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Strategic Planning Warning Flag 1 – Business Unit versus Goal-Based Planning
Executives and managers maximize their company’s value when they focus the efforts of the entire workforce on the organization’s prioritized mission goals and supporting objectives. Some executives and managers, by making the mission measurable, prioritizing those measures, and sharing accountability for identifying and executing the most value adding initiatives, ensure their workforce focuses on those activities that maximize the organization’s overall value. In other organizations, planning and/or execution shortfalls allow the pursuit of initiatives that do not optimally support mission achievement; diminishing the organization’s value creation capacity. While many factors result in misaligned focus at all levels of the organization, one in particular, the failure to align the organization’s programs, budgets, and procedures to the mission’s prioritized goals and supporting objectives is the most devastating.
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Additional Information
The following StrategyDriven recommended best practices are designed to reduce the likelihood of business unit based planning while simultaneously fostering mission goal based planning:
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make the Mission Measureable
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 2 – Prioritize the Mission
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 3 – Strategic Discipline
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 8 – Results First, Action Second
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 1 – Vertically Cascading
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 2 – Horizontally Shared
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 4 – Core Performance Measures
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 5 – One Source of the Truth
StrategyDriven Contributors have created several illustrations to visually depict the mission to programs, budgets, and procedures alignment. The Strategic Pyramid Model highlights the alignment that should exist between an organization’s mission and its programs, budgets, and procedures. The Strategic Organizational Alignment Model reveals the typical executive and managerial responsibilities associated with identifying, reaffirming, and translating the organization’s mission into goals and objectives and then into programs, processes, and procedures.
About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Too often, organizations biased to action move forward with projects and initiatives before defining the results to be achieved. This shotgun approach resembles the marksman who shoots, shoots some more, and then aims. And like the marksman who doesn’t first aim, the organization may or may not achieve its desired goals. Even if the goals are met, it is likely that many of the activities pursued contributed little or not at all to the organization’s goals; ultimately, wasting precious time and resources.
Organizational silos act as barriers; hindering the performance of business units, work groups, and individuals as they strive to achieve the organization’s shared goals. Nowhere in the organization are silos more destructive than if they exist within the executive team. Here, silos prevent the free flow of information and resources needed to successfully execute cross-functional initiatives with the barriers to collaboration cascading downward though the entire organization. To help prevent these silos from forming, all strategic plan goals must be shared equally by all executives.
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