It's always a good time to start thinking about your strategic plan in the coming year…and swerving to avoid success-devouring potholes. There are some strategic planning mistakes leaders make every year. Let’s go over three of these common errors (and how to avoid them).
1. Bowing Down to Task Tyranny
You have too many partnerships to manage. You have too many staffing issues to handle. You have too many [insert problem here].
The truth is: you really do have too many things to do. A constant flow of tasks often controls the workday. Urgent problems put long-term strategic concerns under their tyrannical boots. It’s easy to look around mid-year and still have nothing done.
What do you do? It’s important to start the year organized so you build the right kind of momentum. Create a tactical action plan and prioritize the most important items. Assign dates and owners to each task. Schedule regular meetings to keep things rolling. What gets calendared gets done. You may see some short-term tasks go by the wayside as a result…and that’s OK. Sometimes the important should consume the urgent.
2. Letting the Dog Walk You
Think about walking your dog. A well-trained dog and disciplined owner have a focused walk without excessive squirrel-chasing. Now, think about a distracted man walking a hyperactive Corgi with two young children in tow. It looks more like the dog is dragging the poor guy.
Strategic plans regularly become unfocused laundry lists of possible projects. Sessions drag you along through this task-adding marathon, leaving you breathless by the end. And even worse, you wind up with so many goals that you never accomplish them all.
You failed before you began.
What do you do? Commit to focus. Limit yourself to three or four strategic buckets. If you have trouble steering the session while participating, an outside facilitator is a helpful tool to ensure your team stays in the lanes.
3. Enforcing Height Restrictions
“You must be this tall to ride.”
Every child visiting an amusement park knows that sign…and not one of them has fond memories of it. It’s there for their safety but (at the time) feels discriminatory.
Your strategic plan is not an amusement park ride. You don’t need to send “you must have this position to participate” signals. No one gets hurt knowing your organization’s plan. In fact, it’s keeping your plan from staff members that harms you. Employees who don’t understand your plan have less buy-in…meaning less plan implementation at the grassroots level.
What do you do? Share your plan from the boardroom to the breakroom. Get everyone in the same boat rowing towards the same goal. You don’t need the whole staff creating the plan - that’s too many cooks - but tell people how it applies to them. Give them permission to own the plan.
One more pitfall: not getting your preferred strategic planning date. Book a free consultation with On The Mark Strategies and lock in your planning date now. We ran out of dates last year, so don’t wait if you want one of our expert facilitators.
