What the organization has become and if it has followed its mission and met its objectives.

What are the organization’s current strengths, weaknesses, obstacles to enhanced profitability, long-term viability, and strength of the organization’s talent pool, vulnerabilities, and fiscal health? 

A new addition to the initial phase of a strategic planning process is adherence to reporting requirements and general conformance to the Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability (Sarbanes-Oxley) Act.  Additionally, this is an opportunistic time to discuss individual, as well as organizational ethics. 

What is the organization’s overall global competitiveness?  Who are the organization’s competitors?  What do we know about our competitor’s talent, innovations, and recent successes?  How can we get better real-time information about our competition?  What do the competitors do better than we do?  What do we need to do to become more competitive?

Does the organization have sufficient “high horsepower” talent?  Does the organization have up-to-date succession planning in place? 

An organization can exit a strategic planning process with an aggressive and realistic one, three, and five year business and profit plan.

Is the organization benefiting from innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, with intelligent, cohesive, and consistent leadership?

Are the leadership and management team sharing the same vision and commitment?

Does the organization have counter-productive politics or excessive bureaucracy?

Other critical components of the annual strategic planning process includes the following:

Development of a mission statement that truly reflects the organization’s direction.

Establish, or refine, a set of core values that all leaders must live by.

Objectives the organization must achieve.

Consensus on close-in business, a profit plan and growth strategy.

Consensus on a consistent measurement system, recognition methodologies for rewarding accomplishment, and consequences for failure to meet agreed upon objectives.

Strategic planning gives common direction, common guidelines for setting priorities and encourages cohesive decision-making.  It focuses energy, resources, and actions.  It minimizes disagreements and strengthens the leadership body’s trust between each other.  With strategic planning in place, consensus is much easier to attain and costly duplication of efforts is eliminated. 

Strategic planning is best done off-site.  This eliminates distractions, assures better participation and creativeness, assures privacy and security when discussing sensitive business plans.  Matters such as staffing changes, competitive strategies, leadership weakness, and barriers to enhanced organizational performance are additional sensitive topics best not discussed on site.  Strategic planning initiatives are far more productive and successful when facilitated by an external facilitator and SME (subject matter expert).  External consultants are not constrained by relationships, politics, friendships and can be honest without fear of retribution.

The principle elements and outcomes of a strategic planning process are the Mission Statement, Organizational Vision, Values, Guiding Principles, and Shared Operational Philosophy.  Additionally, it established consensus on Priorities, acceptable Outcomes, a standardized Measurement Matrix to rate successes and failures. 

Strategic Planning is essential to business success.  It is usually the most productive, most invigorating, and motivational three or four days of the entire work year.  Nothing is more important, encourages better team building, or is more critical to organizational success, profitability, and competitiveness.

If there is a human capital, business performance, workplace issue or employee relations topic you would like to see covered, please email a request to: bobdrogus@primarymetals.net