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The Four Keys to Successful Strategic Planning Blog Feature

Best practices

Lisa Lefebure

By: Lisa Lefebure on November 9th, 2022


The Four Keys to Successful Strategic Planning

 “Strategy” can be considered a buzzword in management. But do you really know what strategy is? Every time I present at a local university, I ask this question to students: “Is strategy a plan, is it a vision, or is it execution?” Well, it’s all those things. In its most basic form, strategy includes goals and objectives, analysis, tactical plans, management review, and follow-up readjustments. Working with business units – like Collabrance – on their strategic plans is one of the greatest professional highlights of my role as GreatAmerica Chief of Staff. After five years of leading planning processes, I’ve seen that successful strategic plans have certain elements in common, including:  

  1. Clarity  
  2. Priority 
  3. Discipline  
  4. Iteration 

Read on to learn how to stay ahead of the market by focusing on these four key components of strategic planning.  

Clarity – Does your leadership team have clarity as to where you are headed and why it matters?  

Misalignment at a leadership level makes execution difficult, if not impossible. An important piece of Collabrance’s planning sessions is spending the time needed to clearly understand the current state and priorities, assessing the progress made against those priorities to date, as well as aligning on how best to move forward. Obtaining clarity in a group setting can take time but slowing down to achieve that strategic clarity versus dealing with strategic misalignment down the road during the execution phase can heavily influence the outcome of your efforts.   

Priority Does your leadership team prioritize well?  

Fewer cars on the road can drive faster (compared to rush hour traffic where many things move very slowly). Fewer, clear strategies that are well-defined tend to be more successful than many projects or strategies all being executed at once. In a world where there are many things to do, prioritization is a hard but necessary leadership skill that must be used to make strategy planning and execution successful.  

Discipline - After a strategy planning session, does your team have a cadence to keep focused on the most important priorities?  

Collabrance makes it a leadership team best practice to meet weekly to evaluate the progress and address outstanding items associated with their strategy execution, to ensure their leadership team continues in alignment over time. This helps the team know what blockers are in the team’s way or what needs to be done so the group can swarm to get the most important things completed.  

Related: Four Steps to Successfully Perform a QBR (Quarterly Business Review) 

Iteration - Does your team revisit its priorities and strategies with a reoccurring cadence?  

Strategy is not meant to be an activity that occurs only once a year. The world is quickly changing, and in this dynamic environment, the ability to assess the soundness of your strategy and pivot if needed is a crucial part of the success of your efforts over time. Collabrance recently met to readjust strategy tactics to ensure that focus remains on the most important thing: our service providers and the experience of their subscribers, and what they need as the world evolves.  

Prioritize strategic planning  

Strategy agility in the world of changing priorities can make planning difficult. However, building iteration, prioritization, discipline, and clarity into your processes will help you focus energy on what’s most important. If you would like help with your strategic planning efforts, I would encourage you to contact a consultancy like Pathshare HR Services (a subsidiary of GreatAmerica). At GreatAmerica and Collabrance, our goal is to help our customers achieve greater success and we would be excited to help support your strategic planning efforts for the future!