Literature abounds on the topic of strategic planning. Why it is important, why it is not, how to make strategic planning documents more than glorified paper weight, and so on. This month I lean in on the topic of strategic planning – but from an operational perspective.
In general, strategic plans are important – as they get your team on the same page rowing in the same direction to achieve common objectives. The format for these plans can be multitudinous. They can be documents, power points, but I like to use a visual graphic that looks like a venn diagram with intersecting circles of priorities and actionables. It’s a one pager where everyone on the team sees the important part they play in what your group is trying to accomplish.
So how do you develop a successful strategic plan? As someone who developed many, that resulted in successful outcomes, I feel confident in sharing, from my perspective, how to develop and implement a galvanizing effective plan.
To begin, from a higher education perspective, this involves leaning into the institutional mission and your area’s role in achieving it. Most institutional missions say something about successful student outcomes. Bingo! This is a galvanizing phrase that everyone plays an important part in impacting.
The next step is to assemble your team to begin developing the plan. I believe there are two types of people – retreat people and not retreat people. I am a retreat person. I believe in getting everyone together in a room to discuss the objective(s) and the tactics to achieve the objective(s). For me, this involves putting people at round tables of 8-10 from different groups so people learn to begin working with people they may not know. This also results in relationship and trust building within your team. Win-win here. You get a plan while building your team.
After that, comes the prompt – where do you want to be in five years? You give each table time and space to create a list of actionables that lends to positive student outcomes that your area can either control or in some way influence – regardless of cost. This will result in some pie in the sky ideas as well as some real in the weeds items. They are all of value and address current pain points or processes that contribute to student outcomes – there is no wrong answer here.
With all this rich information, you assemble your senior leadership team and look at all the initiatives received as a group. In a sense, you throw all the initiatives into a big soup and look for common themes, threads, or intersecting ideas. You also prioritize each item relative to impact and cost. In addition, you and your leadership team should identify any gaps that exist or actionables that should be included in the plan. With the ones most frequently referenced that have meaningful effect and are reasonable, relative to cost, you give them an A grade. The next you give a B, then C, and D. Some ideas will either be too costly to take on or others will be simply outliers that will not have an impact on the objective(s).
From there you assemble a strategic planning working group of rising star professionals from each area of your organization. These are individuals who see the big picture but also work operationally enough to move initiatives – project manager types. You meet with this team on a regular basis to operationalize the plan visually, relative to priorities and actionables. This team is also responsible for leading some of the initiatives.
I love this approach as it results in team buy-in (the ideas came from the team, but you influenced the objectives(s)) and the priority items were influenced by your leadership team. It has proven to galvanize a team around common objective(s) such that the team rows in the same direction and everyone knows the important part they play in achieving the objective(s). It also allows you to do some leadership development because you are working directly with your rising stars.
As a leader, it is important to return to this plan with your team and leadership team on regular basis, so you keep your eye on the ball relative to the priorities you are looking to achieve. Without this, as Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) wrote, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
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