Board in Conflict with Their Leadership Team
Strategic planning gets both stakeholder groups to listen and understand, identifies Board and Leadership Team members who don't belong and/or are not aligned with where the organization needs to go, and gets both the Board and their Leadership Team on the same page.
Dysfunctional Executive Teams
Strategic planning: Builds trust based on gaining insight into individual's motivation and competence, eliminates the politics of "private one-on-one discussions" where each team member is told a different story, forces people to understand all sides of an issue, leading to more informed decisions, gets people to listen to each other, leads the team to make decisions rather than table them and to establish action plans to implement those decisions and provides a safe environment so the issues people wouldn't talk about can be discussed and resolved now or in the future.
New Leadership
Strategic planning: Enables the new CEO to intelligently influence direction and to blend his/her instincts with insights from team members, Provides a look into the soul of their leadership team -- their passions, competences, and personal alignment with organizational goals, and Brings the new executive up to speed quickly on all company issues.
Stuck In a Rut
Strategic planning: Airs options, forces decisions with tangible action steps, Establishes focus and commitment for the organization on meaningful changes to the status quo, and Provides a voice and forum for "out of the box" thinking -- especially from those people who aren't often heard.
Failing Business Model
Strategic Planning: Focuses the leadership team on worthwhile approaches - ones with positive responses to the four basic go-ahead questions of: is it real? can we do it? can we win? is it worth it?,
Formulates a path out of the briar patch with specific goals, and key result measures to focus effort with 30-, 60- and 90-day action steps, and Helps team come to grips with collapsing market or product and the urgency to transition to a new business model.
Recovering from a Major Downsizing, Merger or Reorganization
Strategic Planning: Clears the air, surfacing perceived issues of fairness and logic, and helps the team bury the past, Gets new team chemistry established, Gets the team focused on the future rather than the past.
Outgrown Their Current Organizational Structure
Strategic Planning: Establishes an appropriate scale of systems for their organization -- more modest than Exxon's, but more formal than Joe's Garage, Identifies missing leadership skills and team members,
Identifies the brush-clearing goals -- documentation of procedures and policies, organizational changes, etc, and Sets strategic goals to "clear the brush," positioning organization for the next major move, and also Identifying and implementing the tools needed to build the tools required to get to the next level.
Family Owned Businesses Transitioning to the Next Generation
Strategic Planning: Identifies the next generation's weaknesses in tactical and strategic thinking for private mentoring, Provides a forum for maintaining strategic direction during the transition to the next generation, Provides a forum for the next generation to lead while the previous generation is present, and Provides an "independent outsider" to facilitate the development of strategic thinking for the next generation.
Startups Ready to Scale
Strategic Planning: Establishes the go-to-market strategy -- what initial product and what initial market, Establishes a focus on the major next steps with the appropriate sense of urgency, Helps the team pick the initial path to become sustainable and commit to it, and Helps the team reach consensus on the actual business they're in.
Looking to Expand their Leadership Team
Strategic Planning: Allows existing leadership to judge abilities and potential of new leadership team members, Expands new team members' minds by forcing them to understand and pay attention to the "big picture." and Forces team members to think through issues and provide answers BEFORE the CEO/owners give them the "correct" answer.
Recruiting C-level Executives
Strategic Planning: Builds trust for the potential executives among the rest of the team, Gives insight as to what the potential new executives' chemistry with various players will be, Highlights where the potential new executives are likely to contribute and Helps potential new executives quickly learn what they are getting into, enabling them to make a more informed decision.
Strategies for Organizations
Use strategic planning to create your future
Strategic planning is creating a vision of the future and managing toward that expectancy. It's operating under a vision, mission, and strategy umbrella that focuses the organization's effort. It's an effective process for aligning your short-term decisions with your long-term goals.
Strategic planning answers the four big questions:
- Where are we today?
- Where do we want to be in the future?
- What should we be focused on today, in order to make it more likely we will be where we want to be in the future?
- How do we make it happen?
It is a simple process with an incredible power to energize your organization and bridge the gap between long-term vision and day-to-day tactics. One way to visualize the process is as a pyramid, with vision forming the stable base and rapidly evolving tactical action steps at the top.
Properly done, the strategic planning process customizes itself around the unique issues of each organization.
Strategic planning makes an immediate impact
- It builds true teamwork by developing consensus, commitment, and trust.
- It delivers dramatically higher results by establishing personal accountability, specific measures and action steps, a commitment of team members and company resources, and a stable investment platform.
- It reduces stress through a shared vision, mutual trust, and tools for effective delegation.
Strategic planning can keep the organization from being overcome by events
- It provides regular “stakes in the ground” meetings that force the leadership team to reevaluate where they are relative to where they want to be and whether their action plans are changing the status quo quickly enough.
- It provides a quarterly forum for recognizing opportunities/threats and developing responses with appropriate urgency.
- It provides a forum for discussions and resolution of issues that don’t lend themselves to operational meetings.
Strategic planning strengthens the leadership team
- It forces the leadership team to think about the big picture - look at the business through the eyes of the CEO
- It helps team members communicate with and listen to one another's fears, insights, and dreams.
- It makes everyone focus on what is truly important to the organization, prioritizing efforts and the use of resources.
- It gets the team on the same page - a shared visualization of where the organization wants to be within 5, 10 or 30 years.
- It results in proactively changing the status quo with an implementation process that keeps people on schedule, on track, and regularly held accountable for 30-, 60- and 90-day action steps.
What's the Quickest Path to these Benefits?
Since 1991, organizations have been discovering that Myrna Associates' strategic planning process is the secret path to success. They have found the "Myrna magic" to be a powerful and an affordable tool for coping with major transitions ranging from near bankruptcy to sudden, massive, and uncontrolled growth.
Our strategic planning services are the quickest, most reliable way to turn the concept of strategic planning into reality. It is a proven process, professionally facilitated, with prompt delivery of the documented plan
We offer a selection of Services that caters to every need.
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