SETTING STRATEGY WITH EXECUTION IN MIND
The Strategic Planning Challenge
Strategic planning for an enterprise is arguably the most important responsibility of leadership. Yet achieving alignment on future direction is always challenging work for any executive team. The issues at play are many and complex, and the high-powered players typically involved often hold strong views about the business, its operating environment and each other.
In addition, even after a senior executive team reaches consensus through strategic plan development, they still need to build commitment and mobilize support throughout the enterprise to ensure on-strategy execution and implementation at all levels.
A Proven Approach to Strategic Plan Development & Implementation
In spite of these challenges, we have helped many a client executive team achieve the kind of alignment that unites them and galvanizes their organizations around a coherent and compelling strategic plan for future success. What results is a comprehensive, reality-based, accountable, action-oriented strategic plan for an enterprise or strategic business unit, plus many other benefits to the organization and its leadership team.
The cornerstones of our successful Team-Based Strategic Planning Process are:
- an open, candid, fact-based assessment of a company’s current and prospective operating environment
- a series of customized, structured planning Conferences, carefully designed and facilitated by Gagnon Associates consultants, against concrete outcome goals
- a parallel, “Offline,” Feedback/Input Process, “interleaved” with planning Conferences, that enables representatives of a company’s key stakeholder groups to review and influence in-process planning material, as well as to provide fresh, “front-end” inputs to planning Conference discussions and deliberations.
This approach facilitates broader organizational involvement in the kind of high-level planning that is often the exclusive purview of only senior-most executives.
Since commitment and ownership are always a function of involvement, our Team-Based Strategic Planning Process not only provides a leadership team with the data, setting, process and support they need to achieve alignment among themselves, it also ensures the kind of stakeholder involvement that’s needed to build broader ownership for the final plan and commitment to its ultimate implementation.
Getting Started: Strategic Plan Development
The “Strategic Planning Model,” shown here, lays out the Team-Based Strategic Planning Process at a glance.
It begins with:
- Confidential Executive Interviews of the Planning Team members, conducted by the Gagnon Associates consultant who will be leading the Strategic Planning Process,
- Preparation of the Environmental Scan, a “snap-shot” of the enterprise’s:
- macro business environment,
- industry,
- major competitors,
- financial and organizational health.
This contextual material, as well as a thorough SWOTS analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) serves to lay the factual foundation upon which all subsequent planning Conference deliberations are based.
The Strategic Planning Conferences
The Planning Conferences represent the heart of the Team-Based Strategic Planning Process. A configuration of three, two-day sessions, taking place over as little as three months, has proven suitable for many clients, but this schedule can be adjusted to suit a given client’s operating requirements and constraints.
The accompanying “Architecture” depicts the key strategic questions the Planning Team works through in the course of the Conferences and the sequence in which they confront these questions.
Gagnon Associates consultants play the role of content-neutral moderator/facilitator/trainer/task-master, and catalyst at all Conferences. This ensures:
- unbiased management of the content agenda and the deliberative process,
- the CEO’s interaction as a full participant vs. obligatory “meeting leader”
- a healthy confrontation of critical, yet sometimes sensitive, issues identified in Executive Interviews and surfaced anonymously and “safely” by the consultant/facilitator,
- high-productivity sessions based on a proven approach vs. “making it up as you go along.”
“Offline” Organizational Feedback/Input Process
Between the formal Planning Conferences, members of the Planning Team serve as “Task Team” Leaders. Following a process provided by Gagnon Associates, “Task Team” Leaders meet with representatives from the enterprise’s broader constituencies to:
- review and prepare feedback on previous Conference draft outputs and outcomes and
- provide input to the strategic questions to be addressed in subsequent Conferences.
“Task Team” Leaders prepare this “Offline” material for presentation and discussion at the Planning Conferences, thus ensuring substantive stakeholder input to the Strategic Planning Process.
This in-process involvement before a strategic plan is final builds awareness and ownership for the planning process itself and maximizes the chances for broader organizational “buy-in” for the strategic plan that results. In terms of effective implementation, this approach provides a leadership team with far better chances of gaining traction for new direction than if, as is so often the case, their strategic plan had been “hatched” privately behind closed doors. In this case, the likelihood of a successful strategic plan implementation process is much stronger.
Clients of Our Strategic Planning Process
Customized applications of the Team-Based Strategic Planning Process have been conducted with executive leadership from the following for-profit companies:
- Colgate-Palmolive
- The First-Brands Corporation
- FTD
- Rodale, Inc.
- Russ Berrie and Company, Inc.
- The Orvis Company
- POLO.COM (a subsidiary of Polo Ralph Lauren)
- Financo, Inc.
- AdvaMed
- Noble International, LTD
In the non-profit arena, the Process has been conducted for:
- St. Bonaventure University
- The Frank Foundation,
- Gilda’s Club
- Food Pantries of the Capital District (Albany, NY)
- Trout Unlimited
“I’d like to focus primarily on the benefits of the Strategic Planning Process to the leadership of the company, that is, to me as CEO and to my leadership team. First, my top-line statement would be that I gained valuable insights that encouraged me to change my style and approach to leading the company.” ... Read the full Testimonial »
“We had just completed a major acquisition in Europe that almost doubled the size of the Company. We were in the beginning of the process of not only combining our businesses – one in North America and the other in Europe – but, since the entire senior management team of the European business stayed on to continue to run the business, we also needed to meld together two very different cultures, while determining how to create value.
"Of importance to me as CEO was the opportunity that the Strategic Planning Process provided for this new, global senior management team to work together and become more comfortable with each other. By the end of our last planning session, each of the executives who participated truly believed they had played an important role in developing our new Strategic Plan and that their voice had been heard and respected.
"In this context, Gagnon Associates’ involvement with Noble was invaluable.” ... Read the full Testimonial »
"The Strategic Planning Process provided clarity and concreteness to our goals, strategies, and timetables. It also created a bond that brought my group together both as a new business as well as a team. Most importantly, your process allowed me to create a real sense of commitment within our group that has helped us survive a volatile business environment. To this day, we still speak the “language” established in that first strategy session over a year ago." ... Read the full Testimonial »
“I . . . want to note that working with Gagnon Associates has been a real pleasure. Your business focus to Strategic Planning, your skills in facilitation and the advance preparation you demand of yourselves make planning sessions the most productive I have ever experienced in my career.” ... Read the full Testimonial »
Case Study: Strategic Plan Development & Implementation
THE COMPANY: America’s oldest direct-mail catalogue marketing company.
THE SITUATION: After years of enviable growth, the company encounters a business down turn and withstands the first layoffs in its history. Impact on company morale is significant, and though the imperative to resolve on a future course is clear, ... Read the full Case Study »