Strategic planning is great and all!
But many organizations fail when it comes time to make that strategic plan into a set of action items that will move the plan forward into the world of results!
This is an easy thing to have happen too.
Because in many organizations the strategic planning is handled on a high level with little input from lower levels, which makes the strategic plan feel a little stilted and unmoored from reality.
Let’s assume for a second that you did a good job of working with people up and down the organization to ensure that you had a great overview of the on the ground challenges your teams are facing and you have buy-in throughout…now what?
You need to put some actions in place to get the thing moving!
First, you need to set some short term goals.
Most strategic plans do a great job of laying out big picture ideals and dreams, but fall apart when it comes time to focus in on taking the action necessary to make these dreams reality.
To ensure that isn’t you, you need to set some short and medium term goals that directly feed into your big goals.
These goals should be measurable, output related, and time sensitive so that your teams can see progress and make adjustments much faster.
Next, you want to assign responsibility for the results and goals.
If you aren’t careful, you have a strategic plan and a set of short/medium term goals but no ownership of them.
If you do that, you are likely to come across failure.
So make certain that you assign responsibilities and teams, where possible.
Finally, you need to set a regular communication schedule.
A common complaint about any strategy is that it gets completed and begins collecting dust immediately.
One final reason for this is that there is never a communication schedule attached to reviewing progress on the strategy and plan.
If you go through the process of planning a long-term strategy and follow through on setting short term goals with delegated responsibilities, you need to make sure that everyone knows what the communications schedule and needs look like.
Without communications accountability, your strategy will suffer and likely fail. Because attention won’t be paid on a regular enough schedule to be able to keep on top of issues and concerns and to allow time to make good decisions about how to fix it.
So to make sure you get your strategy from plan to action, you need to do just a few things:
- Set short term and medium term goals.
- Assign responsibility for those goals.
- Set a regular communication schedule.