Develop and Implement Strategy, No matter how well-designed and well-communicated your vision, mission, values and strategic goals are, they still add little or no long-term value to your organization unless you do something to achieve them. Once you identify strategic goals, based on your vision mission, you must decide what you intend to do in order to realize them.
Another way to look at strategic planning is to think of it as being a funnel that is wide at the top and narrower, or more specific, at the bottom:
Many leaders are daunted by strategy and it is often considered something only a CEO or a highly-paid consultant can do. Of course, external guidance is always useful when developing strategy and, yes, finding a winning strategy is never easy but do not be daunted by it on a conceptual level.
Strategy is essentially about the choices an organization makes, or options it takes, designed to help it move from its current position (where are we now?) towards the goals it wants to achieve (where do we want to be?).
strategy should help the organization play to its strengths, address weaknesses, capitalize on opportunities and prepare for threats. In reality, any organization usually has a number of integrated strategies in order to achieve each set of the stakeholder-focused goals it has defined.
In light of this, as a leader, you need to consider the strategic goals and then reflect on the alternatives available to help you achieve them. Clearly, the strategies you adopt depend upon your specific strategic goals and the current position of your organization but will always involve decision making.
A strategy for achieving financial goals might involve choosing between entering a new market, or expanding within the current one; it might involve designing and launching new products, or looking at how to improve the marketing and promotion of the existing product line.
For employee-related goals, it could involve redesigning the training and development process, or choosing how to restructure the ways in which performance is rewarded. For customer-related goals, it might involve choices between building up direct sales or moving to online distribution.
Strategy is always about choices and decisions and, with the right information, experience and indeed, some gut-feeling, you can do it.
When you have decided upon your general strategies, you need to implement them. Most organizations do so as part of the annual planning process. Any organization, regardless of size, should prepare an annual business plan, with financial, marketing, human resources and operational components.
There are many things to be planned in any given year but planned and budgeted for annually; otherwise, you get ‘drift’, which can prove fatal in terms of realizing strategic goals.
