Some believe that planning is dead! They say that today’s environment changes too often and too quickly. Despite the disruptive and unrelenting pace of change, planning is still an important function in the workplace. A good plan provides a framework for organizing company resources and it provides direction for employees on how they can help the company fulfill its strategic goals. Show The key difference in planning today is how this function is viewed and implemented. Effective planning is less rigid now than it was in the past. An effective plan provides principles for taking action and direction for achieving company goals. Click To TweetWhy Plans FailAs I coach managers, I often find that many neglect the planning function. Seven common reasons why many of them fail to plan are the following: • Some managers dislike constraints of any kind. It is important for managers to keep options open to encourage creativity and innovation. Taken to an extreme, however, the lack of any sensible constraints creates confusion. Employees are unsure of the strategic direction of the company as they are constantly switched from one project to another. They eventually become frustrated and organizational productivity declines. • Some managers assume crisis management is inevitable. There’s an element of truth to this view particularly as the scope of a manager’s job increases. Unrelenting crisis management is often a sign of insufficient planning, however. When I work with managers in these environments, I challenge them to probe deeper for the root causes behind these crises. Often, these managers are revisiting the same organizational problems because they lack a plan. • Some managers lack the time in their schedule to plan. This is always a challenge. In working with managers, I encourage them to improve their time management skills. Taking a time management seminar from a reputable training organization is a great way for a manager to free up more time for planning. • Some managers have been successful without any real planning. This success becomes harder to repeat as a manager’s responsibilities increase. Planning is a critical function for middle and senior level managers as they execute organizational initiatives through others. Managers who fail to plan, risk creating a chaotic work environment that harms workplace motivation. Click To Tweet• Some managers do not have a system for planning. A good plan defines what needs to be done and how it is to be done. Senior managers develop strategic plans that apply to the entire organization. Middle and front line managers develop operational plans to implement the strategic plans. There are many tools used in planning including SWOT Analysis, vision and mission statements, environmental scanning, resource analysis, etc. Since many managers are promoted for their technical ability with no real training in management, this is another area where managers can take a management seminar from a reputable company to learn how to plan effectively. • Some managers lack self-discipline. The managers I have known who have effectively addressed this area first admitted they had shortcomings, identified realistic goals for themselves, and then committed to meeting their goals. They kept practicing self-discipline until it became routine for them. • Some managers are solely focused on results. For these get-it-done and get-it-done quickly managers, I coach them that they need to be effective as well as being efficient. Getting things done does not always mean that the right things are being done. Well designed plans address what needs to be done in the organization (effectiveness) as well as how it is to be done (efficiency). Despite what some may say, planning is not dead! Plans today must be living documents that adapt to changing market needs. To plan effectively, managers develop relevant plans and then adapt them as necessary to the ever-changing business landscape. No matter the reason, the familiar management saying is still true: If you fail to plan, plan to fail! It’s also difficult to have motivated and engaged employees when the organization is in chaos due to poor planning. Let’s make planning alive and well. The following video provides tips on how to plan effectively: It's still true that if you fail to plan, you can plan to fail. Click To Tweet
Written by Robert Tanner | Copyrighted Material | All Rights Reserved Worldwide This article is accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge.
How many times have you seen a strategic plan launch to great fanfare and optimism, only to be forgotten about within a few months? We're going to tell you some of the most common pitfalls we see as to why strategic plans fail, to help you ensure that your plan isn't one of them! 1. Lack of buy-in from the teamYou can't execute a strategy alone! Indeed, as the owner of your strategic plan, you should really be one of the least important people when it comes to execution. Why? Because ideally, you will keep yourself at arms-length from much of the delivery to allow you to retain perspective and a strategic lens. This only serves to heighten the importance of team buy-in. A common mistake here is to underestimate the size of your 'team' when it comes to having them buy into the plan. If you have a team of 5, things are fairly easy - all 5 need to be bought in. If you have a team of 50 - things get trickier. Often we see strategy leads doing a great job of gaining support from their immediate colleagues and direct reports, but a lousy job of ensuring that support cascades throughout the organization. If you only have buy-in from 5 out of your 50 strong teams, then either your strategy will fail through lack of resources - or worse, if it succeeds with that level of buy-in, it probably means that it was nowhere near ambitious enough in the first place! Tools like Cascade have of course been designed explicitly to help you get that buy-in Even if you're not using a cloud-based solution to help your planning/execution, there are a couple of simple things you can do to help you succeed. A lot of people assume that communication is a key part of this process - and of course, they're right. Before you get to the communication stage, you need to start gathering feedback and inviting contributions from your team into any new strategic plan. Make sure that the first time your team hears about the plan isn't when it's finished! Use tools like surveys, meetings, and face to face discussions to gather feedback from your whole organization on topics like: - The organization's strengths and weaknesses Involving people as early as possible will make the next phase of the process (communication) go so much more smoothly! When it comes to that phase, the key is to communicate early and often. We often see plans kick off with a flurry of workshops and activity, only to see communication tail off rapidly as people return to business-as-usual activities. Schedule regular strategy sessions with your team, and stick to them. Failure to address a lack of buy-in early is the single biggest reason why strategic plans fail! 2. Unclear ObjectivesFailure of strategic planning can come about due to unclear objectives. Coming up with ideas about what your organization needs to do and knowing how to do it aren't usually a problem. Clearly structured plans with well-written objectives are much rarer than they should be! We've written an entire blog post on creating well-crafted Strategic Objectives - you can also download ours on the topic. As such, I'll only cover the basics here. In our experience, well-written objectives are those which: - Have a clear link to the Vision of the organization A good way to 'test' the clarity of your objectives is to ask various people throughout the organization whether they remember and can clearly articulate them - as well as clearly describe how their own work and tasks relate back to a given objective. If people are able to form this link, then not only is it likely that they are clear about the objective itself, it also suggests that your cascading process has worked effectively. 3. Failure to Account for Business as UsualPragmatism is a key part of any successful plan. Often when organizations create new plans, they get caught up in the excitement of the 'new' and forget to allow enough time to manage existing business activities. There are two ways that you can deal with this:
4. Loss of MomentumWe've alluded to this already, but so often with strategic plans, we see a great deal of enthusiasm at the start of the process, followed by a gradual tailing off and return to business as usual. Delivering against all of the points above (and below) will help immensely in making sure this doesn't happen to you - but here are a few other tips you can employ to stop your plan from falling into a black hole:
5. Unwillingness to IterateAnother vote for pragmatism here. It is pretty unlikely that you'll get your strategic plan 100% perfect on the first attempt. Smart leaders constantly have their ear to the ground, listening to threats and opportunities and moving quickly to adjust plans accordingly. Your strategy should be no different. Think of your plan as a living breathing thing. It's one of the reasons that cloud systems are becoming so popular for strategic planning because rather than creating and printing a plan than putting it on a wall somewhere, they encourage you to constantly adjust and tweak the plan in a real-time environment. All of that said, you do need to avoid changing the plan so much or so regularly that you lose credibility with your people. Changes should be iterative rather than dramatic. On only very rare occasions should you be looking to make changes to your Vision, Values, or Focus Areas. 6. Lack of AlignmentEffectively communicating your strategic plan isn't the same thing as ensuring alignment. Alignment means that everyone in the organization can clearly (and accurately) articulate how their own set of goals and tasks are contributing to the strategic plan. Measuring alignment can be hard if you're using manual strategy and goal tools such as Excel or even pen and paper. In Cascade, we've developed a proprietary formula for calculating the level of alignment in your organization by measuring the amount of work-effort people are putting in against each of the organization's strategic goals. Even without a system to help, you need to ensure that whenever you meet with your people to discuss their goals - you're constantly challenging them as to the why of what they're doing - not just the how or the what. One way to help drive alignment is to create a clear strategic framework and ask people to 'categorize' their activities into that framework. For example, if 'Innovation, Service, and Growth' are the Key Focus Areas of your strategic plan, have people clearly state which of these aspects their various work projects, goals, and tasks fall into. Run your team meetings using this structure, slotting in progress updates and agenda items under these headings. 7. Failure to Celebrate SuccessLast but certainly not least, is one of the nicest and most rewarding (but so often overlooked) things that you can do to successfully deliver your plan. Celebrate! Sometimes we get so caught up in the doing and the final outcome, that we fail to recognize the great things we achieve along the way. By celebrating success in delivering our strategy, we reinforce a culture that highlights the importance of strategy to the whole organization. Let's say you have 10 strategic objectives that make up your plan - at a minimum, you should be celebrating every time you achieve one - even if that means once per month or more regularly. It doesn't have to be anything huge - it could be a team lunch, an early office departure on a Friday afternoon, or maybe a reward (monetary or otherwise). Don't be too finicky about 'who' gets to celebrate - this needs to be a whole-team celebration, even if one person or team did more than the rest. Why? Because the whole point of this article is that it is your team who will deliver your strategy, not one single person. Summary of why strategic plans failThere are undoubtedly a whole host of other reasons why strategic plans fail - but in our experience of working with hundreds of strategic plans, these are by far the most common - but thankfully, also the easiest to avoid! We'd love to hear your thoughts on this list and your suggestions for additional pitfalls we can all strive to avoid. |