Leadership for Life – Strategic Planning

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Our Leadership experts will be sharing tips and insights for everyone, at any station in life, at both home and work. Leadership for Life – the skills you embrace represent who you really are at all times.

Strategic planning is a vital undertaking for any organization. Most successful organizations have a comprehensive method of strategic planning that is revised periodically. The interval between planning sessions has diminished over the past few years. The interval used to be about five years. These days, it’s closer to 2 years in many organizations. As a rule, the more the organization is impacted by technological developments, the shorter the interval. These days, with the global and national economic system as uncertain as it is, strategic planning is more difficult, but more important, than ever.

Plans do not always succeed in their execution. There are a variety of reasons for this, but most fall into the following categories:

1. Lack of motivation and personal ownership
2. Poor communication
3. Idea behind the plan is too vague
4. Passive management
5. No/poor Leadership

For a plan to succeed, there needs to be a connection with the real world, not just an idealized vision. The real world includes (among others) items such as:

• Technology
• Customer expectations
• Employees
• Resources
• Local and national Economy
• Demographics

The bottom line is that a great leader needs to be heavily involved in the strategic planning process, and is responsible for seeing to it that every department (or whatever organizational subgroup is appropriate) develops its own strategic plan that is compatible with the overall organizational plan. For that reason, training in strategic planning should not be limited to only the most senior leaders in the organization. Every manager, director, team leader needs to have at least the rudiments of knowledge about the planning process.

Oh, by the way, (you knew it was coming!) we offer strategic planning training through our Leadership & Professional Development practice area. Contact me for info: 314-539-5329; bschapiro@stlcc.edu.

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2 Comments

1. Pingback: Strategic Planning – vital for any business | fred zimny's serve4impact

2. 

   shayna

   March 4, 2013 at 4:07 pm

   Thanks Barry for another great blog post. This one reminding us of a process all organizations should routinely put energy into actually formulating and then most importantly keeping it alive. Why are so many of these plans ‘dead on arrival’ or never even have a ‘scheduled launch’ in your opinion? If you had to pick one-what is the #1-most frequent culprit from your list that causes this?

   Reply