilities without constraint. Think of new ideas, explore them, and align them with the purpose of the organization.
Create a mission statement for your business–revise, if necessary:
The mission statement is a description of how the organization will or should operate at some point in the future and of how your customers or clients are benefiting from the organization's products and services. What makes your business special / competitive? If you decide to change the course of your business for any reason, the mission state can be revised to reflect your new direction.
Communicate a list of corporate values and beliefs:
This list includes the overall priorities in how the organization will operate. Some organizations focus this statement on moral values to be upheld in the workplace, such as integrity, honesty, respect, etc. These can apply to employees, customers, environment etc. As you prepare your strategic plan outlining the goals and tasks necessary to reach your objectives, you will want to ensure that everything aligns with your organization’s core values.
Analyze available corporate resources:
Examine what staffing levels, skills / competencies and financial resources are available and what levels are necessary to achieve the established goals and objectives. Management should continuously monitor the performance of the workforce on the goals. This will provide insight on whether additional resources are necessary to execute the strategic plan or whether course corrections may need to be made.
Determine a set of achievable goals and action plans:
After you have developed the key objectives of your strategic plan, turn your attention to developing individual employee goals to align with those objectives, enabling you to achieve these strategies. Goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound. From these goals, action plans should be developed to accomplish the goals to guide daily, weekly and monthly actions.
Reward for strategy execution:
Performance rewards aren’t exclusively focused on financial returns—while being paid for performance is an excellent motivational tool, there are other ways to reward your employees for executing on your strategic plan. Creation of a learning and development plan for your employees is another opportunity to compensate employees for a job well done—you are essentially investing in their long-term relationship with your company and potentially grooming them for positions with more responsibility and higher financial compensation. It’s a win-win situation. There are also non-financial rewards that can be utilized as well—flexible hours, public acknowledgments, gifts, etc.
Conclusion:
By designing a clear strategic plan, linking it to individual plans and goals and communicating it all to your employees, you will develop an engaged workforce with a plan for success. The plan will enable you to deploy a great strategy and ensure that your employees are executing on it every day.
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