When organizations want to, they use a strategic plan to:
Thinking strategically helps companies take the right action for more success and better outcomes. Some even call it an art.
Strategic plans are one of three essential business plans used to pursue important objectives for your company. When tackling challenges and determining action plans, you can think strategically, tactically, or operationally. These three thought processes often work in concert to help you create a framework that achieves your desired objectives.
The goal of your strategic plan is to determine:
The main purpose of your strategic plan is to create clearly defined goals for achieving the growth and success your organization needs. These goals are connected to your organization’s Vision.
Strategic leadership, also known as strategy execution, is how you create, implement, and sustain your strategic plan so your organization moves in the direction you intend for long-term success. This usually involves establishing ongoing practices and benchmarks, allocating resources, and providing leadership that supports your Vision.
Strategic leadership can employ two different approaches:
Most people agree that a strategic plan is only as good as the company’s ability to research, create, implement, evaluate, and adjust when needed. The benefits can be great when:
What are the four main points of strategic planning? You engage in strategic thinking so you can create effective company goals that are:
Align your strategic plan with the Vision as you understand it.
Actionable strategic goals are worth spending your time and resources on to reach organizational objectives.
It’s critical for you to track your strategy's progress and success, enabling your teams to take action and meet the goals more effectively.
A long-term focus distinguishes a strategic plan from operational goals, which involve daily activities and milestones required for success. When planning strategically, you’re looking ahead to the company’s future.
A strategic plan isn’t written in a day: Critical thinking evolves over several months. Those involved in the strategic planning are usually a Senior Leadership Team and team members from your company and possibly other stakeholders.
You should plan strategically for startups and newer organizations from the start. But even if your company is a more established small or midsize business, it’s not too late to start working on strategy.
Flexible timing that’s tailored to the needs of your organization is smart. Although the frequency of strategy sessions is up to you, many leaders use these milestones as a guide:
Many organizations opt to schedule regular strategic reviews either quarterly or annually. Especially when crafting a plan, your strategic planning team should meet regularly. They will often follow predetermined steps in the development of your long-term plan.
Gather market data and research information from both internal and external sources. You may want to conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis. Your strengths and weaknesses are directly related to your current competitive advantage within your industry. They're what you use to balance challenges to your success. They also influence the likelihood of increased market share in the future.
What would success look like for you in three years? Five years? Ten years? Articulate that in your Vision. Formulating purpose-driven strategic goals articulates why your company does what it does. Your organizational values inform your Vision and connect them to specific objectives.
Many companies use financial forecasting for this purpose. A forecast can assign anticipated measurable results, return on investment, or profits and cost of investment.
Defining the impact you want to have and the time frame for achieving it helps focus a too-broad or over-ambitious first draft. This way, your plan will have objectives that will have the most impact.
Your strategic objectives identify the conditions for your success. For instance, they may cover:
Strategic initiatives are your company's actions to reach your strategic objectives, such as raising brand awareness, a commitment to product development, purpose-driven employee training, and more.
Cascading goals are like cascading messages: They filter your strategy throughout the company from top to bottom. The highest-level goals align with both mid-level goals and the individual goals team members must accomplish to achieve overall outcomes. This helps everyone see how their performance will influence overall success, which improves engagement and productivity.
The success of your strategy is directly impacted by your commitment to inform and engage your entire workforce in strategy implementation. This involves ensuring everyone is connected and working together to achieve your goals. Overall decision-making becomes easier and more aligned.
A strategy map is an easy-to-understand diagram, graphic, or illustration that shows the logical, cause-and-effect relationship among various strategic objectives. They are used to quickly communicate how your organization creates value. It will help you communicate the details of your strategic plan better to people by tapping into their visual learning abilities.
When your strategy informs the creation of SMART organizational goals, benchmarks can be established and metrics can be assigned to evaluate performance within specific time frames. Key performance indicators align performance and productivity with long-term strategic objectives.
You write a strategic plan to improve your company’s overall performance. Evaluating your progress at regular intervals will tell you whether you’re on your way to achieving your objectives or whether your plan needs an adjustment.
Effective strategic planning involves creating a company culture of good communication and accountability. It involves creating and embracing the opportunity for positive change.
Consider these statistics:
Here’s what you can do to embrace a culture of good communication and accountability:
Make your strategic plan visible. Talk about what's working and what isn't. People want to know where and how they fit into the organization and why their contribution is valuable — even if they don't understand every element of the plan.
Build accountability. If you've agreed on a plan with clear objectives and priorities, your leaders have to take responsibility for what's in it. They must own the objectives and activities in your plan.
Create an environment for change. It’s much more difficult to implement a strategy if you think there will be no support or collaboration from your team members. Addressing their concerns will help build a culture that understands how to champion change.
The reality for so many is that it’s harder to implement a strategic plan than to craft one. Great strategic ideas and a clear direction are key to success, no matter what. But so is:
When your plan is structured to support implementation, you're more likely to get it done.
What are examples of good strategic planning? If you prefer a more traditional approach, there's lots of templates out there to help you create a plan document with pen and paper whether you're a for-profit or nonprofit entity.
But Ninety has a better way.
The Vision planner is essentially a strategic planning template on Ninety’s cloud-based platform that allows you to:
And you can do all this with only two digitized pages.
In your Vision tool inside Ninety, you can easily access all the things that make strategic plans effective by either using our default categories or making custom ones that meet your company’s specific needs. While you can include information about your Vision, goals, SWOT analysis, and key performance indicators from the start, here are some examples of custom options you could add to help more effectively implement your strategic plan:
Your Vision and goals are also completely integrated with all other features on Ninety, such as Scorecards, Rocks, To-Dos, Issues, Org Chart, Meetings, 1-on-1s, and more:
Now that you’ve learned how to grow your company using strategic planning, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice:
