Leading Your Leaders to Develop an Effective Strategic Framework

Strategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail. Learn how to see your plan through to success. The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future. This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

Developing a Well-informed Strategic Framework is the Second Crucial Step in Strategic Planning.

All successful plans start with an Executable Focus. If a plan lacks focus on fixing organizational problems and overcoming barriers to the organization’s vision it is not built on the realities of the environment impacting the organization. When plans are built in a vacuum with by leaders or a planning team sitting in a conference room one afternoon, they often lack this focus. This was the focus of the last several blog articles designed to guide you through How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. The last ten weeks were designed to outline the first step in ensuring strategic planning doesn’t fail–building an executable focus.

The second step of Think Big, Take Small Steps, is to develop a well-informed Strategic Framework with a purposeful and everlasting mission statement; an inspiring and far-reaching vision statement; and three to five broad goals that encompass what must change.

The leadership’s primary role is to decide the direction of the organization and when the plan is not developed by the input of organizational leadership, it does not have their buy-in. Just as importantly, a plan built without the input of the organization’s personnel will have an equally difficult time of gaining approval and traction.

Over the next six weeks we will focus on conducting an effective strategic planning offsite and ensuring we develop a strong mission and vision statement and effective goals. We will also discuss establishing core values and principles that don’t exist and how to adjust those that exist, but are not the ones the company desires to drive the right behavior.

The focus of these articles, like the ones before, are really for someone to facilitate the strategic planning activity, but any organization could pick these steps up and complete them end to end.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.