Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is a complete look at how to position an organization for future success by evaluating the organization’s current status, where it would like to be, and how to get there. It also includes integrating the goals of the primary business functions.
We care about strategic planning because it:
develops and maintains a competitive advantage
ensures that stakeholders can contribute, understand, and support vision/strategy
teaches leaders to recognize challenges, problems, and how to solve them
encourages forward-thinking and clarifies individual responsibilities
better allocates time and resources to increase profitability and foster a proactive rather than reactive culture
As an HR professional, you need to know that strategy can be carried out in these four steps:
formulation
development
implementation
strategy evaluation
In the formulation stage, you are using the available knowledge to document the intended direction of a business. Not only that, you are documenting actionable steps to reach its goals. This is the step in which you outline your organization’s mission, vision and values. You are identifying why you exist, what you would look like in the future as a successful organization and the values will outline what is essential to your organization.
In the development stage, you are looking at the strategic options. These will consist of those strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We also know this as the SWOT Analysis. The SWOT analysis seeks to characterize internal/external forces that affect the performance of an organization.
In the implementation stage, this is all about the action. In this step, you are managing the plan. This ensures the reasons behind the strategy are understood. This step also communicates long- and short-term goals, provides employees with tools needed to accomplish tasks, models commitment and enthusiasm, and remains sensitive to employees’ emotional reactions.
And last but not least, the evaluation phase. This is a step that’s often forgotten, but I want you to think back to the basketball example that I provided in the what is strategy section. After a game, teams will always go back to review the tapes. This is done because they want to evaluate their performance. They are measuring their performance against their initial objectives. During this stage, you may ask yourself “Did we actually achieve what we set out to achieve” or “Do we need to make some tweaks to our strategy”
What I really want you to know is that strategic planning is not a one time event. It is an ongoing activity. You should be constantly looking for ways to improve and tweak your strategy as needed.