5 Steps to Maximize Your ROI on Strategic Planning

Business leaders often come to me with problems that they don’t know are strategy problems. They tell me things like we’re underperforming, we’re behind plan, my team is struggling, we’re missing out on opportunities, we lost a client, or I can just tell something is off – things don’t feel right.

These leaders and their teams are smart, hard-working leaders in the top percent of their craft. Yet they are frustrated. Quite often, I can link the core issue back to an incomplete approach to strategic planning rather than bad strategy. Too often, great leaders and great leadership teams think up a tremendous strategy, but they fail to reap the strategy’s benefits because they don’t work through each of the phases of strategic planning:

Phase 1: Create the Strategy – A ton of work goes into this process, and this is the part that leaders and leadership teams seem to enjoy the most. This is the actual creation of a strategic plan.

• Completed or Mature When: Strategy is documented and everyone on the leadership team agreed to support the documented strategy.

  
  

Phase 2: Share the Strategy – Once you have a strategy, its potential benefit to the organization is limited by the degree to which it is understood by the organization. A great strategy to achieve a significant win aligns and motivates team members, setting the conditions for them to bring their best efforts to the highest ROI activities for the business.

• Completed or Mature When: This process is ongoing, but you can tell it’s mature once everyone in your organization can tell you how their work aligns with and supports the strategy.

Phase 3: Implement the Strategy – Obviously, no strategic plan adds significant value by just existing in any collection of people’s heads. The strategy doesn’t generate value until it is translated into actions.

• Completed or Mature When: This process is ongoing, but until you have an effective KPI dashboard that tells you how the actions determined by the strategy are (or are not) generating the expected results, this process is underdeveloped.

Phase 4: Manage the Strategy – Great dashboards are also only as great as they are utilized. A high performing leadership team engages in regularly scheduled meetings to assess the organization’s performance on the strategy and any potential adjustments to the operating or strategic plans. Otherwise, they know that they will drift off course and not realize it until significant resources have been wasted or other harm has been incurred.

• Completed or Mature When: The right meeting cadence depends on the rate of change to the business, market, and/or goals. In PE, we typically recommend this happens at least quarterly. Once the meetings are set and occurring, this process is on track.

Phase 5: Update the Strategy – At some point, you need to get the key leaders together and fully reassess the strategic plan. There’s just been too much learning and too much change (positive, negative, or neutral; internal or external) to believe that the old strategic plan and its translation to operations is still the best, complete plan. In PE, we have a rapid rate of change and typically hold these updates annually.

• Completed or Mature When: Strategy is documented and everyone on the leadership team agreed to support the documented strategy.

  
  

If you want to have the best chances of maximizing value creation in a short period of time, once you’re through phase 5, work back through 2, 3, 4 and 5 again.