Many companies struggle to translate their strategic plans into action. This article outlines a framework to create a plan that excites and motivates your team.
The Problem: Strategic Plans That Don't Translate to Action
One of the greatest challenges we see over and over again through our collective business experience, and consulting others, is that after the brilliant 2-day strat plan offsite, the energy and alignment in the room doesn’t cascade its way throughout the entire organization. “The troops” are often not clear on the plan, or why it is the plan. Sometimes the targets seem both lofty and ambiguous, which is hardly a recipe for buy-in.
Other times, the SWOT analysis (especially the threats) are a mystery that isn’t shared, and the envisioned future is dictated, not co-created (again, how would this create buy-in for you?)
When it comes to setting a grandiose vision that binds the hearts (commitment), heads (intellect), and hands (talent), there are few greater examples than JFK’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech. It’s a perfect example of a goal that both excited, and scared, the Kennedy administration; and as such, prompted massive action and historic results. This is how the phrase “moonshot goal” was coined – in other words, the future vision of massive success for an organization.
We use the analogy of bringing different organs (head, heart, hands) on purpose so that a clear shift in task orientation can be associated with a clear shift in type of thinking. In fact, we actually use different regions of our brain to answer different questions. Our integrated framework is below, and further broken down by type of questions and strategic planning steps.
Strategic planning sessions are often filled with energy and great ideas. However, once the team returns to their daily routines, that energy fizzles out. Here’s why this happens:
- Lack of Clarity: Employees don’t understand the plan or why it matters.
- Unrealistic Goals: Goals seem both ambitious and unclear, making them difficult to achieve.
- Poor Communication: Essential information, like SWOT analysis results, isn’t shared with the team.
- Dictated Vision: The envisioned future is dictated by leadership, rather than co-created with the team.
The Strategic Planning Framework
In the above paradigm, the purpose sets the direction; the tone, if you will, for the entire strategy. It is your ‘why’. Fueling the inspiring purpose are the core values that each member of your team must hold (‘who’ must belong). With a passionate, aligned team, a better future becomes both more clear, and more attainable – this is your vision (your what and where). The mission is the mechanism through which your vision becomes a reality – your ‘how’.
The reason a trained and skilled facilitator can be so effective in helping an organization through their strategic plan formation is because each of the above concepts requires a different kind of thinking (as do the next sections).
- Purpose (why) – appeals to the soul, the conscience, the moral code
- Core values (who) – appeals to a sense of identity and belonging. Without knowing it, when you choose your core values as an organization, you are asking yourself “who do I see as a reflection of the best parts of myself?”
- Vision (where/ what) – where are we going (or what is the better future we are creating) are questions of possibility (not necessarily practicality). In essence, these are questions tied to your belief system, or what you believe to be on the outer edge of attainable.
- Mission (how) – this is the practicality (or at least actionable) aspect of strategy. One of the biggest problems we see in the strategic planning facilitation is confusing vision and mission. By this, we don’t mean confusing the vernacular – we mean, when executives are tasked with asking themselves what’s the most inspiring future we can create, far too many end up asking themselves “but how will we get there?”. It’s only natural, but we point it out so that your team can stay focused on the right question at the right time, knowing that the ‘how’ will come once we set the bar high enough. After all – if you only pursued goals you thought you could reasonably attain, how exciting would the journey really be?
With these pillars flushed out, the team can return to their natural state, and the preferred region of the brain – their prefrontal cortex (the logical, practical, problem-solving center of the brain). This is the part of the brain that solves the more ‘X and O’ aspects of strategy.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
What are the mountains we must move in the foreseeable future to be better positioned to achieve our vision? Recent examples we’ve seen of the larger organizational objectives the entire organization must be aligned with include:
- Aggressive growth
- Secure funding
- Launch a new major product or revenue stream
- Expand into a new geography (singular market or entire country)
- Changeover to a new operating system company-wide
- Divest out of non-profitable business lines
- Complete an acquisition
In short, these are your strategic ‘whales’. It is very important to understand the difference between an objective and a strategy. Keeping with the what, why, how type of questions – objectives are what you hope to achieve, strategies are the tactical plans of how you hope to achieve the big things.
If you tried to assign accountability and measures at this stage – you’re setting individuals and entire teams up for failure. How would you feel if the CEO asked you to go secure $10M in funding, and report back when it’s a done deal? In short, objectives typically require departments, possibly even the entire organization; while strategies might have a singular owner or a smaller team executing them.
Once you determine which objectives matter, the next step is to decide what success looks like (a target, a number, a completion date, etc).
For demonstrative purposes, let’s say securing funding is the objective we are trying to achieve, and $10M by the end of the year is the Key Result (KR).
Strategies and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Strategies are the smaller, more digestible pieces of the big plans. The ‘bite-size pieces’, if you will. Your key strategies should align with, if not flow from, your larger objectives.
Using the example of secure $10M in funding by the end of the year (OKR), your strategies might include some of the following:
- Create an investor pitch deck
- Research pitch competitions and government grants you may be eligible for
- Create a 5-year pro forma (projected revenue and profit for the next 5 years)
- Collect the most recent profit and loss statements and an up-to-date balance sheet
- Update (or create) the business plan
- Create a list of potential investors
- Plan an investor pitch event
- Concentrated sales efforts (demonstrate an appealing growth trajectory)
Each of these strategies is less overwhelming by itself than the overarching objective, which also makes defining success, and assigning a project owner, much easier. Examples of KPI’s (key performance indicators) for above would include:
- Pipeline (# of qualified investors; # of grants or total potential $ you might qualify for)
- Due or done-by dates
- The financial metrics investors might want to see (gross revenue in $, net profit margin in $ or as a % of total revenue, debt: equity ratio, and perhaps a total company valuation (estimated value in $).
Once the strategies are selected (the process for this is outlined below), and KPI’s or due dates (or any other success measures) are attached, the last step to get you to the start line is to assign owner(s) and support(s) to each strategy.
For instance, the finance team might own the objective of securing the $10M in funding, then the CMO (chief marketing officer) might be assigned the creation of the pitch deck, and she might need the pro forma and balance sheet to complete the deck. If Armand, the CFO (chief financial officer) is tasked with completing these initiatives, he would be the task owner for those strategies, and a key support for the pitch deck initiative.
Assigning Ownership and Support
This is a crucial step in execution – the alignment conversations. This is where The CMO, CFO, and any other support personnel will need to clarify:
- What they need (in detail)
- Who they need it from
- When they need it by
- Any other resources (ie budget, technology, outsourced consultants, etc)
- Any obstacles they foresee, and their plan to overcome (or support requests if they don’t know)
Review and Alignment
We referenced a how-to process in terms of facilitating the creation of the strategic plan. In terms of the culture pillars (purpose, values, vision, and mission), we covered how to generate or come up with your answers in the culture section. Once each of these cultural tenets are in place, they should be reviewed during your strategic plan. This includes exercises such as:
- Reviewing your purpose – is this still the compelling why that binds the right people to your organization? Ask, don’t assume.
- What way(s) do you have of knowing if you are on the right track towards your vision? Refer back to the exercises in the culture section that helped you come up with your BHAG. Is it measurable, and if so, how are you doing? Have you achieved your BHAG? If so, follow the same process to come up with a new one
- Audit your values. Again, have you discovered your true values, or are there one or a few that just don’t resonate as much as others? If you’ve nailed your values, how are you living them? How alive are your values within your organization? What processes & methods do you have for bringing them to life within every aspect of organization life, and what success measures have you in place? How are you performing when it comes to living your values?
- Try pulling your mission apart. How are we actually doing this? Is our mission statement just corporate jargon, or does it speak to clear philosophies or methods that set us apart? Make sure your team is on the same page about how your book is different than everyone else’s.
- SWOT analysis. As a time-saver, a SWOT analysis is often sent to the team members participating in the strategic planning session in advance, with answers due to the facilitator in advance so that they can be trended and shared during the meeting. This saves hours, and gets the team focused where they should be;
- How do we double down on our strengths to enhance our competitive advantage?
- How do we proactively respond to the threats we’ve identified?
- How do we shore up our inherent organizational weaknesses?
- How can we prioritize, then capitalize on the opportunities we see before us?
- Market analysis. Again, this is usually best prepared in advance. This section may not be a collaborative one, but rather a presentation, say by the VP of strategy. After the presentation, a brainstorm should ensue to determine how to keep up to, or completely steer away from, your competitors, as well as respond to industry trends like law or policy or technology change.
- Transformational initiatives. Some of this may come from the culture section, or above through the SWOT analysis. Some might be evolutionary goals like moving from an enterprise software to a SaaS model, or moving from a small, regional brick and mortar sales model to a global e-commerce strategy.
- Organize your strategic initiatives into the big stuff (objectives) and assign key results (objectives & key results = OKR’s)
- Align the strategies that support or help you achieve your overarching objectives under those buckets and define KPI’s, key dates, or other success measures, for each strategy
- Define owner(s) and support requirements (people, deliverables, or resources) for each strategy
We mention that this is the start line, even though this cascading philosophy goes to more rigorous lengths than most organizations do when planning, to highlight the important links in the chain it takes to actually galvanize your team toward action. Just like completing the customer journey map or employee journey map helped to operationalize customer and employee retention and satisfaction, highlighting a step-by-step strategic process helps teams avoid the cliffs most other organizations fall off of when it comes to generating traction behind their good ideas.
Conclusion
By following this framework, you can create a strategic plan that gets your entire team on board and moving towards a shared vision.
At FSQ, our mission is to build better leaders. If you need help developing or FSQ today. Our team of experienced consultants can guide you through every step of the process.