How to build your strategic plan so it’s agile and accountable
As we close out October, momentum continues to advance us towards next year, and you are likely in the depths of planning for the future (or at least you should be). You have assessed your current strategy, set your inspirational yet realistic vision, and now you’re ready to build your strategic plan.
Most leadership teams go through some sort of strategic planning process each year, where they architect the bigger picture: why they are going after their goals (vision) and what work they want to focus on driving forward towards their goals (priorities). What many leaders fail to spend enough time on is defining exactly how their teams will achieve success (workstreams, milestones, metrics and owners). Detailing this next layer deeper to the tactical level is essential for any strategy to be agile and accountable throughout your organization.
Before you dive into the tactics, let’s make sure that you have shaped your priorities for the year. Starting from your mid-year strategy refresh, incorporate any priorities that are continuing or expanding from this year. Multi-year priorities can be essential to advancing your strategy as long as you have evaluated and committed to the importance of this work furthering your vision. Then assess what capacity you have for new growth, taking into consideration your resources and talent bandwidth. These priorities should be the foundational framework for your strategic plan so should distribute across functional areas and teams, balance ongoing strategies and new areas of work, and stretch your organization beyond the status quo. Depending on the size of your organization and resources, your strategic plan may vary but focusing on 4-7 complex priorities will help to align efforts when you operationalize. When your plan has more priorities, it can feel more like a list and challenging to determine what is truly a priority. When your plan has fewer priorities, it can be too simplistic, easy to misinterpret, or does not truly push your organization to be strategic. With your priorities outlined, now it’s time to engage your broader organization to define how you will work together to achieve success.
Creating connection through collaboration
This tactical level of your strategic plan will greatly benefit from direct input and feedback from across your organization. For your plan to be successful next year, each of your team members should be able to clearly see the connection between their future work and the strategic direction of the organization. Everyone should also see themselves as drivers of the collective goals, not that the plan is solely connected to leaders or particularly functional teams. By hosting feedback sessions with your teams, you also have the opportunity to test assumptions on capacity, ability, and complexity and refine your plan as you build it. Additionally, it’s a perfect opportunity to invite team members to contribute to your strategic plan, which helps drive collective buy-in and alignment before implementation. With all of this being said, it is important to frame any feedback sessions appropriately as to what is open to change and adaptation and what’s not. Your strategic vision and priorities are not on the table to be overhauled and should provide guiderails for your team members to brainstorm and build the best way to drive the plan forward for overall success.
Building infrastructure and support systems
The first step of defining how you will actualize your strategic plan is building your operational workstreams. These are the large bodies of work or initiatives that will drive forward your strategic priorities and are essential operations to complete before year-end. Each priority should have 1-3 workstreams that can be collaborative across teams but must have one accountable owner (more on that in a bit). When you drafted your strategic priorities, you likely already started defining some of these workstreams.
For example, you may have a new strategic priority to diversify and strengthen your vendor portfolio for a more inclusive supply chain.
An initial operational workstream could be to evaluate your current portfolio and make data-driven decisions for greater inclusivity.
The second step is setting your milestones. These are the timebound tactical achievements or deliverables that are set to indicate progress on each workstream. Depending on your organization, these can be set monthly, quarterly or both, but most importantly these need to be tracked and reported on throughout the year. If a milestone is delayed, it could imply challenges for the overall workstream and escalate issues for potential changes needed.
Building on our previous example workstream, some milestones could be to:
Conduct a current state assessment and gap analysis of your vendor portfolio by end of Q1,
Evaluate the vendor landscape and make need-based recommendations by end of Q2,
Establish new vendor relationships to diversify portfolio by end of Q3, and
Determine composition of new portfolio and negotiate contracts by end of Q4.
Defining success and ownership
The third step is defining your success measures. Each workstream should have at least one measure as a proof point that this work is advancing the strategic priority and has been successful by year-end. As noted in the name, this needs to be measurable (best if quantifiable), specific to the workstream, and able to report progress throughout the year, much like milestones. There can be additional metrics that are related to this work but aren’t necessarily defining that this work has achieved peak performance this year.
For our example, your success measure could be:
Contract with at least two new vendor partners in alignment with diversification recommendations
Additional metrics could be:
Establish relationships with supplier diversity certification and advocacy organizations by end of Q2
Evaluate a minimum of ten new diverse vendor partners by end of Q3
These are additive and contributing towards the workstream but are not key indicators that you have taken actions to diversify and strengthen your vendor portfolio for a more inclusive supply chain.
The fourth step is determining an accountable owner for each workstream. These owners are ultimately responsible for the successful implementation of the work. They tend to be members of your leadership team as they need to have enough authority and oversight over the work. They also will be the ones to report on the workstream’s progress and will need to address any delays or obstacles. By having an accountable owner, it provides clarity on who is supervising often complex and collaborative workstreams across multiple functions.
Refining and communicating your plan
Once you have completed these steps through feedback sessions, you are ready to finalize your strategic plan. This includes incorporating any final adjustments, ensuring that financial and talent resources are appropriately allocated, preparing any reporting dashboards and designed collateral, and communicating the final plan to your teams.
Now with your why, what and how you will execute your strategic plan, you have prepared your organization to be future ready and engaged your team members to be both agile and accountable in the new year. Pause a moment to acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment within itself. Taking the time to build a strategic plan that is collaborative, action-oriented and measurable will inspire your teams to collectively advance toward mutual success in coming year.