Creating a strategic plan for your team’s goals
The ability to think and plan strategically is a huge part of being a successful leader. You need to be considering multiple long term variables at all times like your team members, your customers, your organization, and the industry. You need to be able to see the bigger picture of your whole team coming together for the greater goals of the organization, and not get stuck in the day-to-day weeds.
One way to effectively convert your long-term goals into actionable plans is with a strategic plan.
What is a strategic plan?
A strategic plan is typically a documented plan for an organization or team's long-term goals. In addition to internal goals, it can include reviewing multiple factors like the organization's mission, vision, values, strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and external threats in order to make the plan as effective as possible.
I like to think of strategic plans as a roadmap that can help bring big (sometimes scary) goals into reality.
When would my team need a strategic plan?
All teams and organizations with goals longer than 3 months would benefit from a strategic plan.
What are the benefits of a strategic plan?
A strategic plan helps the leaders and teams break their long-term goals into smaller milestones. It creates an action plan to help the teams get started on these goals and helps them know if they are on track toward their goals throughout the year.
It can help empower employees at all levels to better understand how their day-to-day work impacts and contributes to the organization's greater mission and annual goals. This creates more motivated and engaged employees throughout the year.
The strategic plan can help set clear expectations for the priorities throughout the year, so teams and individuals don't get too distracted when new opportunities and obstacles come up. It can also help prevent the dreaded scramble at the end of the year to revisit your annual goals that you set at the beginning of the year and quickly forgot about.
What are the benefits of having a facilitator during the process?
A facilitator brings a neutral perspective and follows a structured process to ensure the planning process runs smoothly and efficiently. They ask challenging questions that help refine goals and plans, making them more realistic while fostering accountability among leaders.
When someone in your company leads these sessions, there can be biases in the room that can derail the session. For instance, if your boss or leader is facilitating the process, you may be more likely to just say yes to anything they say and not challenge or think more critically about it. Another example is that an internal company facilitator may have their own biases for being personally attached to certain plans or ideas or people compared to an external facilitator who has no attachment or bias for the internal goals or who works on what.
What are the main topics to include in a strategic planning session?
1.Learn from the past
Reflecting on the past helps us create a knowledge baseline to understand what has worked and what hasn't worked when it comes to our goals, plans, and performance. From there, we can factor this information into our new goals, plans, and performance.
For each insight about what worked or didn't work, you want to create an action item of what to do with that information.
I like the simple 'Start, Stop, Continue' framework where you decide what actions to start based on new ideas, what actions to stop because they aren't working, and what actions to continue because they are working.
2. Set a clear vision
When setting a clear vision, we typically start with the organization's mission, vision, and/or values (when available). This helps to convert these from just words on the wall or website to actionable beliefs that are embedded in the organization's goals and teams' actions.
We want to be able to deeply connect the organization's mission, vision, and values to the long-term goals. You may want to have each leader explain how these are connected specifically to their team or department.
If you don't already have them, get a clear list of goals for your role, your team, and think through how these ladder up to the company's annual or long-term goals.
To go even deeper, I like to take a few minutes to visualize what it will look like after you've achieved these goals. Get specific, by the end of the year, what will be different? How will the day-to-day of your work or your team look different?
3. Convert the vision into a plan
The planning phase here is all about ensuring your goals can become reality.
First, let's start by making sure each of the goals is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Then we can think about what needs to be done to support each of these goals. Start with a brain dump to get as many ideas out, then start to order the activities in chronological order.
You may even want to convert the goals into monthly, weekly, and/or daily habits for you and your teams. The consistency and discipline to complete the goals is what makes or breaks your success.
4. Prioritize support along the way
First, let's decide how you will measure each of your goals, how often you will measure them, and what to do if you're not meeting these milestone check points. What support will you need along the way to make this happen?
It's unrealistic to expect that nothing will change over the long term as we work toward our goals. Assuming everything will always go according to plan sets us up for failure.
So, it's helpful to have a conversation about how to re-prioritize or adjust along the way as new information becomes available, market conditions change, teams change, and more. This will empower yourself, your leaders, and the teams to be able to navigate inevitable change and uncertainty.
If your team could use outside facilitation for its next strategic planning session, let's chat. Explore Strategic Planning and Retreats.
Brittany Canaski is a highly-rated Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Founder of Hello Velocity where she builds confident leaders and high-performing teams. When she's not building her business, you can find her planning her next travel adventure with her husband, watching Formula 1 racing, or volunteering in her local community of Charlotte, NC.
