Taking Action on Strategic Planning

“The goal of a strategic planning process should not be to make strategy but to build prepared minds that are capable of making sound strategic decisions.[1]”

“The Real Value of Strategic Planning” has a takeaway I can really understand and suspect that many working professionals have witnessed. Many companies make big productions of strategic planning at regular intervals, involve a large number of people, come up with a strategy, then still have no idea how to actually take actions in support of the strategy.

Kaplan and Beinhocker go on to explain the main steps to positively change the process.

1.     Diagnose the current process

2.     Design a new process

3.     Roll out the new process

4.     Build skills in parallel to the rollout

This is an extremely concise recommendation to help improve organizational strategy. In fact, many people probably begin to think through and diagnose the current process at their organization immediately after reading the first step. At one of my previous organizations, the strategy was fairly clear but processes to implement it were much fuzzier. Long-term strategy planning to maintain our “unique and valuable position[2]” by looking at the future of our industry did not seem prominent. Strategy guidelines or skill-building for management was minimal.

The company’s strategy was to target a portion of the market that demands experts and it was important to attract top personnel as employees. Although the strategy worked well, the more competitive job market is making it tougher to hire experts in our field. We could have foreseen this issue and adjusted in a number of ways if strategy was rolled out and updated correctly. Human resources, leadership, and managers can all heavily influence hiring success while the organization itself should be emphasizing the benefits of working there.

One great example of a practice that could help with the strategy of providing top-end experts would be to study what experienced staff want in an employer and make corresponding adjustments. Even if the company can’t compete directly with salary, benefits can make up for some salary disparity, as can quality of life policies like allowing working from home regularly. Even if these policies are in place, succeeding at the organization’s strategy means that benefits and quality of life should be emphasized in interviewing and hiring to attract more experienced candidates.

Taking actions to make the company more attractive to senior candidates with a lot of expertise is just one way to help translate the strategy to practice and maintaining unique value. To maintain market share in top tier consultants, the company would also need to perform other activities, like identifying work that is a good fit and even turning down potential customers if they or the work are not a good match for the organization’s strategy. It is clearly important to translate strategy into sound decisions.

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[1] Kaplan, S., and Beinhocker, E.D. The real value of strategic planning. (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2003).

[2] Porter, M.E. What is strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996).