What’s Your Organization’s Strategy?

What’s your organization’s strategy?  When you read this question, what comes to mind?  We often hear owners and leaders may have ideas, thoughts, or even written goals they would like to achieve.  But the challenge is in dedicating effort to formally take action to pursue the goals that achieve your strategy.  If you have goals you would like to achieve, what is stopping you from creating the action plan to start?

To this question, owners and leaders can offer a variety of response, such as: “I am just managing to keep up with today”, “I have not thought about a strategy, I’ve only considered the goals I’d like to achieve”, “I am not large enough to need a strategy”, or something similar. 

While some organizations do achieve positive results without a strategy, in our personal experience working with hundreds of organizations throughout the years, we find the most successful organizations utilize a more formal process to develop and manage a strategy to attain greater success in reaching their goals.

Everyone Needs a Roadmap to Get to Their Destination

An effective one-page strategic plan along with a vision statement gives your organization a written road map to an incredible future that you define. This provides the best opportunity for greater leader satisfaction, enhanced employee engagement, higher morale, a stronger sense of purpose, and improved financial results because it gives you and your employees a destination.

Motivated and engaged employees want a purpose in their job. A strategic plan provides your entire organization with the same big goals, which are broken into smaller, more individualized and achievable goals.  Instead of having a team that comes to work to “get a job done”, you can create a team that comes to work to achieve specific goals.

Creating Your Roadmap

The creative process of strategic planning involves a review of core organizational areas.  The areas of particular focus are: People, Processes, Technology, Leadership, and Finance. These overall areas allow you to consider organization-wide goals designed to pursue success as you define a Mission Statement, Vision, and Core Values.  Most importantly, the plan is in writing and given to every employee in your organization.

Based on our experience, here a few keys to optimizing the opportunity for success during strategic planning:

• Use the services of an outside facilitator.  An independent consultant provides overall accountability and commitment during the planning session.
• Go offsite/away from the office.  You need to minimize distraction.
• Commit, at least, 1.5 days to the offsite planning session.
• Include leadership plus influential team members.  Our planning team is comprised of 9 of our team members plus our shareholders.
• Do expect everyone to be honest and forthright.  All progress starts with the truth.
• Make the experience enjoyable by scheduling free time and some non-work activities. 
• Plan for monthly accountability meetings with your team and quarterly accountability calls with your facilitator.

Get Started This Year

I know first-hand the positive results that have come from our own strategic planning here at Avizo Group.  We’ve been dedicated to the process for over a decade and have seen tremendous growth both organizationally and among our individual team members.

 Make building a written strategic plan a part of your 2020-2021 plans for your organization to create an even better opportunity for exponential growth. Avizo Group has experience in facilitation of strategic planning sessions and can help you on the way to an even better future.