Picture this: You’re a managing director, and you have just finished developing your strategic plan with your leadership team. You’ve reached alignment on your company’s vision and purpose, and you’re clear on your strategic priorities, goals and action items. Now, what do you do?
Often, companies are left with a stack of papers or a strategic planning document, and then a couple weeks later you get busy with operations, and strategic initiatives are placed on the back burner. Ten to twelve months later, people are going to ask how they are doing with the strategic plan, and those responsible for implementation and tracking may start to scramble when looking at the goals that haven’t been met.
To avoid this from happening, the number one thing you can do once you’ve completed your strategic planning session is to create a strategy meeting rhythm so that your company can stay on top of its strategic plan implementation.
You may already have regular meetings, weekly check ups, daily scrums, or quarterly session to have various operations or project discussions. However, it’s also important is to create time for the strategic work. Some company’s like to meet monthly, quarterly, weekly, or even daily.
In those meetings, it is key to have a written agenda that clearly outlines your vision, purpose, strategic priorities and goals you’ve set out. See to it that you report back against what those goals are, how you’re doing, what was done in the last quarter or what’s going to be done in the next quarter.
I recommend you do this every month with your leadership team. Everybody should have either a strategic initiative they’re assigned or specific action items they’ve decided to take on. Talk about where you’re going, share the strategic priorities, and emphasise where you are going to focus. Talk about what you did last month and what you did this month as it relates to your strategy.
