Is Your Annual Strategic Planning Process Done?

Strategic Planning - Not Just For Fortune 2000 Companies
PART II
By Bob Norton, CEO and Entrepreneur Coach

In the last issue we discuss the need for a strategic plan, even in small companies, and the key questions that all managers, and even other employees must be able to answer for optimum results in your company.

The Strategic Planning Process I Recommend:

1. Team Meeting #1 - Brainstorming the WHAT - Most likely here the CEO puts the first stake in the ground, proposing WHAT the objectives are for the coming year. This is just a starting point for discussion really though. It might be as simple as a percentage growth goal, or as complex as a bunch of new market niches and/or product combinations to explore.  There is much discussion about what is achievable, how and why or why not. This needs to be a safe environment to brainstorm, say anything and challenge everything. Your culture must not only allow, but must encourage dissent and heated discussion. Without this you will be growing a team of "yes men" (and women) that are there to simply validate what the CEO wants.  At this point we are getting the team"s input on "What" we want to achieve this year. This can be a bottomless pit of time and discussions and at some point the CEO needs to decide on limits. Details should not be discussed unless they make the objectives impractical. This is more of a brainstorming meeting and can easily take several hours. I like to call these "Summits" and do them offsite to get people away from distractions and enhance creativity. If you can afford it make it a paid weekend foliage or ski trip with this meeting being the focal point of the weekend and lots of time for people to bond personally too. The quicker this gets done the better your team is really - the more alignment in thinking anyway. However are you pushing the envelope of creativity and options? If this stretches out to several meetings without some clear agreement on the "what" then you should probably bring in an outside facilitator or advisor.
    
2. Individual Department First Draft Developed - The team now goes away and individually prepares what they think is achievable for their department written down in terms of quarterly goals and priorities. This is 1-3 pages per department, not anything big, as it is still dynamic and just a proposal. Sometimes a list of potential projects and priorities, things to try and larger items for discussion is even sufficient at this stage. Avoid schedules at this stage, as you will most likely rearrange order and priorities.  These senior people will seek out and meet with others to discuss dependencies, timelines and how they will accomplish some goals fairly informally. This off-line work should build enough confidence and framework to go to the next step and surface any conflict to be brought to the group for discussion.
    
3. CEO Challenge and Review - CEO and most department heads should probably meet one-on-one to flush out these first drafts before meeting #2.
    
4. Team Meeting # 2 - Validating It Can Be Done - Each team member now presents their goals to the team and explains the risks, resources needed and rough timeline (quarters) for objectives (if there is good communications the managers have already compared timelines offline to coordinate this some). They should also make it clear WHY these are the right objectives for the company this year. Obviously financial costs and the resulting financial performance should be estimated.

•        By now the goals and priorities should be fairly clear, if not go back to step one and narrow the discussion to repeat the process - it should go quicker. Otherwise you should be simply working out more details and specifics. Ideally this will happen offline between managers and their people.

5. More Detailed Department Plan - Each department head, or team member, now works up the next level of detail with resources, needed, timelines and metrics for success and benchmarking progress. This is prepared to present to the entire group. As in step #2 team members meet as necessary with others to work out dependencies and get final input. They may even present what they have to the other department head too.
6. Team Meeting #3 - Agreeing on the HOW and WHEN - The team now meets to review an integrated plan with all department goals dovetailed to show they have a complete plan and understand how they will tie into other department's goals and objectives too.

If this process does not help and flush out most of your plan you have bigger problems and probably need some major changes and/or outside help to get through it.  Don't worry about making the document fancy, sometimes PowerPoint slides and Excel sheets with timelines and metric goals will do fine. The level of detail you require must be a function of the experience of the individual department head. The more experience they have, and the more trust you have for them, the less detail is required in the plan.  However, as the company gets bigger and more people need to read the plan you may need to write more detail.  Do worry about the team understanding it well. The value is not the written plan. The value you created during this process is what is in the heads of your team at the end. You have stretched their minds to a new level and thee minds should not easily return to just a day-to-day focus with good oversight. Adjustments will happen frequently in young companies and less frequently as the company gets more experience and more predictable.

After this plan is in place monthly meetings, or a specific section of regular staff meetings monthly, should be reserved to benchmark progress against this written plan. Things will change but everyone must be informed because others are depending on other departments to achieve their goals too. Good managers will alert other managers in real-time about significant changes that affect them. This is the sign that a manager is executive material and is thinking about the big picture and overall vision of the company, not just their area.

I would normally make this process happen during the holidays  to get productivity from your team during slower times, but this will depend on your business. There is no magic to an annual cycle and you might want to use your tax year if your business is very seasonal.

Bob Norton is the author of four books on starting and running companies and entrepreneurship. He runs the exclusive Advanced Entrepreneurship CEO Boot Camp to help CEOs and senior executives cut years off their learning curve. He also coaches CEOs at growth oriented technology companies with between $500K and $50MM in sales on how to get to the next level. He can be contacted at: B ob@CLevelEnterprises.com .

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