Most organizations will take the last quarter of 2019 to develop a Strategic Plan for 2020 and beyond that will focus on growing revenue and profits. From our firsthand experiences, companies fail to execute their Strategic Plan, because they do not integrate their Strategic Planning into a process that weaves daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities with strategic action. The process must focus their employees on the key tasks that move the company forward. Companies need to treat their Strategic Plan as a “process” that is dynamic and not a static “event”. Once the Strategic Plan is developed, it’s the beginning of an organizational journey that should inspire, motivate and drive alignment. Creating actions towards operational excellence.
To transform your Strategic Plan into a “process” companies need to build their Strategic Planning process around the continuous improvement process of “plan, do, check, act”. As you implement this continuous process, you are updating the plan on what is working and making the necessary adjustments for internal and external constraints. A lacking of understanding the constraints could derail the success of your strategic plan. It starts with sharing with all employees the top priorities required to move the Strategic Plan forward. Breaking these priorities into department and individual priorities that can be woven into the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly fabric of the organization ensures success.
Once the priorities are set, the next step is establishing the metrics or measurements that will determine if the priorities are moving in the right directions. Visual Scoreboards should be built for all key organizational and department priorities. By displaying the metrics on the Visual Scoreboard, it will keep focus on these priorities.
The last step in transforming a Strategic Plan into a “process” is to develop the right meeting rhythm to keep the organization focused on the organization priorities. Organization need to establish meeting rhythms that set aside a structured time daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly that allows individuals and teams to focus on the priorities required to move the Strategic Plan.
The daily meeting should be very short, less than fifteen minutes that allow individuals and teams to share relevant information and ask for help outside of the meeting to move the company forward. The weekly meeting is thirty minutes to an hour meeting to discuss progress on timelines for quarterly priorities and identify constraints that need to be addressed. The monthly meeting is one to two-hour long meeting to review key metrics to the plan and discussing the quarterly priorities to ensure they are on track. The quarterly meeting is a four to eight-hour leadership meeting that the leadership teams review the company performance against the plan and establish the new quarterly key priorities against the key initiatives to meet that yearly.
Now, it’s your turn to evaluate if your Strategic Plan is going to be “event” or a “process” that moves your organization forward in 2020. Start by asking yourself these questions. Did all your employees know the top 3 to 5 key priorities that your organization needed to achieve to make your 2019 successful year? Where the priorities broken down into team priorities that had visual scoreboards, so everyone was aligned and knew the progress of your organization priorities? Did your organization structure the meeting rhythms that allowed employees to focus on your priorities in your plan in 2019?
Accerion Partners is a boutique consulting and coaching firm.
Providing access to unique senior executive skills and experience to mid-market privately held / family owned companies allowing them to form and execute detailed value enhancement strategies to accelerate their growth
