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Strategic Planning – Why Do Organizations Need Strategic Planning
Do you know of an organization that performs extremely well during a crisis? Maybe your own?
Organizations do well during times of crisis because executives, managers, and individual contributors all gain clarity of purpose, expectation, and action. Clarity, along with a sense of urgency, breaks down organizational barriers allowing people to work efficiently together toward achievement of the shared goal(s). These factors enable the organization to resolve the crisis quickly and return to normal operations.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Executives and managers maximize their company’s value when they focus the efforts of the entire workforce on the organization’s prioritized mission goals and supporting objectives. Some executives and managers, by making the mission measurable, prioritizing those measures, and sharing accountability for identifying and executing the most value adding initiatives, ensure their workforce focuses on those activities that maximize the organization’s overall value. In other organizations, planning and/or execution shortfalls allow the pursuit of initiatives that do not optimally support mission achievement; diminishing the organization’s value creation capacity. While many factors result in misaligned focus at all levels of the organization, one in particular, the failure to align the organization’s programs, budgets, and procedures to the mission’s prioritized goals and supporting objectives is the most devastating.
Too often, organizations biased to action move forward with projects and initiatives before defining the results to be achieved. This shotgun approach resembles the marksman who shoots, shoots some more, and then aims. And like the marksman who doesn’t first aim, the organization may or may not achieve its desired goals. Even if the goals are met, it is likely that many of the activities pursued contributed little or not at all to the organization’s goals; ultimately, wasting precious time and resources.
Organizational silos act as barriers; hindering the performance of business units, work groups, and individuals as they strive to achieve the organization’s shared goals. Nowhere in the organization are silos more destructive than if they exist within the executive team. Here, silos prevent the free flow of information and resources needed to successfully execute cross-functional initiatives with the barriers to collaboration cascading downward though the entire organization. To help prevent these silos from forming, all strategic plan goals must be shared equally by all executives.
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