Leadership Strategies - Introduction to Strategic Planning - Video 1
Transcript
Why you need a strategy, five reasons to plan. Developing a strategy takes time and resources. It takes the time and commitment of some of the most highly paid and highly experienced people in your organization. So, if your team is not willing to invest the necessary time, we recommend you don’t do it. Poor planning is often worse than not planning at all. However, if you are similar to the hundreds of organizations with whom we have worked and you recognize how taking the time to develop strategy is not only necessary but critical to the long-term success and health of your organization. The next step is determine how and then actually do it.
Hi, I’m Michael Wilkinson, founder of leadership strategies to facilitation company. We provide professional facilitators who help organizations develop and implement ongoing strategic plans and processes that drive better thinking, better decisions, and better results. Our strategic planning work. Our planning roadmap is called “the drivers model” which is described in my book “The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy”. So, why do you need a strategy? Why take time for planning? There are many reasons but the drivers model focuses on five in particular.
First and foremost, you need a strategy because it sets the direction and establishes priorities for your organization. Your strategy defines your organization’s view of success and outlines the priority activities you must complete to make this view your reality. The strategy will help your people know what they should be working on and what they should be working on first, but without a clearly defined and articulate strategy you may very well find that your priority initiatives, the ones that will drive the highest success are being given secondary treatment.
Second, you need a strategy to get everyone in your organization on the same page. If you find that you have departments working to achieve different aims or going in different directions you need a strategy. Once you define your strategic direction, you can get operations, sales, marketing, administration, manufacturing and all other departments moving together to achieve the goals of the organization.
Third, a strategy can simplify decision-making. If your leadership team is having trouble saying no to new ideas, potential initiatives, etc, you need a strategy, why? Because it mentioned earlier your strategy will clearly outline two priority activities you must complete to achieve success. Once you are clear on what your priority initiatives are, it makes it much easier say no to those potential initiatives that will pull you off your focus.
Fourth, a strategy drives alignment. Many organizations have hard working people putting their best efforts into areas that have little to no impact on strategic success, they are essentially majoring in the minors because their activities aren’t aligned with the priorities. Your strategy serves as the vehicle for answering the question: how can we better align all of our resources to maximize our strategic success?
Finally, a strategy helps you clarify and communicate the message. Many leaders walk around with a virtual strategy locked in their heads. They know where their organization needs to be and the key activities that will get it there. Unfortunately, the strategy is not down on paper and hasn’t been communicated thoroughly. As a result, few people are acting on it. When your staff your suppliers and even your customers know where you’re going there are even greater opportunities for people to help you maximize your success in getting there.
So, to summarize, why do you need a strategy? To set direction and priorities, to get everyone on the same page, to simplify decision-making, to drive alignment, and finally, to communicate the message. Leadership strategies have helped hundreds of organizations like yours to develop successful strategic plans.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c5kI5rJyBo
What is Strategic Planning, Really? - Video 2
Transcript
Hi my name is Erica Olsen with m3 planning. Today's topic is about what is strategic planning really, you know strategic planning means different things to different people and we have found that if we are not really clear about what we mean by strategic planning for an organization upfront before we get started, we tend to have have some problems getting people engaged in the middle of the process or there are just roadblocks or people’s resistance gets in the way. So, here are the different types of things we mean when we talk about strategic planning and there are different outcomes most of the time that leaders are seeking when they are engaging in a strategic planning process, these build. So, let's talk about them sequentially and then you can think as we are moving through what you are really looking for in your strategic planning process.
So, at the very base level, a strategic planning process is an articulated plan. People want an articulated plan for their organization. So, what do I mean by that? That means we have a mission, we have a vision, we have goals, objectives, etc, an articulated plan. Sometimes, we want to add on to that, that the plan is actually estrategic and you may say well it's a strategic plan but that's not necessarily true unless you bring in external data. If you don’t bring in external market data such as: what you customers think, what your competitors are doing, what's happening in your environment, in your industry. You are not going to have a strategic plan you are just going to plan. Now, sometimes we don’t need a strategic plan. Sometimes we just needs articulated set of mission, vision, goals, objectives, but sometimes we really need to figure out what our strategic differentiation is in the marketplace and in which case to do so, you need to add into your process that market data collection, use it to make strategic decisions about what you're doing and not doing such your plan actually articulates how you are different.
Okay so, a plan that strategic that also drives organizational engagement. How do we drive organizational engagement? We cascade goals, and cascaded goals mean that everybody in the organization knows what their piece of the strategy and the plan are. That drives organizational engagement and you may say, “well of course I want everybody engaged”. Sometimes we want that in organizations but we don’t have the waterfall to actually make that happen and sometimes that's not necessary right now, so it's important to know if your strategic planning process is intended to drive organizational engagement or not, and if it is, you need to make sure that your plan goes all the way down to the individual level so everybody knows their piece of the future.
So, sometimes we add on to that they will want to actually drive organizational transformation using a strategic planning process and how do we do that? We have an articulated plan that's strategic, that’s cascaded through the whole organization, that we talk about on a regular basis and we make changes to, as we move along the way and we help shift behaviors and we help drive choice and we do that by visibly talking about it in specific meetings I'm calling quarterly business reviews you may call them something else, but the point is we are using this information to drive decision making and drive behavior and we are talking about it and we are being visible about it.
So, as you are thinking about your strategic planning process, think about what's important to your organization right now and get everybody on the same page about what the real outcome of your process is intended to be.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ34L5UW4E
Overview of the Strategic Planning Process - Video 3
Transcript
Hi, my name is Erica Olsen. Today's whiteboard video is an overview of the strategic planning process. Instead of going through a bullet-pointed list, we'll do it on the form of an illustration. To orient ourselves, I want to outline the four phases of the process over here: assess, design, build, and manage. The phases of planning are assess, designing, and building and we spend a couple of months per year doing that. We spend the rest of the year managing the performance and the execution of our plan. Oftentimes we get into execution and we are no exactly realizing the results that we want, in which case we go back in into some parts of the planning process, sort of rinse and repeat. Today's video is going through the whole process, but sometimes you just may pick pieces of it. So, let's jump in.
Great strategic plans start with understanding where we are today, assessing the current state.
A) We do that by gathering external perspective, opportunities and threats. And internal perspective, strengths and weakness. And we summarize all that information into a SWOT analysis. And as a little asterisk, we have detailed whiteboard videos on ech point today, so if you need to dig deeper, check those out. So once we are clear about where are today we can move into the second part of our process, which is designing the strategy, starting with our mission statement. Our mission statement is a square here because great mission statements tell us what's in and what's out. Why do we exist as an organization? What's our core purpose? And then by default what’s not? With clarity on our mission, we can move to casting our vision or our future state. Strategic plans are all about moving organizations from where we are today to where we want to be in the future and that's what's our vision statement does for us. It tell us where we want to go. The rest of our plan builds a road map from today to tomorrow starting with a couple of thing that help us answer, how will we succeed? Our competitive advantages and our long term organization-wide strategies. These come in different names, but let's just use the analogy and the visual to keep us grounded. These help guide, they act as an umbrella over our entire plan to make sure that we're building a plan that we can succeed and be successful and be competitive with. So with that guideline in place, we can move to building our framework. Our long-term strategic objectives are our framework. Again, there are different names for this. Let's just use that for today, I like to see them in four categories because we want a holistic framework. We want to make sure that our plan covers our financial perspective, our customer perspective, our operational and internal perspective, and our people perspective. Less than six is a pretty good idea when you are looking at your framework because we are gonna cascade the rest of the plan from these.
From there, we are ready to move the nest phase, which is building our plan. That looks like starting with our goals, our corporate goals. And we are using the word “goals” to articulate quantifiable, outcome-based statements. Where do you want be in year one? In year two? in yer three? And most of the time, we use key performance indicators to help guide us along the way. So, we like our corporate goals and again we are gonna cascade from our strategic objectives we like our corporate goals to be SMART. SMART is a great to make sure you have good, quantifiable, outcome-based goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Once we have our corporate goals in place a couple per ech long-term strategic objective we are ready to move into annual operating plans and that looks like building goals and cascading into each level of the organization. So that looks like corporate goals being cascaded into department goals and department goals being cascaded into individual contributor goals. Once we have cascaded it down that far, we have a plan and we are done with the third phase.
So now we have a plan, now what? We want to move into managing execution because nobody wants to build a plan that sits on a shelf. So there are three things you have to have in place to effectively execute.
- People. You need to make sure that every person in your organization has an individual action plan that expresses ownership and accountability for what they need to get done by when. And with that, that matters because all the rest of this, it’s just on paper if we’re not clear about that, that very specific piece.
- We need to make sure that we have a system in place to track and manage performance. A software system, spreadsheets, whatever it looks like, you are gonna gather a lot of data on monthly or a quarterly, an annual basis you need a place to put that and everybody needs to be working on the same system.
- Process. You need to schedule at least monthly or quarterly reviews of you performance because without that review, all the rest of this is just again good idea on paper. So with that, that's an overview of the strategic planning process.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_OvXeUQV3o
Developing a Strategic Plan - Video 4
Transcript
Strategic planning is a process to create a multi-year strategy. Every business and industry does it differently. So there is no wrong way to create a strategic plan, except perhaps not to do one. The classical view of strategic planning is to align the company's resources so that every action or decision taken every day moves the company closer to the company's vision. In this course you will look at common practices that businesses use to develop their strategic plans, to assist you in understanding the application of these practices you will examine a scenario of a fictional auto company “Rail Motors”.
Rail Motors is a leading manufacturer of gasoline-powered automobiles. In recent years the sales pattern of Rail Motors has changed. Customers now seek vehicles that require less fuel due to high prices and environmental degeneration. Rail Motors has lost 10% of its market share to competitors that offer newer hybrid automobiles. This is of concern to management because lost sales mean post profits. The management of Rail Motors knows that they need a product can compete in this new market. The management team realizes that if they do not invest in product differentiation, sales will continue to decline and they may need to take urgent actions to maintain profitability. They understand that the company needs a strategic plan to build the products that appeal to the widest variety of customers. This strategic plan will not only address the company's goals in the near term but in the long term as well.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9O77vFpSMg
5 Benefits of Strategic Planning - Video 5
Transcript
Why do you use strategic planning? I sometimes hear this, who needs strategic planning? Not my company, not my team. We don’t need a plan to know what to do every day. We just keep selling. Yeah I hear that occasionally and there is a lot of holes in that argument. So let me help, if you are in doubt or not sure why strategic planning might make sense for you, here are five powerful reasons why:
- To establish an unfair fight in the marketplace. No, I don’t mean illegal or unethical, I mean you want compelling game-changing advantages your competitors likely don’t have. Ideas, resources, clear goals, and deadlines and eager collaborative fully bought into action oriented leadership team most are not by the way, a tracking system and accountability for flawless execution. Okay to be fair there were about five or six solid reasons in there but I bundle them all together into one called game-changing advantages.
- You cannot make intelligent today decisions unless you have a long term context within which to make them. So, first knowing where you want to be in two, three, or four years helps you make smarter decisions right now because it's easier to eliminate options that won't take you where you want to go. Numbers three, four, and five are proven business philosophies from three highly successful people who have been there done that and got the T-shirt.
- Number three is Oilman T Boone Pickens who said his father gave him this advice as young man, “a fool with a plan will beat a genius without a plan every time”. As a result, Pickens said he has been a confirmed plan all his life. I dont argue with billionaires.
- Legendary CEO of GE Jack Welch said, “when the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside the end of your business is near”. Not even the best leaders successfully drive change willy-nilly, it takes a clear bought into plan.
- Famed football coach Lou Holtz said, “if you on only maintain, you become the hunted. You either get better or worse”, amen to that the hunted run scared. Hunters have a plan. Some think that planning restricts their freedom of movement and ties them down to a rigid direction. Not at all, good plans are fluid. You change them if needed and yes you can still absolutely explore exciting new strategic opportunities that arise from time to time even if they are not in the plan. I hope this sheds some light on sound reasons why planning makes sense for growth oriented businesses and teams. Thanks for watching.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpg8UuS3pFg
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