An outside facilitator can significantly change the effectiveness of your next strategic planning session 

By using an experienced facilitator in the right situations, you will almost certainly accomplish more in your meetings, delve deeper into critical issues and resolve them.

Equally important, participants in the planning session will leave with positive feelings, stronger cohesiveness, a sense of accomplishment, and a renewed belief in the team.

Why Hire an Outside Facilitator?

Strategic planning discussions can be painful and difficult. These sessions involve personal values and goals, deeply held beliefs about the nature of your company and where it’s going, and maybe different perspectives on the marketplace. Some senior leaders may have values or goals that conflict with those of other key members of the organization.

An outside facilitator carries none of this baggage.

He or she is trained to look at your company, the management team, and the planning process objectively. Without stepping on toes, an outside facilitator can get away with saying things like “that’s habit talking” or “you’re rationalizing,” and can make sure that certain people don’t dominate the discussion. A facilitator knows how to keep the discussion on track while taking everyone’s concerns into consideration.

BOTTOMLINE: If you’re considering engaging an outside facilitator for your next strategic planning session, engage an experienced business coach who uses a repeatable business-building methodology – one that will not produce “yet-another-3-ring-binder” that sits on your shelf, collecting dust.  What you really need is a “living” strategic plan that can be communicated to the rest of your organization, so that each person’s daily activities can be planned and are aligned to support your plan.

Quadrant I: The “Growth” Wave

We begin our exploration in Quadrant I, where typically a new or start-up business has a strong strategy, typically because of an important competitive advantage, which can come from offering premium products or services, availability or price. It can be rooted in technology, distribution channels, manufacturing expertise, or your current customer base. Some start-ups enter the market with a “better mousetrap” than those of long-standing competitors (the disruption factor). 

Regardless of whether a company is a start-up or a seasoned business, strong strategy usually leads to growth in sales.  This is the kind of company that offers something customers want – and, if it’s successful, one thing is certain – competitors will be watching. 

What differentiates companies in Quadrant I?  They’ve made clear choices about what they would do – and not do. 

What happens to these companies next?  Many times, their runaway successes cause the company to grow so rapidly that it puts pressure on them to execute properly – to deliver enough quality product/service to meet the demand.  

There are four “waves” that every successful business goes through, and it can be described in two dimensions: strategy (deciding what to do) and execution (getting it done). 

Here’s our model that shows these two dimensions using four quadrants of organizational performance:

Leaders who build organizations with the ability to balance both strong strategy with strong execution over long periods of time can achieve enduring business excellence (Quadrant II, where strategy and execution is balanced, consistent, and predictable.)

Most every successful organization cycles through all four “waves” of these quadrants in this model – and does so repeatedly through their lives.

During the next several posts, we’ll be discussing each of the four waves of this model,  how businesses move from one quadrant to the next, and how a strategy execution program (like Six Disciplines) can help an organization to move into – and stay – in Quadrant II for longer periods of time. 

SUGGESTION:  Take a minute right now, print off this post with the above model, and hand it to your leadership team. Ask them to honestly pinpoint where they think your organization is today on this model. Give the same printout of the model to several teams and ask them to do the same. Then, create a composite of all of their input as to where they think your organization is today. We’ve done this exercise with hundreds of clients and prospects – the results are intriguing!  Let us know about your results (by leaving us a Comment below)

FOR MORE ON THIS MODEL:  The model above is described in detail in Chapter 1: Business Excellence of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution. 

What kind of plan does your organization need – a strategic plan or a business plan?

The easy answer is that you need both. That being said, these plans should be crafted in the proper order: strategic plan first, which then drives the business plan second.  

Simply put, here’s the difference between strategic plans and business plans:

• A strategic plan sets the direction for your organization in the mid- to long-term future. It spells out the company’s mission statement, primary goals, and measurable objectives, and explains the basic strategies for fulfilling the mission and achieving the goals.
• The purpose of the business plan is to define the activities (targets, forecasts, measures) necessary to achieve the short- or mid-term objectives. The business plan aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization without significantly changing its direction.

BOTTOMLINE: “The value of strategic planning lies in the process. Engaging team leaders – and eventually team members – is essential to the success of a strategic planning effort. Different viewpoints on directions, goals, and strategies will emerge, but they can lead to creative solutions. Alignment begins to occur as a consensus is reached on vision, values, mission, goals, strategies, and objectives.

The good folks over at Vistage have a very deep and rich set of best practices for a variety of management concerns.

In particular, is their extensive list of suggestions on goal-setting.

They’ve identified ten barriers to setting – and executing - organizational goals:

1. Lack of clear-cut responsibilities around the goals
2. Lack of a tracking system
3. Lack of an accountability system
4. Lack of commitment
5. Lack of buy-in from people who are expected to fulfill the goals
6. Ineffective communication
7. Lack of time or resources
8. Too many goals are financially driven
9. Focusing on too many or too few goals
10. Goals aren’t tied to a longer-term vision

BOTTOMLINE: Get agreement on the appropriate goals for your organization. Write them down. Keep them close by. Get buy in and alignment from those executing the goals. Make them realistic and attainable.

SUGGESTION:  Watch the short video that explains the similar approach that Six Disciplines takes toward goal-setting. 

On May 12, at 12:15 pm, Six Disciplines’ CEO Gary Harpst will be a guest on Jordan Kimmel’s “Trust Across America“ (Building Great Business By Rebuilding Trust) radio program. 

The topic for Gary’s interview will be “Accountability: Doing The Right Things RIGHT” 

Details of the radio interview are here. 

Which is more important?  Strategy, or execution?

(…Is this a trick question?)

In a recent article “Putting Strategy Into Practice“, published in Strategy+Business magazine, the author refers to the just-released HBR anthology “Must-Reads on Strategy“.

To address the issue, the editors of Harvard Business Review (HBR), in compiling their new collection of their 10 most significant articles on strategy (Must-Reads on Strategy, [Harvard Business Press, 2009]), chose to devote half the volume to articles about execution.

And rightly so!

Dr. Stephen R. Covey offers a  post on his blog on what makes a good leader.

Covey believes there is a formula. They are what he calls the four imperatives of leadership.

1. The first is to inspire trust. You build relationships of trust through both your character and competence and you also extend trust to others. You show others that you believe in their capacity to live up to certain expectations, to deliver on promises, and to achieve clarity on key goals. You don’t inspire trust by micromanaging and second guessing every step people make.
2. The second is to clarify purpose. Great leaders involve their people in the communication process to create the goals to be achieved. If people are involved in the process, they psychologically own it and you create a situation where people are on the same page about what is really important—mission, vision, values, and goals.
3. The third is to align systems. This means that you don’t allow there to be conflict between what you say is important and what you measure. For instance, many times organizations claim that people are important but in fact the structures and systems, including accounting, make them an expense or cost center rather than an asset and the most significant resource.
4. The fourth is the fruit of the other three—unleashed talent. When you inspire trust and share a common purpose with aligned systems, you empower people. Their talent is unleashed so that their capacity, their intelligence, their creativity, and their resourcefulness is utilized.

Here’s a recent book review of Six Disciplines for Excellence, as published by the Strategic Planning Strategy blog.