2 Secrets to Your Strategic Plan’s Success

We are now entering strategic planning season for most credit unions. You know the drill: SWOT analysis, surveys, facilitators, budgets, data, strategic initiatives, tactical action plans and trends.

All those items (except maybe the overused SWOT analysis) are keys to a successful strategic planning session. Too many credit unions, however, can fall prey to doing the same things year after year after year with their planning. The result: Not as successful a strategy.

As we routinely tell our clients: Strategy is a process, not a date on a calendar. And no matter what process you use, there are often two keys after the planning session that determine whether or not the plan you spent hours cussing and discussing actually gets implemented.

So what are the two secrets to your strategic plan’s success? Focus and staff.

Focus

Strategic planning is not just about what you’re going to do. It’s also about what you’re not going to do. If all you do is walk out of your planning session with a giant to-do list, you are setting yourself up for failure and not success.

As Michael Porter, author of “Competitive Strategy,” says, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

In other words, there are a lot of things you can do with your strategy. The bigger question is what should you do?

The problem with focus is that it’s easy to lose. As Gino Wickman says in “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business,” “It doesn’t take much for an organization to get off track in the hustle and bustle of the business world.”

Focus takes discipline. If everything is important, then nothing is important. You must set limits: Limit your strategies, limit your projects and limit chasing too many new ideas.

Not every idea is a good idea. And some good ideas are not great ideas. Planning ultimately comes down to a resource allocation exercise.

From a practical standpoint, answer this question: Of all the strategies we’ve discussed, which three will have the highest positive impact on our credit union? Then scratch off everything else on your list.

Staff

You can have the best strategy in your market. You can have the most unique ideas. You can have the budget. But none of that matters if you don’t have the people to execute your plan.

As we tell our clients, it doesn’t matter what you say in a planning session; it matters what you do with your staff the next week when it comes to implementation.

According to recent workplace statistics, 37% of employees don’t understand their companies’ priorities. Let that number sink in. That means one-third of your employees do not know your strategic plan.

That’s not their fault: That’s on leadership. You have to tell them. And tell them again. The book “Traction” notes that people need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time.

As Patrick Lencioni, president of organizational health consulting firm the Table Group, notes, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, any market, against any competition, at any time.”

From a practical implementation standpoint, there are a couple of steps your credit union can take to help with this team communication. One is to develop a strategic playbook. This is a short one-page document that summarizes your key initiatives, measurables and the role employees play with implementation. The playbook keeps the plan in front of employees on a regular basis.

Another practical solution is to conduct 90-day strategic planning sprints. With this format, every quarter your executive team reexamines the plan to determine status, roadblocks, issues and projects. Ninety-day sprints force more employee communication.

With your staff and implementation, the goal is progress, not perfection.

Do not assume that just because the executive team and board had a strategic planning retreat, came back and told staff what the credit union is doing next year that every employee knows and understands the plan. It takes repetitive communication. A plan that is not understood is a plan that won’t get done.

As Peter Drucker, who is known as the “inventor of modern management,” famously said, “strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” If you want your plan to not sit on a shelf and collect dust, you must excel at execution. And that takes focus and staff.

Mark Arnold is founder and president of On the Mark Strategies, a Dallas, Texas-based consulting firm specializing in branding and strategic planning for credit unions.