“ACTION PLANS - THE LINK BETWEEN STRATEGY AND ACCOUNTABILITY”
Over the past three months, I have reviewed business strategy and accountability. The critical link between strategy and accountability is the Action Plans that you and your team jointly craft and commit to implement.
Too often, strategic plans are prepared and then gain dust while the organization goes on running the business the way they always have. As a consequence, the organization usually underachieves and the credibility of the leadership suffers.
Action Plans are meant to be the dynamic outcome of your strategic plan. They bring your strategic plan to life and should drive marketing and sales efforts, human resources practices and research and development.
Implementation is the most difficult part of the planning process. Here are some key requirements:
- A visible CEO - who regularly delivers a "stump speech" about the plan - promoting its values, mission statement, actions, etc.
- An attentive management team - that keeps a close eye on the top three priorities under each strategy in the plan.
- Strategy sponsorship teams - a team for each strategy, they become the change agents for each strategy.
When strategic plans fail, top management is often to blame. The reasons?
- Lack of communication - The plan doesn't get communicated to employees who keep on working in the dark.
- Mired in the day-to-day - Managers consumed by daily operating problems lose sight of long-term goals.
- Something special - The plan is treated as something separate and removed from the management process.
- Reversion to old ways - Management ends up discarding the plan, choosing instead to make intuitive decisions that clash with accepted objectives and strategies. The result is confusion among employees throughout the ranks.
Above all else, the business must communicate strategy clearly and regularly to employees. When the CEO and top management demonstrate the link between strategy and specific business decisions, front-line staff are encouraged to think strategically as well.
To keep a plan alive, it must be monitored through regular monthly or quarterly updates. Progress in a plan can be measured through such key indicators as revenue, gross sales and the number of new customers. The planning team must decide what measurements are most applicable to long-term objectives. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
Here are a few final tips:
- Stay committed and keep talking about the values, vision, goals and strategy.
- Build milestones into the plan, follow up and hold people accountable
- Reward success. Celebrate it. Appreciate people’s contributions.
Over the life of a strategic plan, a company's vision may stay the same, but its strategies will probably need to be revised. Regular monitoring of results and testing of assumptions usually reveals this. Normally, this means refining specific strategies and goals each year to meet changing circumstances.
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