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What is Strategic Training?

Is training needed to execute strategy? Is training part of strategy? Let’s answer these questions by first examining the process of developing strategy.

Strategic Planning Is an Expensive Endeavor

If you take into account the value of the executive team’s time, developing a strategic plan is an expensive endeavor. But, it’s even more costly if that plan is not executed, and the fact is that most plans are not. With so much at stake, why aren’t most plans implemented? Two reasons: either the plan is not executable or the organization lacks the capability to do so.

If a strategic plan is not executable that means it can’t be accomplished in the timeframe allotted, with the people and money that are available. To determine if a strategic plan is executable it has to be validated. Do we have the people? Is there enough time to accomplish these goals? What will it cost?

The Capability to Execute a Plan

You also need capability to execute a plan – both individual and organizational capability. We live in a rapidly changing world and therefore the capability required for tomorrow’s work is not the same capability required for today’s. Individual capability is addressed by the question, “Do the individuals who must implement the plan have the capabilities required to do so?” If the answer is no, then you have three options:

  • Revise the plan
  • De-hire the people who don’t have the capabilities and hire people who do
  • Train people so they can perform at the new level required by the plan

Hiring new people is almost always more expensive than training existing people, so option two is the least attractive. If training people cannot be done in the timeframe of the plan or if the costs exceed the benefits to be derived, then option one – revise the plan, is the best choice. Otherwise, you’re left with option three – train people strategically, to improve their capabilities so they can implement the strategic plan.

How Capable Is Your Organization?

The other capability you need is organizational and organizational capability is a combination of systems, procedures, know-how, and skills required to get something done on an enterprise-wide basis. One example of an organizational capability is the ability to create, make and sell products and services to customers for a profit which most organizations have some capability to do. Another example of an organizational capability is the capability to execute the strategic plan, which most organizations lack.

How Capable Is Your Project System?

In order to effectively execute the portfolio of projects , the organization needs the capability to do so.  The question you must ask is, “How capable is your project system? Can you predictably execute all of the projects in the portfolio? Effectively? Efficiently?” If your system isn’t capable, then it needs to be upgraded and just as with any other new capability that you want to roll out on an enterprise-level, building that capability requires training – strategic training – training to build organizational capability. In the case of the project system, this includes training in a methodology, training in project leadership, training in project sponsorship and training in portfolio management.

If your strategy requires new organizational capability, that is when training becomes strategic. This was the approach GE used when it decided it needed the organizational capability to significantly improve the performance of its business processes. In order to create that capability, they had to train people at all levels in the organization. This is strategic training.

Training is strategic when it’s part of the strategic plan, when the capability to be developed is required for the organization to move forward. Training is not strategic when people just sign up ad hoc for training classes.

Strategic Training Is an Investment in the Future

Yes, strategic training costs money, but what does it cost not to execute your strategic plan? To stay stuck at the same level of capability that you were at last year? And the year before that? How does that position you competitively? Training, done strategically, is an investment in the future. And the first investment in training you should consider is in creating the capability to execute your strategy effectively and efficiently!

Paula Martin

Paula Martin is a Master Level Certified Matrix Management Consultant™ (CMMC™—MOL), and the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of the Matrix Management Institute. She is the developer of the MM 2.0™ Operating System, and the author of the Matrix Management 2.0™ Body of Knowledge, the Matrix Management Reinvented book series, and more than 10 other books on topics related to Matrix Management and Managing Projects in a Matrix.

L&D STRATEGY

Why Strategic Training and Development is Essential for Long-Term Business Success

Training programs come in many forms, depending on the organisation. What all should have in common is a strategic focus. That is, company goals the program will impact. 

Strategic training and development ties individual learning needs to business results. Not only does this give employees a better sense of purpose, it ensures that job roles and every day work are truly driving business success. 

Let’s walk through the steps in the process as well as examples of strategic training and development that you can easily implement today.  

what is strategic training and development

What is strategic training and development?

Strategic training and development is the process of designing specific employee training programs that directly align with business needs. Training with a strategic focus develops the capabilities and tools that employees need to successfully carry out their jobs. In turn, the capabilities gained give organisations a competitive edge.  

What is the strategic training process?

The difference between regular employee development and training with strategic goals comes down to a few characteristics. 

  • All development activities are based on the strategic objectives of the organisation.  
  • The learning framework is general enough to be applied to any business function’s needs, but specific enough that it can address niche training requirements. 
  • Continual reporting, analysis and iteration is a core part of the process for L&D professionals. 
  • Management are key champions.  
  • Training activities are tailored to personal needs to ensure learning sticks.  

The above must exist and be routinely utilised in a strategic training process, particularly one that supports human resource management. At the centre is a performance outcome or behavioural change. Thus, the main differentiator is that strategic training and development programs look long-term. 

What are the steps in a strategic training and development process?

This process is always rooted in business-level outcomes. While you’re looking for performance outcomes at the individual level, these outcomes need to have business impacts. It’s also a cyclical process where each step informs the next.  

infographic showing the cyclical nature of the strategic training & development process

Define strategic initiatives

If we’re thinking long-term for current activities, we need to start at the top: Business strategy. What is the ultimate business value that any given training program will provide? 

If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you can’t effectively identify or track results. And even if you do experience a positive result, you probably won’t be able to accurately retrace your steps to replicate it. This is why we want to have quantifiable training initiatives. 

Look at your business drivers. This is usually where organisations pull from strategic planning tools like a  capability framework , because these are what make a business effective. If you don’t have one, there are two ways frameworks derive business drivers. 

  • Public sector capability frameworks  look at key high-level behaviours and attributes.  
  • Private enterprise frameworks often develop capabilities from business units and technical and leadership skills.  

Content creation, customer management and predictive analytics are capabilities derived from business functions. Human abilities like leadership , collaboration , and decision-making are also developable capabilities that impact the bottom line. To make these initiatives, we just have to think about the link to job performance.  

This is where legacy learning tech is going to let you down. Most LMSs focus on plugging massive content libraries that force learners to wade through largely irrelevant content. If they do complete training, you base improvement on completions, which shows nothing but that they ticked a box.

It was this complaint that lead us to create Acorn performance learning management system (PLMS), a first-of-its-kind learning solution that guides learners step-by-step to master the specific capabilities of their roles. That includes curating content and mapping it to those specific capabilities, so learners so only what is relevant to their capability needs, and capturing experiences that are happening outside the platform and transforming them into learning assets.

And given learning starts and ends with capabilities, this enables reporting that shows true business impact, thus proving the strategic nature of your training and development.

Find your gaps

Whatever the initiative, you want key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are what make strategic training an iterative, cyclical process and, well, strategic, as they give you a measure of change.  

Start by prioritising capabilities based on the impact they will have on desired business goals and the availability of said capability within your organisation. This comes down to performance.  

Observation, performance reviews and even time tracking can give insight into how effectively employees apply capabilities. We note this isn’t breathing down people’s necks or questioning why they spent so long on something. It’s an objective analysis of the way work gets done.  

Say you realise Project Management is the lynchpin capability for an upcoming project, because there’ll be multiple players from different teams collaborating. But it’s sorely lacking in a young, junior-level workforce. There’s the training opportunity and priority, all in one. It also means there are ample practice opportunities, too. To define KPIs, think about what the  end goal of performance is and the progress towards it . Consider quantifiable training metrics (efficiency, quality, time) as well your reporting periods—KPIs need to be achievable.     

Personalise activities 

Training can be a change strategy, but only if it  reflects how people work . Consider the day in the life of employees. What are they good at and why? Does a Technical Support Officer excel when talking with customers because they are empathetic or because they understand the technology well enough to explain it? What are the blockages (new skills, processes or technology )  in their workflow? How do they structure their days? 

Any program should be practical to an employee’s day-to-day, while the mode of training should complement it. As much as we’re thinking long-term, training needs to be accessible, timely and relevant in the interim for employees to engage with it.  

This is where managers are key. They should be openly discussing career progression and preferences with their employees (because managers directly impact the way training is viewed in the workplace culture), even co-designing the process.  

Consider modes of training like: 

  • On the job training , such as mentoring, coaching and job shadowing. These are beneficial for behavioural capabilities like people leadership, because true development translates theory into actions.    
  • External learnings through third party providers.  
  • Long-term study, such as a graduate certificate. 
  • Short-burst training e.g. video-based micro-courses. 
  • Online training as accessed through a  learning management system .  

You could take a holistic and experiential approach through a blended learning experience that combines any of the above. Let employees choose topics of training that interest them, too. These can be drawn from your pool of capabilities or business drivers, even if not necessary for one’s job. An IT professional looking at the psychology of product design, for example.  

Analyse impact 

This is the step that makes the process cyclical. It’s also where you show the  ROI of training , ensuring that organisational value is easy to convey because: 

  • You’re not making assumptions 
  • Training is truly impactful on employee day-to-day 
  • Learning outcomes are solving business pain points.  

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we’re borrowing from the  Kirkpatrick training evaluation model . The focus is always on tangible outcomes that occurred—and  only  occurred—because of training.  

kirkpatrick evaluation model diagram

In this case, you can use learning-based metrics like:  

  • Content completions 
  • Progression rates 
  • Performance reviews 

To better understand organisational results such as: 

  • Customer satisfaction/complaints 
  • Employee satisfaction/engagement 
  • Project/process iterations. 

Whatever insights you gain here you funnel back into the process. Say increased customer satisfaction was an intended outcome. Satisfaction scores haven’t increased in the three months since support staff were meant to undertake an emotional intelligence. Look to the content completions and progression rates. If they’re low, you may need to revisit program design to boost engagement .  

Examples of strategic training and development programs 

Before you dive into fleshing out a program, keep in mind that some training may not be strategic even if  important to your business . That’s training like: 

  • Compliance, which is crucial for obvious reasons.  
  • Onboarding. It sets the tone for new hires, but the knowledge shared is usually only beneficial for getting the lay of the land in their first few months.  
  • Product. This keeps your engine running as knowledge critical for certain job roles.  

The key difference between these types of training and training with strategic impact is that they are niche topics for a certain moment in time. Strategic training looks long-term, often encompassing short-term initiatives.  

Initiative: Leadership development

Leaders are the core of workplace culture, which means any displays of agility, resilience and strategy filter down to employees. Equally, any negative attributes (poor delegation, opaque decision making, lacking business knowledge) will be obvious to those leaders are meant to influence.  

Obviously, leaders aren’t just born or developed overnight. Having a talent pipeline to promote from takes time to develop, but it should be started as early as possible since leaders are the make-or-break role in your organisation. It’s easier to develop the leaders you want and need.  

Program: Mentoring

Leadership is something that is better learned than studied. Ergo, opt for a largely face-to-face approach that’s reinforced by online modules on topics like conflict resolution. Many great leaders will say experience is what sets them apart from junior roles, because experience provides context. Mentoring benefits both mentee and mentor, since it builds new knowledge in one and develops and reinforces skills in the other.  

To  establish a mentoring program , start by identifying the people best for mentoring and being mentored. Bring it back to capabilities and authority. Who in your organisation is highly proficient? Who do employees routinely turn to with questions? Get managers to spotlight employees who either want to undertake mentoring or would benefit. The key thing to get right is matching mentee and mentor by capabilities, personality (hint: too similar can make for echo chambers) and experience.  

Initiative: Social learning 

Don’t knock it. Even at our most introverted, we are generally a social workforce. Think of the mission-critical knowledge that is shared in non-trackable ways: Between peers throughout the day, within meetings, on the coffee run.  

Your competitive advantage is being shared here, without you even knowing or encouraging it. (Think about  cross-cutting decisions .) And knowledge sharing depends on your culture. Poor culture means knowledge is more likely to be siloed. So, encourage  social sharing .  

Program: Lunch & learns 

Informal but impactful. That’s how we’d sum up the lunch and learn. Not all training needs to be extremely formal—social learning is an easy way of quickly improving employee knowledge. 

Lunch and learns  bring the benefits  of: 

  • Efficiency. Training may be a luxury in smaller teams. Inviting guests or having team members “preach” to their peers during the working day can be cost and time effective. 
  • Cross-training. The communications team talking about marketing strategy can be insightful for the customer team, who they may not interact with otherwise. 
  • Being geo-agnostic. A remote workforce means scattered information and  a lack of tacit knowledge , but the convenience of video calls makes lunch and learns accessible to all.  

It also means you can relay new or updated information faster. The product team may give a presentation on an upcoming launch, and with that comes the specialist expertise they have of the product. Other employees can ask questions as they need and get answers immediately, removing the potential for miscommunication later.  

Initiative: Capability building 

There’s not a lot to say here that hasn’t already been said. Capabilities—technical or soft, core or complementary—need to be continuously developed in your existing workforce as they determine your long-term success. Sometimes, you can’t hire for emerging skills. That’s where the stretch assignment comes in.  

Program: Stretch assignments

Keeping high performers engaged is tricky. They learn and evolve quickly, so a challenge isn’t a challenge for long. Stretch assignments are often labelled soft promotions as they add dimension and responsibility to an employee’s job, while helping solve a business problem. While not entirely exclusive, it’s also something you can trial on a small group of employees—namely those who are starting to outpace their current role.  

They’re truly impactful and easily implemented because they get employees on the ground. Training is practical, immediately or directly impacts the business and is reinforced by social sharing, making it low cost. Many assignments can give employees a chance to try out leadership, too.  

Examples of stretch assignments include: 

  • Serving on a special task force 
  • Leading a new project or implementation 
  • Relaunching or optimising an internal initiative (such as lunch and learns) 
  • Mentoring an entry-level or junior employee 
  • Representing the organisation to clients or at events.  

Key takeaways

Training and development should never be done for the sake of it. Aligning training with business strategy means employees are developing capabilities critical to business sustainability, growing their skillsets while driving competitive advantage. Offering practical training and development means you can boost job performance and company performance in one—as long as you’re continually assessing your methods to keep up with today’s business environment, that is.  

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Build Your 2024 AI Transformation Roadmap 🚀

The strategic planning process in 4 steps, to help you throughout our strategic planning framework, we have created a how-to guide on the basics of a strategic plan, which we will take you through step-by-step..

Free Strategic Planning Guide

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic Planning is when organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy development.

What

Overview of the Strategic Planning Process:

The strategic management process involves taking your organization on a journey from point A (where you are today) to point B (your vision of the future).

Part of that journey is the strategy built during strategic planning, and part of it is execution during the strategic management process. A good strategic plan dictates “how” you travel the selected road.

Effective execution ensures you are reviewing, refreshing, and recalibrating your strategy to reach your destination. The planning process should take no longer than 90 days. But, move at a pace that works best for you and your team and leverage this as a resource.

To kick this process off, we recommend 1-2 weeks (1-hour meeting with the Owner/CEO, Strategy Director, and Facilitator (if necessary) to discuss the information collected and direction for continued planning.)

Strategic Planning Guide and Process

Questions to Ask:

  • Who is on your Planning Team? What senior leadership members and key stakeholders are included? Checkout these links you need help finding a strategic planning consultant , someone to facilitate strategic planning , or expert AI strategy consulting .
  • Who will be the business process owner (Strategy Director) of planning in your organization?
  • Fast forward 12 months from now, what do you want to see differently in your organization as a result of your strategic plan and implementation?
  • Planning team members are informed of their roles and responsibilities.
  • A strategic planning schedule is established.
  • Existing planning information and secondary data collected.

Action Grid:

What

Step 1: Determine Organizational Readiness

Set up your plan for success – questions to ask:

  • Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place at the current time? Can certain pitfalls be avoided?
  • Is this the appropriate time for your organization to initiate a planning process? Yes or no? If no, where do you go from here?

Step 2: Develop Your Team & Schedule

Who is going to be on your planning team? You need to choose someone to oversee the strategy implementation (Chief Strategy Officer or Strategy Director) and strategic management of your plan? You need some of the key individuals and decision makers for this team. It should be a small group of approximately 12-15 people.

OnStrategy is the leader in strategic planning and performance management. Our cloud-based software and hands-on services closes the gap between strategy and execution. Learn more about OnStrategy here .

Step 3: Collect Current Data

All strategic plans are developed using the following information:

  • The last strategic plan, even if it is not current
  • Mission statement, vision statement, values statement
  • Past or current Business plan
  • Financial records for the last few years
  • Marketing plan
  • Other information, such as last year’s SWOT, sales figures and projections

Step 4: Review Collected Data

Review the data collected in the last action with your strategy director and facilitator.

  • What trends do you see?
  • Are there areas of obvious weakness or strengths?
  • Have you been following a plan or have you just been going along with the market?

Conclusion: A successful strategic plan must be adaptable to changing conditions. Organizations benefit from having a flexible plan that can evolve, as assumptions and goals may need adjustments. Preparing to adapt or restart the planning process is crucial, so we recommend updating actions quarterly and refreshing your plan annually.

Strategic Planning Pyramid

Strategic Planning Phase 1: Determine Your Strategic Position

Want more? Dive into the “ Evaluate Your Strategic Position ” How-To Guide.

Action Grid

Step 1: identify strategic issues.

Strategic issues are critical unknowns driving you to embark on a robust strategic planning process. These issues can be problems, opportunities, market shifts, or anything else that keeps you awake at night and begging for a solution or decision. The best strategic plans address your strategic issues head-on.

  • How will we grow, stabilize, or retrench in order to sustain our organization into the future?
  • How will we diversify our revenue to reduce our dependence on a major customer?
  • What must we do to improve our cost structure and stay competitive?
  • How and where must we innovate our products and services?

Step 2: Conduct an Environmental Scan

Conducting an environmental scan will help you understand your operating environment. An environmental scan is called a PEST analysis, an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological trends. Sometimes, it is helpful to include Ecological and Legal trends as well. All of these trends play a part in determining the overall business environment.

Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

The reason to do a competitive analysis is to assess the opportunities and threats that may occur from those organizations competing for the same business you are. You need to understand what your competitors are or aren’t offering your potential customers. Here are a few other key ways a competitive analysis fits into strategic planning:

  • To help you assess whether your competitive advantage is really an advantage.
  • To understand what your competitors’ current and future strategies are so you can plan accordingly.
  • To provide information that will help you evaluate your strategic decisions against what your competitors may or may not be doing.

Learn more on how to conduct a competitive analysis here .

Step 4: Identify Opportunities and Threats

Opportunities are situations that exist but must be acted on if the business is to benefit from them.

What do you want to capitalize on?

  • What new needs of customers could you meet?
  • What are the economic trends that benefit you?
  • What are the emerging political and social opportunities?
  • What niches have your competitors missed?

Threats refer to external conditions or barriers preventing a company from reaching its objectives.

What do you need to mitigate? What external driving force do you need to anticipate?

Questions to Answer:

  • What are the negative economic trends?
  • What are the negative political and social trends?
  • Where are competitors about to bite you?
  • Where are you vulnerable?

Step 5: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths refer to what your company does well.

What do you want to build on?

  • What do you do well (in sales, marketing, operations, management)?
  • What are your core competencies?
  • What differentiates you from your competitors?
  • Why do your customers buy from you?

Weaknesses refer to any limitations a company faces in developing or implementing a strategy.

What do you need to shore up?

  • Where do you lack resources?
  • What can you do better?
  • Where are you losing money?
  • In what areas do your competitors have an edge?

Step 6: Customer Segments

What

Customer segmentation defines the different groups of people or organizations a company aims to reach or serve.

  • What needs or wants define your ideal customer?
  • What characteristics describe your typical customer?
  • Can you sort your customers into different profiles using their needs, wants and characteristics?
  • Can you reach this segment through clear communication channels?

Step 7: Develop Your SWOT

What

A SWOT analysis is a quick way of examining your organization by looking at the internal strengths and weaknesses in relation to the external opportunities and threats. Creating a SWOT analysis lets you see all the important factors affecting your organization together in one place.

It’s easy to read, easy to communicate, and easy to create. Take the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats you developed earlier, review, prioritize, and combine like terms. The SWOT analysis helps you ask and answer the following questions: “How do you….”

  • Build on your strengths
  • Shore up your weaknesses
  • Capitalize on your opportunities
  • Manage your threats

What

Strategic Planning Process Phase 2: Developing Strategy

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Developing Your Strategy” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Develop Your Mission Statement

The mission statement describes an organization’s purpose or reason for existing.

What is our purpose? Why do we exist? What do we do?

  • What are your organization’s goals? What does your organization intend to accomplish?
  • Why do you work here? Why is it special to work here?
  • What would happen if we were not here?

Outcome: A short, concise, concrete statement that clearly defines the scope of the organization.

Step 2: discover your values.

Your values statement clarifies what your organization stands for, believes in and the behaviors you expect to see as a result. Check our the post on great what are core values and examples of core values .

How will we behave?

  • What are the key non-negotiables that are critical to the company’s success?
  • What guiding principles are core to how we operate in this organization?
  • What behaviors do you expect to see?
  • If the circumstances changed and penalized us for holding this core value, would we still keep it?

Outcome: Short list of 5-7 core values.

Step 3: casting your vision statement.

What

A Vision Statement defines your desired future state and directs where we are going as an organization.

Where are we going?

  • What will our organization look like 5–10 years from now?
  • What does success look like?
  • What are we aspiring to achieve?
  • What mountain are you climbing and why?

Outcome: A picture of the future.

Step 4: identify your competitive advantages.

How to Identify Competitive Advantages

A competitive advantage is a characteristic of an organization that allows it to meet its customer’s need(s) better than its competition can. It’s important to consider your competitive advantages when creating your competitive strategy.

What are we best at?

  • What are your unique strengths?
  • What are you best at in your market?
  • Do your customers still value what is being delivered? Ask them.
  • How do your value propositions stack up in the marketplace?

Outcome: A list of 2 or 3 items that honestly express the organization’s foundation for winning.

Step 5: crafting your organization-wide strategies.

What

Your competitive strategy is the general methods you intend to use to reach your vision. Regardless of the level, a strategy answers the question “how.”

How will we succeed?

  • Broad: market scope; a relatively wide market emphasis.
  • Narrow: limited to only one or few segments in the market
  • Does your competitive position focus on lowest total cost or product/service differentiation or both?

Outcome: Establish the general, umbrella methods you intend to use to reach your vision.

What

Phase 3: Strategic Plan Development

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Build Your Plan” How-To Guide.

Strategic Planning Process Step 1: Use Your SWOT to Set Priorities

If your team wants to take the next step in the SWOT analysis, apply the TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix to your strategy map to help you think about the options you could pursue. To do this, match external opportunities and threats with your internal strengths and weaknesses, as illustrated in the matrix below:

TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix

Evaluate the options you’ve generated, and identify the ones that give the greatest benefit, and that best achieve the mission and vision of your organization. Add these to the other strategic options that you’re considering.

Step 2: Define Long-Term Strategic Objectives

Long-Term Strategic Objectives are long-term, broad, continuous statements that holistically address all areas of your organization. What must we focus on to achieve our vision? Check out examples of strategic objectives here. What are the “big rocks”?

Questions to ask:

  • What are our shareholders or stakeholders expectations for our financial performance or social outcomes?
  • To reach our outcomes, what value must we provide to our customers? What is our value proposition?
  • To provide value, what process must we excel at to deliver our products and services?
  • To drive our processes, what skills, capabilities and organizational structure must we have?

Outcome: Framework for your plan – no more than 6. You can use the balanced scorecard framework, OKRs, or whatever methodology works best for you. Just don’t exceed 6 long-term objectives.

Strategy Map

Step 3: Setting Organization-Wide Goals and Measures

What

Once you have formulated your strategic objectives, you should translate them into goals and measures that can be communicated to your strategic planning team (team of business leaders and/or team members).

You want to set goals that convert the strategic objectives into specific performance targets. Effective strategic goals clearly state what, when, how, and who, and they are specifically measurable. They should address what you must do in the short term (think 1-3 years) to achieve your strategic objectives.

Organization-wide goals are annual statements that are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, responsible, and time-bound. These are outcome statements expressing a result to achieve the desired outcomes expected in the organization.

What is most important right now to reach our long-term objectives?

Outcome: clear outcomes for the current year..

Strategic Planning Outcomes Table

Step 4: Select KPIs

What

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the key measures that will have the most impact in moving your organization forward. We recommend you guide your organization with measures that matter. See examples of KPIs here.

How will we measure our success?

Outcome: 5-7 measures that help you keep the pulse on your performance. When selecting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ask, “What are the key performance measures we need to track to monitor if we are achieving our goals?” These KPIs include the key goals you want to measure that will have the most impact on moving your organization forward.

Step 5: Cascade Your Strategies to Operations

NPS Step #5

To move from big ideas to action, creating action items and to-dos for short-term goals is crucial. This involves translating strategy from the organizational level to individuals. Functional area managers and contributors play a role in developing short-term goals to support the organization.

Before taking action, decide whether to create plans directly derived from the strategic plan or sync existing operational, business, or account plans with organizational goals. Avoid the pitfall of managing multiple sets of goals and actions, as this shifts from strategic planning to annual planning.

Questions to Ask

  • How are we going to get there at a functional level?
  • Who must do what by when to accomplish and drive the organizational goals?
  • What strategic questions still remain and need to be solved?

Department/functional goals, actions, measures and targets for the next 12-24 months

Step 6: Cascading Goals to Departments and Team Members

Now in your Departments / Teams, you need to create goals to support the organization-wide goals. These goals should still be SMART and are generally (short-term) something to be done in the next 12-18 months. Finally, you should develop an action plan for each goal.

Keep the acronym SMART in mind again when setting action items, and make sure they include start and end dates and have someone assigned their responsibility. Since these action items support your previously established goals, it may be helpful to consider action items your immediate plans on the way to achieving your (short-term) goals. In other words, identify all the actions that need to occur in the next 90 days and continue this same process every 90 days until the goal is achieved.

Examples of Cascading Goals:

What

Phase 4: Executing Strategy and Managing Performance

Want more? Dive Into the “Managing Performance” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule

Implementation is the process that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic objectives and goals.

How will we use the plan as a management tool?

  • Communication Schedule: How and when will you roll-out your plan to your staff? How frequently will you send out updates?
  • Process Leader: Who is your strategy director?
  • Structure: What are the dates for your strategy reviews (we recommend at least quarterly)?
  • System & Reports: What are you expecting each staff member to come prepared with to those strategy review sessions?

Outcome: Syncing your plan into the “rhythm of your business.”

Once your resources are in place, you can set your implementation schedule. Use the following steps as your base implementation plan:

  • Establish your performance management and reward system.
  • Set up monthly and quarterly strategy meetings with established reporting procedures.
  • Set up annual strategic review dates including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.

Now you’re ready to start plan roll-out. Below are sample implementation schedules, which double for a full strategic management process timeline.

Strategic Planning Calendar

Step 2: Tracking Goals & Actions

Monthly strategy meetings don’t need to take a lot of time – 30 to 60 minutes should suffice. But it is important that key team members report on their progress toward the goals they are responsible for – including reporting on metrics in the scorecard they have been assigned.

By using the measurements already established, it’s easy to make course corrections if necessary. You should also commit to reviewing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) during these regular meetings. Need help comparing strategic planning software ? Check out our guide.

Effective Strategic Planning: Your Bi-Annual Checklist

What

Never lose sight of the fact that strategic plans are guidelines, not rules. Every six months or so, you should evaluate your strategy execution and strategic plan implementation by asking these key questions:

  • Will your goals be achieved within the time frame of the plan? If not, why?
  • Should the deadlines be modified? (Before you modify deadlines, figure out why you’re behind schedule.)
  • Are your goals and action items still realistic?
  • Should the organization’s focus be changed to put more emphasis on achieving your goals?
  • Should your goals be changed? (Be careful about making these changes – know why efforts aren’t achieving the goals before changing the goals.)
  • What can be gathered from an adaptation to improve future planning activities?

Why Track Your Goals?

  • Ownership: Having a stake and responsibility in the plan makes you feel part of it and leads you to drive your goals forward.
  • Culture: Successful plans tie tracking and updating goals into organizational culture.
  • Implementation: If you don’t review and update your strategic goals, they are just good intentions
  • Accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source and initiative must have an owner.
  • Empowerment: Changing goals from In Progress to Complete just feels good!

Step 3: Review & Adapt

Guidelines for your strategy review.

The most important part of this meeting is a 70/30 review. 30% is about reviewing performance, and 70% should be spent on making decisions to move the company’s strategy forward in the next quarter.

The best strategic planners spend about 60-90 minutes in the sessions. Holding meetings helps focus your goals on accomplishing top priorities and accelerating the organization’s growth. Although the meeting structure is relatively simple, it does require a high degree of discipline.

Strategy Review Session Questions:

Strategic planning frequently asked questions, read our frequently asked questions about strategic planning to learn how to build a great strategic plan..

Strategic planning is when organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy..

Your strategic plan needs to include an assessment of your current state, a SWOT analysis, mission, vision, values, competitive advantages, growth strategy, growth enablers, a 3-year roadmap, and annual plan with strategic goals, OKRs, and KPIs.

A strategic planning process should take no longer than 90 days to complete from start to finish! Any longer could fatigue your organization and team.

There are four overarching phases to the strategic planning process that include: determining position, developing your strategy, building your plan, and managing performance. Each phase plays a unique but distinctly crucial role in the strategic planning process.

Prior to starting your strategic plan, you must go through this pre-planning process to determine your organization’s readiness by following these steps:

Ask yourself these questions: Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place now? Can we foresee any pitfalls that we can avoid? Is there an appropriate time for our organization to initiate this process?

Develop your team and schedule. Who will oversee the implementation as Chief Strategy Officer or Director? Do we have at least 12-15 other key individuals on our team?

Research and Collect Current Data. Find the following resources that your organization may have used in the past to assist you with your new plan: last strategic plan, mission, vision, and values statement, business plan, financial records, marketing plan, SWOT, sales figures, or projections.

Finally, review the data with your strategy director and facilitator and ask these questions: What trends do we see? Any obvious strengths or weaknesses? Have we been following a plan or just going along with the market?

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What is Strategic Planning? Definition, Importance, Model, Process and Examples

By Paul VanZandt

Published on: February 2, 2023

strategic planning

Table of Contents

What is Strategic Planning?

Importance and benefits of strategic planning, strategic planning models, strategic planning process: 6 key steps, what makes an effective strategic plan example, strategic planning example.

Strategic planning is defined as a pivotal organizational endeavor, meticulously charting the mission, goals, and objectives over a strategic timeframe, typically spanning 2-5 years. This comprehensive roadmap takes into meticulous consideration the current organizational landscape, navigating through the intricacies of prevailing legislation, the dynamic business environment, product portfolios, departmental dynamics, and the judicious allocation of budget resources. By weaving together these critical elements, a strategic plan becomes a guiding compass, steering the organization towards its vision with adaptability and foresight.

Strategic planning first entered business environments in the post-war period of the 1950s, and has been so effective that it is still widely used and applied across organizational spectrums, including non-profits.

While a strategic plan is the final outcome of the strategic planning process, here are the key factors and components that feed into creating this plan:

  • Profitability and balance sheet management

For any business, profitability and the adjacent balance sheet management is and always should be a key factor to be taken into consideration during strategic planning, depending on the size of the business. Both these factors are in fact co-dependent. For example, one of the key outcomes of a strategic plan is to set the revenue growth percentage to be achieved each year for, say, 3 years. This in turn will require an evaluation of the balance sheet, including any debt payments, dividend payout, shareholder expectations, etc.

Even if the business is a startup and is rich with investor cash to spend in acquiring customers in the short to medium term, it is still aspiring to be profitable and must lay out a larger strategic path to profitability.

  • SWOT analysis outcomes

Strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – these are the outcomes and full terms of the abbreviated term, SWOT analysis. Strength refers to the business factors that indicate key factors that are contributing to the achievement of business outcomes. These may be factors related to sales, employee and talent retention, software stack, business efficiency, etc. Similarly, weakness refers to factors that are holding back the growth and achievement of business outcomes, such as poor margins, lack of company data management, employee attrition, etc.

Opportunity refers to areas in the business environment that the business can potentially explore. For example, one of the opportunities identified could be sales in a new market, implementing a better human resources management model, branching into new products and/ or services, etc.

  • Operations management

Operations management pertains to the cohesive movement of all moving and communicating parts to produce the company’s products or services. While creating a strategic business plan, management needs to take into account how each department and team will need to interact with each other to produce the results desired as outcomes in the strategic plan. This includes ensuring the right technology stack needed for each team including communication and collaboration technology needed for remote and on-premise task execution.

  • Human resource management

Strategic planning involves taking into account all aspects of HR and employee-related spending and policies. One of the key aspects of a strategic plan must be to ensure a harmonious work experience for employees such that it increases employee retention and helps build an environment that enhances employee productivity and workplace satisfaction.

A strategic plan is more than just a business tool, it also plays a key role in defining operational, cultural, and workplace ethics. Here are some of the key aspects of the importance of strategic planning:

1. Provides a unified goal

A strategic plan is like a unified action plan for the whole company in order to achieve common outcomes. For example, a strategic plan to achieve a certain revenue growth each year requires sales, account management, product development, and marketing teams to work together to ensure a seamless lead pipeline, customer upsells and account retention, meet customer expectations, etc.

2. Adds to management transparency

Strategic planning is more than just for direct business growth, it also helps shine clarity to employees and shareholders as to what their mid-to-long-term objectives are and how their actions are derived from these larger goals. Such a plan must always be referenced for citation and justification for key business moves and decisions to make it apparently justified and based on logic and reason. This also encourages team leads and employees to in turn be more transparent with their team members and peers with their plans and goals.

One of the issues most dreaded by investors and employees alike is management that seems to make random decisions without any clear guidance on how they help meet requirements for the final business objectives or tackle the challenges of the day. A strategic plan helps build investor and employee confidence in the management and adds to building a culture of transparency in day-to-day business operations.

3. Identifies hidden strengths and weaknesses

Many strengths and weaknesses in a company may be contributing, yet hidden factors in the path to meeting or hindering the meeting of business goals. A strategic plan’s primary input is a SWOT analysis of the company, which is conducted by auditing the firm to recognize and list strengths and weaknesses within the company. These may be a competitive product, a better monetization model, a weak employee incentive policy, etc.

The important step here is the actual deep analysis and listing down of these strengths and weaknesses and how they can be leveraged or minimized.

4. Leads to better financial health

A company with a clear strategic plan is able to better plan expenses and set the right expectations on return on investment (ROI). It takes into account balance sheets, profitability, accounting and expense management, all of which contribute to better bookkeeping and financial health of the company.

5. Improves management-employee relations

Employees and teams work in silos when the management works in silos. But when a company shares a strategic plan with employees and lays out exactly how each team will be working towards contributing to this larger plan, it gives each team and its members a sense of belonging and importance within the larger company, In today’s environment of hybrid or remote work cultures, it is a key step to ensuring that the company remains cohesive and collaborative in getting work done and meeting final objectives.

Learn more: What is Tactical Planning?

Strategic planning inputs may require one of many of the following business analysis models:

  • SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis is the process and visual template for identifying and listing a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These are cornerstone considerations for any leadership team and play a key role in the strategic planning process.

  • Business model canvas

A business model canvas is a process used to identify and represent existing business models of an enterprise and develop new models to better meet company goals and objectives. Like SWOT analysis, the business model canvas is also a standard business template.

  • PESTEL analysis

PESTEL is an abbreviation for political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal, and PESTEL analysis aims to identify the impact of these external factors on a business.

  • Cost-benefit analysis

A cost-benefit analysis is a method of evaluating an investment in the business based on the benefits it would bring to the table. This is a good method for ensuring a healthy financial balance sheet where spending and budgeting are carefully analyzed to ensure only those investments bring back reasonable ROI.

Most companies have 2 or more product/service streams or even 2 or more businesses. A BCG matrix is a visual process of managing an enterprise’s portfolio by prioritizing profitable companies with good market share and growth.

An effective strategic planning process requires the following key steps:

1. Identify core business objectives

Strategic planning begins with first identifying your business objectives- what does it produce? What does it do better than the competition? What is the quality-profitability balance? These are examples of the questions that need to be asked to identify core business objectives. The strategic planning tools can be applied at any stage of the planning process to help answer these questions.

2. Identify the objectives of each department

Once the core business objective is ready, it needs to trickle down to an execution plan that involves each department. This in turn will result in breaking down of the core objectives into smaller objectives for the teams. This needs to be laid out with clarity and precision since the team leaders will further use this team goal to assign individual targets for members.

3. Identify potential roadblocks

Before formulating the final strategy, it is important to discuss it with relevant leaders in the company to ensure an error-free process that is achievable with minimal roadblocks. Of course, as the execution work begins, the management should be flexible enough to absorb unforeseen and small issues that are inevitable. The goal here is to avoid any big boulders which may cripple the strategy at a later stage, such as data security, pricing estimations, hiring new employees or expansion to new departments/ teams, investment in new product development, mergers and acquisition plans, etc.

4. Formulate the final strategy

Once the objectives and goals have been scanned for potential roadblocks and alterations/ safeguards have been accommodated, this is the first draft of the final strategic plan for the company. This strategy may be applicable for the foreseeable future or have a specific deadline, it should however be pulled up for revision annually. Small companies or startups who have much to learn on the way, need to keep an active eye on the larger strategy based on changing business realities.

5. Re-evaluate based on feedback

Before you iron out the processes and policies that will enable the execution of the new strategic plan of the company, it is important to hear back from your employees. This doesn’t have to be every single employee, especially if you have a large team, but to the extent possible. You may at first discuss the strategy with team leaders, who if needed, may take it further down the chain to their own team members and absorb their feedback. Complete agreement may not be possible, but it is important that both sides remain flexible while discussions are on but must be prepared to execute once the discussions are over.

6. Set or revise adjacent policies and processes

Now that the strategic plan for the business is complete and sealed, the leadership team needs to start the execution with necessary changes to the processes and policies as the need may be. This may need to include data management process changes, technology stack updates, issue escalation matrix, etc. In some cases, it may not require any change, and the right processes may already be in place with just a new direction based on the strategic plan.

Learn more: What is SWOT Analysis Framework?

Crafting a good example of a strategic plan involves several key elements. Here’s a breakdown of what makes a strategic plan exemplary:

  • Clear Mission Statement: A strong strategic plan starts with a clear and concise mission statement that defines the organization’s purpose and the value it aims to provide.
  • SMART Objectives: The plan should include specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives. This ensures that goals are well-defined and actionable.
  • Environmental Analysis: A good strategic plan conducts a thorough analysis of the internal and external environment, taking into account strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). This provides a foundation for strategic decision-making.
  • Alignment with Vision: The plan should clearly articulate how each objective contributes to the overall vision of the organization. There should be a cohesive alignment between the strategic goals and the long-term vision.
  • Resource Allocation: Effective resource allocation is crucial. The plan should outline how financial, human, and other resources will be distributed to support the strategic goals.
  • Actionable Steps: Each objective should be broken down into actionable steps or initiatives. This helps in practical implementation and provides a roadmap for achieving the goals.
  • Monitoring and Evaluation: A good strategic plan includes mechanisms for ongoing monitoring and evaluation. Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be defined, and regular assessments should be conducted to track progress.
  • Flexibility and Adaptability: The plan should acknowledge the dynamic nature of business environments. Flexibility and adaptability are essential to adjust strategies in response to changes in the internal or external landscape.
  • Communication Strategy: A strategic plan should include a communication strategy to ensure that stakeholders are well-informed about the goals, progress, and any adjustments made to the plan.
  • Inclusivity: Involving key stakeholders in the strategic planning process fosters a sense of ownership and commitment. A good plan considers input from various departments, employees, and external partners.
  • Risk Management: Anticipating and addressing potential risks is a vital aspect of a strategic plan. Contingency plans should be in place to mitigate unforeseen challenges.
  • Continuous Improvement: A strategic plan should not be static. There should be a commitment to continuous improvement, with regular reviews and updates to ensure its relevance and effectiveness.

By incorporating these elements into your example of a strategic plan, you can demonstrate a comprehensive and thoughtful approach to organizational planning, which may resonate well with both practitioners and those seeking to understand the principles of strategic planning.

A strategic plan is a detailed document that outlines an organization’s goals, objectives, and the actions required to achieve them. While the specific details of a strategic plan will vary depending on the organization, its industry, and its unique circumstances, here’s an example of a strategic plan for a fictional company:

Company: Visionary Tech Solutions (VTS)

Mission Statement: “To empower businesses through innovative technology solutions, fostering growth and sustainability in an ever-evolving digital landscape.”

Strategic Goals: Presented below are ten strategic goals that serve as excellent examples to enhance the functionality of a company.

1. Market Leadership in Tech Solutions:

Objective: Capture a 20% increase in market share within the next three years.

Action Steps:

  • Launch two new cutting-edge products catering to emerging market demands.
  • Strengthen strategic partnerships with key industry players.
  • Implement aggressive marketing campaigns highlighting VTS’s technological prowess.

2. Operational Efficiency:

Objective: Improve operational efficiency by 15% over the next two years.

  • Streamline internal processes through the implementation of advanced project management tools.
  • Invest in employee training programs to enhance skills and productivity.
  • Conduct regular process audits for continuous improvement.

3. Customer-Centric Innovation:

Objective: Introduce at least three customer-centric innovations annually.

  • Establish a dedicated R&D team focused on anticipating and addressing customer needs.
  • Implement customer feedback loops to gather insights for product enhancements.
  • Launch a customer loyalty program to foster long-term relationships.

4. Global Expansion:

Objective: Expand operations to two new international markets within the next four years.

  • Conduct thorough market research to identify viable expansion opportunities.
  • Establish local partnerships to navigate regulatory and cultural nuances.
  • Develop customized marketing strategies tailored to each target market.

5. Resource Allocation:

Budget allocation:

  • 30% for research and development.
  • 25% for marketing and promotional activities.
  • 20% for employee training and development.
  • 15% for operational improvements.
  • 10% for international expansion initiatives.

6. Monitoring and Evaluation:

  • Quarterly performance reviews with key performance indicators (KPIs) tracked against predefined targets.
  • Annual comprehensive evaluation of the strategic plan’s effectiveness and adjustments as needed.

7. Communication Strategy:

  • Regular updates through internal newsletters, town hall meetings, and an interactive company intranet.
  • External communication through press releases, social media updates, and a dedicated section on the company website.

8. Risk Management:

  • Identification of potential risks such as technological disruptions, market fluctuations, and geopolitical challenges.
  • Development of contingency plans and regular risk assessments.

9. Inclusivity:

  • Cross-functional teams involved in the strategic planning process, ensuring diverse perspectives and expertise.

10. Continuous Improvement:

  • Commitment to regular reviews and updates to the strategic plan based on industry trends, technological advancements, and feedback from stakeholders.

This example of a strategic plan for Visionary Tech Solutions outlines a roadmap that integrates the company’s mission, strategic goals, resource allocation, monitoring mechanisms, and a commitment to adaptability and continuous improvement. Adjustments should be made as needed based on ongoing evaluations and changes in the business environment.

Learn more: What is Enterprise Planning?

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Strategic planning — what it is and how to do it well

Strategic planning guide

It can be difficult to reach your business goals and ambitions, regardless of what preparation you’ve done. But if you have a strategic plan in place, you’ll be more likely to achieve a favorable outcome.

This post will explain the importance of strategic planning, when and how to make a strategic plan, and how to manage it and stay on course. It will allow the audience to move forward with their planning efforts.

Read on to learn:

  • What strategic planning is

Benefits of strategic planning

  • When you should do strategic planning

Steps in strategic planning

  • What strategic management is

Strategic mapping

What is strategic planning.

Strategic planning is the process of defining your business’s direction and outlining a path toward a preferred future. The goal of a strategic plan is to capture an organization’s mission and core principles — to envision the fulfillment of these ideals. Strategic planning is both conceptual and practical, as it presents both high-level goals and specific approaches to achieve them.

A strategic plan needs to answer the following questions:

  • Where are we now?
  • Where are we going?
  • How do we get there?

Strategic planning helps businesses set and maintain a clear vision and ensure they’re moving in the right direction. Once the plan has been put in place, it helps maintain alignment between various stakeholders and teams within your business. This plan can make resource allocation simpler — by determining if certain resources are being used in ways that don’t align with the broader strategic plan.

Running a business without a strategic plan is like planning a vacation with no destination in mind. How will you get there? What do you need to bring with you? The same applies to planning for your business. Strategic planning:

  • Gives a sense of purpose and direction. A strategic plan provides a clear goal and end result so all other business functions can work to get you closer to that outcome. This clarity helps keep employees aligned on their efforts, make better decisions, and work towards a shared goal.
  • Makes you aware of opportunities for success. Tying your plans to strategy helps your organization identify opportunities that you discover along your journey. If you find an opportunity that aligns with your strategy — and desired outcomes — you can more easily adapt to take advantage of the situation.
  • Alerts you to risks to avoid. Part of the strategic planning process is scanning the external environment and competitive landscape, which allows you to identify potential roadblocks you may encounter.
  • Helps you understand what resources you will need. When you have a strategic plan in place, you can more effectively allocate your resources. By aligning resources with strategic goals, businesses can focus on the initiatives, projects, and investments that maximize their ROI.
  • Helps prioritize critical tasks. When deciding which tasks are most important and which can be put on hold, a strategic plan streamlines that decision making. Tasks that don’t contribute to your mission can wait, while mission-critical tasks get prioritized.
  • Fosters teamwork and communication. Without a strategic plan, team members can feel isolated and siloed. However, when that strategic plan is clearly communicated to everyone, your team will feel more connected as they work towards a common goal.
  • Increases motivation. And when your team understands the desired outcomes and bigger goals behind their daily tasks, they’ll be more motivated to do high-quality work in a timely manner.
  • Helps measure and evaluate results. Because you’ve likely identified key performance indicators (KPIs) in your planning process, you’ll have an easier time tracking your progress. When you measure your progress, you can more easily identify areas for improvement and make changes on the fly.

When should you do strategic planning?

When and how often your business does strategic planning depends on the size and stage of your company, the speed of your business, and the scope of the projects you’re working on. Strategic planning should not be a one-time event. It should be an iterative process with continuous monitoring, evaluation, and adjustment.

If you’re a new business, you’ll want to create a business plan first, before you move into strategic planning. Once your business is established you can then set a strategic plan to outline your goals and manage your business’s strategic direction. For planning more short-term projects, use a project plan .

Once you’ve created a strategic plan, you should review it regularly — quarterly and yearly, for example — to make sure it is still aligned with your business’s goals and industry landscape. Generally, you should create a new strategic plan every 3–5 years. However, newer or faster-moving companies may need to create a new strategic plan every 1–2 years. Another scenario when you should rework your strategic plan is when you’re preparing to make a major pivot in your business.

How to write a strategic plan for a project

Learn how to write a strategic plan, why you need to create one, and the topics it should cover.

Steps in strategic planning

While every strategic plan might look a little different depending on the organization, industry, and other context, there is still a general outline of the process that you can follow to get you started.

Before you get started, there are a few preliminary steps you can take to make sure your planning process goes smoothly. You need to decide who is involved in the process and what documentation they’ll need. You’ll also want to revisit your company’s vision and mission statements which define where your business is aiming to go.

These are the steps you can take to create a strategic plan for your business:

1. Identify and assess your current position

To understand where you’re headed, you first need to look at where you are now. I n this stage you should:

  • Collect customer and employee feedback to understand what is working well for you and what could use improvement.
  • Perform a needs assessment or SWOT analysis to understand more about the current state of your business.
  • Assess your available resources so you can understand what you have enough of and what you may need to reach your goals.

2. Set goals

Next, you can set goals that you’d like your business to achieve over the short and long term. It’s important to choose goals that align with your company mission and vision. You can use marketing and sales forecasts to give you an idea of what types of goals are realistic. In this phase you’ll also want to prioritize the goals you set — so you know which to choose if conflicts arise.

When setting goals, remember to set SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

3. Develop your plan

In this phase it’s time to put your plan together and map out a project roadmap. This is where your plan becomes clearer both to your planning committee and to your team members who will execute based on the plan.

You want to make sure that your plan is achievable with your current resources — so that you aren’t setting yourself up for failure. You’ll also want to set measurable milestones so you can track your progress along the way. You also need to set KPIs so you have objective numbers to determine if you’re heading in the right direction.

When developing your plan, you should make sure that any short-term action items align with long-term goals. And finally, you’ll need to get approval from leadership and stakeholders.

4. Implement your plan

Now that you’ve created your strategic plan it’s time to act. In fact, the first step of implementation is creating a strategic action plan. Your action plan will outline the specific tactics you’ll use to execute your strategic plan.

In this phase, you’ll also assign tasks to your team members so everyone knows what they are responsible for and what they will be contributing to your mission. It’s important to distribute and communicate your plan across your organization. This helps encourage transparency and will drive buy-in from everyone on your team.

As you are executing on your plan, you should rely on metrics and KPIs to track your performance.

5. Revise your plan as necessary

Next, you’ll want to revise your plan as you encounter roadblocks or market changes. Even the best strategic plans will change as you gather more data or feedback. Using tools — like a project management solution — can help you monitor the progress your team is making. You should schedule periodic evaluations to see which parts of the plan are going well and which need to be revised or reevaluated.

You can conduct reviews on a quarterly basis, so you have information at the end of the year to revise your plan if needed. Even if things are going well, you should make minor adjustments every year to keep your teams aligned and your strategy up to date. Any major revisions you make will require a new planning process — because a major adjustment could derail the rest of your strategic plan.

What is strategic management?

Strategic management is the process of formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategies to achieve the larger goals and objectives of an organization. It can sometimes be used interchangeably with the term strategic planning — but within strategic planning, strategic management means managing the plan being put into action.

Part of strategic management is being adaptive and adjusting to headwinds or organizational changes. You’ll also need to maintain a strong team culture, so your plan stays on track and team members stay engaged.

There are several models that strategic management can follow. Each takes a different approach to the management process, and how it solves problems that may arise.

One of these frameworks is the balanced scorecard method. This method looks at the strategic measures of a business beyond just financial metrics to get a more “balanced” look at performance. The phrase “balanced scorecard” refers to the management report that leaders may use to drive decision making within the business, since this approach looks at more than just numbers, it provides a more wholistic view of a business.

A strategic map is a visual representation of a business’s strategic objectives and their cause-and-effect relationships between each objective. This diagram helps visualize the strategic plan and understand which tasks are dependent on others. This map should be drawn during the development of the strategic plan to get a better understanding of how things should get done and in what order.

Strategic mapping can turn complex strategic plans into easily understandable visual representations. These can be helpful tools for communicating your strategy more clearly to team members and stakeholders within your organization. Strategic maps also help organizations identify success factors, prioritize initiatives, allocate resources, and monitor progress.

A strategic map can be designed in several ways, but needs to address the four main facets of business:

Strategic mapping

  • Financial. This section of the map should identify how the strategy helps meet the financial goals of the business.
  • Customer. This section should address the benefits that the customer will see from the specific strategy.
  • Internal business processes (IBPs). This section shares the benefits of the strategy to the processes of the business and their efficiency.
  • Learning and growth. This section will address how the business’s capabilities and knowledge will improve by using a given strategy.

Getting started with strategic planning

Strategic planning is a helpful tool for aligning everyone in your organization with your objectives and long-term goals. It can also help you gain a better understanding of your place in the market and how you can improve your business outcomes.

When you’re ready to get started, assemble your leadership team, draft your mission and vision statements, and begin by assessing the current state of your business. But you can’t get the most out of your strategic plan without a platform to drive the process forward.

That’s where Adobe Workfront can help. Workfront is an enterprise work management tool that connects work to strategy and drives better collaboration to deliver measurable business outcomes. It integrates people, data, processes, and technology across an organization so you can manage the entire lifecycle of projects from start to finish. By centralizing digital projects, cross-functional teams can connect, collaborate, and execute from anywhere to help them do their best work.

Take a product tour or watch an overview video to see how Workfront can help you execute on your strategic plan to improve your business outcomes.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/workfront-and-the-employee-experience

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/get-the-most-out-of-workfront-discovery-by-avoiding-common-challenges

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/annual-planning

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Strategic Planning 101: What you need to know to grow

Download our free Strategic Planning Template Download this template

An introduction to strategic planning

Organizations often fail at strategy execution. Despite the best-laid plans, everyone is lost and organizational goals never become a reality.

Why? Because of a hard truth that many leaders hate to admit: 

Strategy doesn’t belong in the boardroom. In 2022, you simply can’t be effective if your strategy isn’t a human-centric one that invites everyone on board. 

This article will explore this truth and give you the strategic advice you need to make your company plan work this year. 

Check out our strategic planning software product overview to see how Cascade can help your organization execute its strategy!

In this article we explore:

What is strategic planning?

What are the benefits of strategic planning, what’s the difference between strategic planning and strategic management, what are the steps involved in the strategic planning process, 3 critical principles for strategic planning success.

Free Download Download our Strategic Planning Template Download this template

Alternatively, if you’re ready to dive into strategic planning, download our free ready-to-go strategic planning template that will guide you from vision to results.

Strategic planning is a management activity organizations use to align human resources, business operations, and budgets .

Aligning these resources empowers all employees and stakeholders to focus on meaningful work that moves them closer to their shared organizational goals and company vision.

This dynamic method of business planning goes far beyond setting short-term goals to consider the entire business environment, define the long-term direction of a company, and the best way to get there. 

Think of the concept as planning a mountain climbing expedition. If your entire team runs up the mountain in a random direction before anybody puts their boots on, pretty soon, disaster will strike. With a strategic plan, there's less chance of an epic fall.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan outlines an organization’s action steps to accomplish its vision . 

Many traditional strategic plans gather dust in long-forgotten spreadsheets or PowerPoints. 

Successful companies bring their strategy to life with an ever-evolving digital asset of their plan that connects their day-to-day activities to the bigger picture.

If your organization takes the right approach, your strategic plan will

  • Define the organization's mission and long-term vision for a period of three to five years.
  • Inform the company’s quarterly and annual goals .
  • Include the planned course of action to achieve these goals.
  • Specify key performance indicators (KPIs) in each project .

Sounds simple in theory, right?

Unfortunately, strategic thinking doesn’t come easy for everyone. 

Let's see what you can gain when you get better at planning with strategic issues and your organization's mission in mind.

Most strategies fail due to a lack of clarity and transparency . If there is no clear sense of direction or trust, how can you instruct your team? How will you inspire them to follow you?

When you take the time to set your strategy up correctly, you give your organization a massive competitive edge. Here are four ways strategic planning can help your company:

1. Narrow your focus

Your team must consider a plethora of channels, platforms, mediums, tools, and tactics in 2022. Without a strategy, your team can lose time on irrelevant or inefficient activities. A strategic plan gives your team a blueprint to reach your goals . 

When you make strategizing part of BAU (business as usual), you can focus on the activities that have the most impact (i.e., those that actually move you closer to your goals and vision). 

2. Optimize your budget allocation

A well-defined strategy clarifies how to use your resources best . With careful planning, you can determine the crucial activities that will contribute to your strategic objectives. It’s good to tie your budget to your goals in this way, as it helps get more value from your resources and minimize wasted spending.

3. Foster stronger team culture

Without meaning, there is no motivation. Strategic planning gives people a shared “why” when it comes to their work . With improved communication from the top-down and bottom-up, a plan offers more context to help employees understand how their actions impact the company vision. This human-centric collaboration motivates people to be effective, keeping everyone engaged and focused on their role.

These terms are intrinsically connected but encompass distinctly different aspects of the overarching mission: to accomplish your long-term goals. 

Here’s the difference:

  • Strategic planning is the process that defines the direction of an organization (e.g., its long-term vision, mission, goals, and priorities).
  • Strategic management includes strategic planning and builds on it with activities, plans, and decisions the organization must undertake to achieve the defined goals. 

In short: strategic planning is what a business wants to do, whereas strategic management includes how it will happen.

Strategic management is one step ahead of strategic planning. The concept includes planning for the unknown contingencies in business, like shifts in the external environment such as a surprise pandemic or change in consumer interests (those fickle creatures!).

When Lego faced bankruptcy in 2003 , the CEO admitted he feared the company wouldn't survive. Over 70 years of market dominance had ingrained the Danish toy manufacturer in global culture.

Then, suddenly, the beloved brand was on the brink of ruin. Thankfully, some tremendous strategic management helped Lego pivot to AR/VR experiences. Today, the brand continues to soar with annual revenues close to $6 billion . 

There are hundreds of models for strategic planning. Many popular strategic planning processes are good in theory but useless in practice.

Let's look at a more straightforward, effective way to write a strategic plan. Our approach to strategic planning keeps the demands for flexibility and scalability in mind.

There are six core elements for your strategic plan:

Cascade-model-image

  • Vision: The ultimate goal and reason for your plan. This goal should be nearly unachievable.
  • Values: The core beliefs that unite everyone to pursue your vision.
  • Focus Areas: The key campaigns that everyone will focus on to drive progress.
  • Objectives: The specific activities and targets within focus areas. These targets have deadlines.
  • Projects: The action plans for how to achieve the objectives.
  • KPIs: The means to measure your progress through metrics and timelines.

Imagine a plan where every individual knows their role — every team has a clear step-by-step playbook.

Every month you make your targets and every quarter you take leaps and bounds toward your shared goals. Everything is in sync and everyone is on board. 

That scenario is what a great strategy plan can deliver. The Cascade Strategy Model is designed to be execution-ready.

We’ve based the design on a wealth of experience where we’ve tried and tested the model to deliver success for our clients far beyond the strategic planning phase. 

💡 Tip: If you feel ready to create your own strategic plan, pick your strategy plan template from our list of most used and free templates in our strategy library. 

📚 Want to learn more about how to write a strategic plan in 2022? Check out our guide to learn more about the Cascade Strategy Model.

When you want to take that elusive next step and succeed with strategy execution, there are a few things you must never forget.

critical-principles-for-strategic-planning-success-infographic

Strategy is for everyone

Your management committee might be tempted to close the doors and brainstorm a strategic plan in private — but this would be a mistake. Old strategies die in endless boardroom meetings . 

Strategy is a team effort, not a C-suite game for the big wigs in the boardroom. Management must involve the entire organization in cross-department collaboration from top to bottom. 

Giving your employees a voice in your strategy helps strengthen the company's internal relationships. As you build your company vision together, you empower your employees to be active contributors to the greater cause.

Provide easy access to the strategic plan

When you have your strategy plan ready for action, it's essential to store it somewhere everyone can access. After all, strategy is everybody’s business and shouldn’t be under lock and key, guarded by a three-headed dog.

Different teams have different roles and they'll need to regularly refer to the master plan to ensure they all row in the same direction. Cascade’s strategy execution platform provides dashboards for every team and displays all business performance together.

With ready-made reports, every employee has access to real-time data, getting the insights they need to make the right decisions at every stage.

Plan with strategy implementation in mind

Last but not least, this next point is arguably the most critical aspect of successful strategic planning.

You must create a strategic plan with execution in mind . After all, strategy without execution is just a hypothesis. A successful strategy is not just about the plan — it’s about the execution on the ground. Done right, your strategy will enable you to dream bigger and execute better so you can achieve the most ambitious goals.

For that vision to become a reality, you must think about what needs to happen at every stage. Think about who will be responsible, how you will track it, and how you measure success.

Here are five questions your team must consider when you create a strategic plan:

  • Is it too complicated? You don't want to confuse people with complex terminology and excessive steps or actions. Make sure the plan is easy to understand, making it easy to turn ideas into implementation.
  • Is it scalable? Many strategic planning models are a good fit for smaller businesses but don't work so well with larger organizations with multiple teams or rapid growth.
  • Is it flexible? A rigid model will force people into unnecessary steps, which adds to their workload and frustration. A more flexible strategy will save time and drive meaningful work. 
  • Is it measurable? It’s crucial to be able to track metrics and determine whether your efforts are successful. Without a way to gauge success, your strategy will struggle to stay on course.
  • Is it adaptable? If there's anything we've learned from the pandemic, it's that the landscape can shift rapidly. Design your strategy to be incredibly adaptable so you can move with the market changes.

Keep implementation in mind to devise a strategic plan that’s easier to carry out in the future. With strategy execution software , you can plan and measure efforts across your organization to ensure progress from every team.

Get your hands dirty: Start planning your strategy

Strategy is not what it once was — a top-down practice or Powerpoint presentation without a long-term plan of action. Most traditional strategy models fail because they don't consider the multiple layers in the organization or the need to bring everyone together. 

Strategic planning is a powerful initiative to help everyone understand where your organization wants to go and precisely how to get there. However, it will only work when everyone is on board.

Whether it's a five-person startup or a 5,000-strong enterprise, executing a successful strategy relies on an inclusive, human-centric approach that involves your entire organization.

You must think about the needs of everyone in the company, consider external factors, plus focus on context and alignment between teams, goals, and everyday actions.

With collaboration at the heart of your strategy formulation , you can create a flexible, scalable, strategic framework that is easy to understand, implement, and measure.

Ultimately, this approach will help unite your employees under a single vision so everyone can help push the company to reach its goals.

Are you ready to fast-track your strategic planning process for the next year? Download our free ready-to-go strategic planning template that guides you from vision to results.

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strategic

Strategic training – a lesson to be learned

Written by Georgiana Alexe on May 17, 2018 . Posted in Articles , Strategy

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An organizational strategy is a planned effort that produces fundamental decisions and actions, which in turn shape and guide an organization, its goal and activities, focusing every plan on the future.

Strategy establishes the principal direction, concentrates resources towards a limited number of directions, focusing on the stakeholders’ benefits – it structures a company’s vision for the future. The benefits of such an endeavor are that it clearly defines the purpose of the organization, it establishes realistic goals and objectives in accordance with the mission and ensures the most effective use of organizational resources.

It may also provide a starting point from which progress can be measured,  from which we can develop a clear focus of the organization and increase productivity by bringing staff and board to work in a coordinated team. The purpose of the strategy is to help the organization do a better job, ensure that employees are working together for the same goals, assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to an ever-changing environment.

Adopting a “strategy” means clearly knowing the organization’s objectives, being aware of the available resources and use them in a dynamic environment.A good strategy has to be disciplined , analytical , and decisive in being united towards a common goal. These characteristics then apply to the strategic plan contents, which are the mission, vision and values.

On top of that, a strategy influences the following organizational elements: physical , financial and human capital . Therefore, ensuring your strategy is up to par with your business environments requirements is of paramount importance.

The company’s strategy determines the amount of training required for current or future job skills, the extent to which training should be customized for particular needs, the extent to which training is restricted to specific groups of employees or open to all, how much of it is planned and systematically administered and the importance such a method has, compared to other HR practices.

Strategic training is a form of training that, according to a business’s strategic planning, values and goals, provides employees with the necessary tools and information required to complete their tasks successfully.

Furthermore, it also increases productivity levels. Learning as a strategic focus means that a company has an enhanced capacity to learn, adapt, and change. It means that it can carefully scrutinize and align training processes with objectives & goals and regards training as part of a system designed to create human capital.

strategic2

The difference between a regular training session and a strategic training one is based on the existence of the following variables: focus , tasks , available information , productivity , job satisfaction and development .

How can the strategy impact the training ? A good strategy plan relies on the amount of training devoted to current or future job skills. It can also represent the extent to which trainings are customized for the varying particular needs of an organization’s employees or are developed based on the needs of a specific team, unit or division.

Then, the strategy can address whether the training session is planned and systematically administrated, provided only when problems occur or spontaneously. Moreover, it also stresses the importance of training sessions compared to other human resource management practices, such as selection and compensation.

The model of a strategic plan has as its main focus the performance results that lead to fulfilling business needs. That is why the entire learning experience has to be linked to the main business goals.

strategic

In this particular representation of a training’s role, learning means the acquisition of knowledge by individuals, employees or groups that are willing to apply said knowledge in their daily assignments, in making decisions or accomplishing tasks for the company .

The strategic training process can be seen here:

strategic

Business Strategy implies reaching the business plan, which consists of the following: mission, vision, goals.

Strategic Training Initiatives contribute to the diversity of a learning portfolio, the improvement of customer satisfaction, acceleration of the pace of employee learning and the rate of gaining and sharing knowledge.

Strategic Activities use web-based training, making development planning mandatory, developing websites for knowledge sharing and increasing the amount of customer service training.

Finally, metrics that show the value of a training involve learning, performance improvement, reduced customer complaints, reduced turnover and greater employee satisfaction. This particular training model takes into account metrics and the balance scorecard (tools for measuring the impact of the training session on the business strategy plan).

These metrics are business-level outcomes, chosen to measure the overall value of training sessions. The balance scorecard measures the overall company performance and the performance of departments or functions and it deals with four perspectives: internal innovation, learning, financial aspects and the customer’s.

Activities in developing such initiatives are seeing the use of new technology in training, which are increasing access to training programs, reducing development time, developing new or expanded course offerings.

The organizational characteristics that influence training sessions are the following:

  • The role of employees and managers – who have to manage individual and team performance, develop employees and encourage continuous learning, plan and allocate resources, coordinate activities between interdependent teams, facilitate decision-making and represent one’s work unit;
  • The impact of top management support – who set a clear direction for learning, provide encouragement, resources and commitment to strategic learning, govern learning and review objectives, develop new learning programs for the company, promote the company’s commitment to learning;
  • The integration of business units – where training includes rotating employees between jobs in different businesses;
  • The feel of a global presence – where training helps prepare employees for temporary or long-term overseas assignments;
  • General business conditions – these impact the ability to find employees with the necessary skills and retain current employees;
  • The extent of unionization – which is represented by joint union-management programs that help employees prepare for new jobs;
  • Staff involvement in training – which takes into account a company’s decision regarding a suitable employee pool, their selection and desired mix of employee skills and statuses.

The models of strategic training are as follows:

  • Faculty Model (that include safety training, quality training, technology and computer systems, leadership development, sales training)
  • Customer Model (that includes Information Systems, Marketing, Production and Operations, Finance)
  • Matrix Model (besides the faculty model training specialty areas, it also includes Marketing and Production and Operations)
  • Corporate University Model (that includes Leadership development programs and newly-hired employee programs)
  • Virtual Model (that operates according to three principles: employee have primary responsibility for learning, the most effective learning takes place on the job, the existence of a good manager-employee relationship is critical)

The implications for continuous learning in regards to human capital development are among others, recognition that learning should help (employee performance and achieve business goals), learning should occur on as needed basis, the need to support informational learning and also the fact that learning should include a therapist’s overview.

It also involves key capabilities such as aligning learning goals to business goals, measurement of learning sessions’ impact on a business development, movement of learning outside the company, developing competencies for critical jobs, integrating learning with other human resource functions, including classroom studying as well as e-learning and designing and delivering leadership development courses.

Consequentially, in order to have a good strategic learning, a company’s top management should first and foremost take note of their institution’s vision, values and goals and adapt any learning programs to those factors, in a dedicated manner.

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How to Set Strategic Planning Goals

Team setting strategic planning goals

  • 29 Oct 2020

In an ever-changing business world, it’s imperative to have strategic goals and a plan to guide organizational efforts. Yet, crafting strategic goals can be a daunting task. How do you decide which goals are vital to your company? Which ones are actionable and measurable? Which goals to prioritize?

To help you answer these questions, here’s a breakdown of what strategic planning is, what characterizes strategic goals, and how to select organizational goals to pursue.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is the ongoing organizational process of using available knowledge to document a business's intended direction. This process is used to prioritize efforts, effectively allocate resources, align shareholders and employees, and ensure organizational goals are backed by data and sound reasoning.

Research in the Harvard Business Review cautions against getting locked into your strategic plan and forgetting that strategy involves inherent risk and discomfort. A good strategic plan evolves and shifts as opportunities and threats arise.

“Most people think of strategy as an event, but that’s not the way the world works,” says Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in the online course Disruptive Strategy . “When we run into unanticipated opportunities and threats, we have to respond. Sometimes we respond successfully; sometimes we don’t. But most strategies develop through this process. More often than not, the strategy that leads to success emerges through a process that’s at work 24/7 in almost every industry."

Related: 5 Tips for Formulating a Successful Strategy

4 Characteristics of Strategic Goals

To craft a strategic plan for your organization, you first need to determine the goals you’re trying to reach. Strategic goals are an organization’s measurable objectives that are indicative of its long-term vision.

Here are four characteristics of strategic goals to keep in mind when setting them for your organization.

4 Characteristics of Strategic Goals

1. Purpose-Driven

The starting point for crafting strategic goals is asking yourself what your company’s purpose and values are . What are you striving for, and why is it important to set these objectives? Let the answers to these questions guide the development of your organization’s strategic goals.

“You don’t have to leave your values at the door when you come to work,” says HBS Professor Rebecca Henderson in the online course Sustainable Business Strategy .

Henderson, whose work focuses on reimagining capitalism for a just and sustainable world, also explains that leading with purpose can drive business performance.

“Adopting a purpose will not hurt your performance if you do it authentically and well,” Henderson says in a lecture streamed via Facebook Live . “If you’re able to link your purpose to the strategic vision of the company in a way that really gets people aligned and facing in the right direction, then you have the possibility of outperforming your competitors.”

Related: 5 Examples of Successful Sustainability Initiatives

2. Long-Term and Forward-Focused

While strategic goals are the long-term objectives of your organization, operational goals are the daily milestones that need to be reached to achieve them. When setting strategic goals, think of your company’s values and long-term vision, and ensure you’re not confusing strategic and operational goals.

For instance, your organization’s goal could be to create a new marketing strategy; however, this is an operational goal in service of a long-term vision. The strategic goal, in this case, could be breaking into a new market segment, to which the creation of a new marketing strategy would contribute.

Keep a forward-focused vision to ensure you’re setting challenging objectives that can have a lasting impact on your organization.

3. Actionable

Strong strategic goals are not only long-term and forward-focused—they’re actionable. If there aren’t operational goals that your team can complete to reach the strategic goal, your organization is better off spending time and resources elsewhere.

When formulating strategic goals, think about the operational goals that fall under them. Do they make up an action plan your team can take to achieve your organization’s objective? If so, the goal could be a worthwhile endeavor for your business.

4. Measurable

When crafting strategic goals, it’s important to define how progress and success will be measured.

According to the online course Strategy Execution , an effective tool you can use to create measurable goals is a balanced scorecard —a tool to help you track and measure non-financial variables.

“The balanced scorecard combines the traditional financial perspective with additional perspectives that focus on customers, internal business processes, and learning and development,” says HBS Professor Robert Simons in the online course Strategy Execution . “These additional perspectives help businesses measure all the activities essential to creating value.”

The four perspectives are:

  • Internal business processes
  • Learning and growth

Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard

The most important element of a balanced scorecard is its alignment with your business strategy.

“Ask yourself,” Simons says, “‘If I picked up a scorecard and examined the measures on it, could I infer what the business's strategy was? If you've designed measures well, the answer should be yes.”

Related: A Manager’s Guide to Successful Strategy Implementation

Strategic Goal Examples

Whatever your business goals and objectives , they must have all four of the characteristics listed above.

For instance, the goal “become a household name” is valid but vague. Consider the intended timeframe to reach this goal and how you’ll operationally define “a household name.” The method of obtaining data must also be taken into account.

An appropriate revision to the original goal could be: “Increase brand recognition by 80 percent among surveyed Americans by 2030.” By setting a more specific goal, you can better equip your organization to reach it and ensure that employees and shareholders have a clear definition of success and how it will be measured.

If your organization is focused on becoming more sustainable and eco-conscious, you may need to assess your strategic goals. For example, you may have a goal of becoming a carbon neutral company, but without defining a realistic timeline and baseline for this initiative, the probability of failure is much higher.

A stronger goal might be: “Implement a comprehensive carbon neutrality strategy by 2030.” From there, you can determine the operational goals that will make this strategic goal possible.

No matter what goal you choose to pursue, it’s important to avoid those that lack clarity, detail, specific targets or timeframes, or clear parameters for success. Without these specific elements in place, you’ll have a difficult time making your goals actionable and measurable.

Prioritizing Strategic Goals

Once you’ve identified several strategic goals, determine which are worth pursuing. This can be a lengthy process, especially if other decision-makers have differing priorities and opinions.

To set the stage, ensure everyone is aware of the purpose behind each strategic goal. This calls back to Henderson’s point that employees’ alignment on purpose can set your organization up to outperform its competitors.

Calculate Anticipated ROI

Next, calculate the estimated return on investment (ROI) of the operational goals tied to each strategic objective. For example, if the strategic goal is “reach carbon-neutral status by 2030,” you need to break that down into actionable sub-tasks—such as “determine how much CO2 our company produces each year” and “craft a marketing and public relations strategy”—and calculate the expected cost and return for each.

Return on Investment equation: net profit divided by cost of investment multiplied by 100

The ROI formula is typically written as:

ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100

In project management, the formula uses slightly different terms:

ROI = [(Financial Value - Project Cost) / Project Cost] x 100

An estimate can be a valuable piece of information when deciding which goals to pursue. Although not all strategic goals need to yield a high return on investment, it’s in your best interest to calculate each objective's anticipated ROI so you can compare them.

Consider Current Events

Finally, when deciding which strategic goal to prioritize, the importance of the present moment can’t be overlooked. What’s happening in the world that could impact the timeliness of each goal?

For example, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the ever-intensifying climate change crisis have impacted many organizations’ strategic goals in 2020. Often, the goals that are timely and pressing are those that earn priority.

Which HBS Online Strategy Course is Right for You? | Download Your Free Flowchart

Learn to Plan Strategic Goals

As you set and prioritize strategic goals, remember that your strategy should always be evolving. As circumstances and challenges shift, so must your organizational strategy.

If you lead with purpose, a measurable and actionable vision, and an awareness of current events, you can set strategic goals worth striving for.

Do you want to learn more about strategic planning? Explore our online strategy courses and download our free flowchart to determine which is right for you and your goals.

This post was updated on November 16, 2023. It was originally published on October 29, 2020.

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  • 7 strategic planning models, plus 8 fra ...

7 strategic planning models, plus 8 frameworks to help you get started

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Strategic planning is vital in defining where your business is going in the next three to five years. With the right strategic planning models and frameworks, you can uncover opportunities, identify risks, and create a strategic plan to fuel your organization’s success. We list the most popular models and frameworks and explain how you can combine them to create a strategic plan that fits your business.

A strategic plan is a great tool to help you hit your business goals . But sometimes, this tool needs to be updated to reflect new business priorities or changing market conditions. If you decide to use a model that already exists, you can benefit from a roadmap that’s already created. The model you choose can improve your knowledge of what works best in your organization, uncover unknown strengths and weaknesses, or help you find out how you can outpace your competitors.

In this article, we cover the most common strategic planning models and frameworks and explain when to use which one. Plus, get tips on how to apply them and which models and frameworks work well together. 

Strategic planning models vs. frameworks

First off: This is not a one-or-nothing scenario. You can use as many or as few strategic planning models and frameworks as you like. 

When your organization undergoes a strategic planning phase, you should first pick a model or two that you want to apply. This will provide you with a basic outline of the steps to take during the strategic planning process.

[Inline illustration] Strategic planning models vs. frameworks (Infographic)

During that process, think of strategic planning frameworks as the tools in your toolbox. Many models suggest starting with a SWOT analysis or defining your vision and mission statements first. Depending on your goals, though, you may want to apply several different frameworks throughout the strategic planning process.

For example, if you’re applying a scenario-based strategic plan, you could start with a SWOT and PEST(LE) analysis to get a better overview of your current standing. If one of the weaknesses you identify has to do with your manufacturing process, you could apply the theory of constraints to improve bottlenecks and mitigate risks. 

Now that you know the difference between the two, learn more about the seven strategic planning models, as well as the eight most commonly used frameworks that go along with them.

[Inline illustration] The seven strategic planning models (Infographic)

1. Basic model

The basic strategic planning model is ideal for establishing your company’s vision, mission, business objectives, and values. This model helps you outline the specific steps you need to take to reach your goals, monitor progress to keep everyone on target, and address issues as they arise.

If it’s your first strategic planning session, the basic model is the way to go. Later on, you can embellish it with other models to adjust or rewrite your business strategy as needed. Let’s take a look at what kinds of businesses can benefit from this strategic planning model and how to apply it.

Small businesses or organizations

Companies with little to no strategic planning experience

Organizations with few resources 

Write your mission statement. Gather your planning team and have a brainstorming session. The more ideas you can collect early in this step, the more fun and rewarding the analysis phase will feel.

Identify your organization’s goals . Setting clear business goals will increase your team’s performance and positively impact their motivation.

Outline strategies that will help you reach your goals. Ask yourself what steps you have to take in order to reach these goals and break them down into long-term, mid-term, and short-term goals .

Create action plans to implement each of the strategies above. Action plans will keep teams motivated and your organization on target.

Monitor and revise the plan as you go . As with any strategic plan, it’s important to closely monitor if your company is implementing it successfully and how you can adjust it for a better outcome.

2. Issue-based model

Also called goal-based planning model, this is essentially an extension of the basic strategic planning model. It’s a bit more dynamic and very popular for companies that want to create a more comprehensive plan.

Organizations with basic strategic planning experience

Businesses that are looking for a more comprehensive plan

Conduct a SWOT analysis . Assess your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with a SWOT analysis to get a better overview of what your strategic plan should focus on. We’ll give into how to conduct a SWOT analysis when we get into the strategic planning frameworks below.

Identify and prioritize major issues and/or goals. Based on your SWOT analysis, identify and prioritize what your strategic plan should focus on this time around.

Develop your main strategies that address these issues and/or goals. Aim to develop one overarching strategy that addresses your highest-priority goal and/or issue to keep this process as simple as possible.

Update or create a mission and vision statement . Make sure that your business’s statements align with your new or updated strategy. If you haven’t already, this is also a chance for you to define your organization’s values.

Create action plans. These will help you address your organization’s goals, resource needs, roles, and responsibilities. 

Develop a yearly operational plan document. This model works best if your business repeats the strategic plan implementation process on an annual basis, so use a yearly operational plan to capture your goals, progress, and opportunities for next time.

Allocate resources for your year-one operational plan. Whether you need funding or dedicated team members to implement your first strategic plan, now is the time to allocate all the resources you’ll need.

Monitor and revise the strategic plan. Record your lessons learned in the operational plan so you can revisit and improve it for the next strategic planning phase.

The issue-based plan can repeat on an annual basis (or less often once you resolve the issues). It’s important to update the plan every time it’s in action to ensure it’s still doing the best it can for your organization.

You don’t have to repeat the full process every year—rather, focus on what’s a priority during this run.

3. Alignment model

This model is also called strategic alignment model (SAM) and is one of the most popular strategic planning models. It helps you align your business and IT strategies with your organization’s strategic goals. 

You’ll have to consider four equally important, yet different perspectives when applying the alignment strategic planning model:

Strategy execution: The business strategy driving the model

Technology potential: The IT strategy supporting the business strategy

Competitive potential: Emerging IT capabilities that can create new products and services

Service level: Team members dedicated to creating the best IT system in the organization

Ideally, your strategy will check off all the criteria above—however, it’s more likely you’ll have to find a compromise. 

Here’s how to create a strategic plan using the alignment model and what kinds of companies can benefit from it.

Organizations that need to fine-tune their strategies

Businesses that want to uncover issues that prevent them from aligning with their mission

Companies that want to reassess objectives or correct problem areas that prevent them from growing

Outline your organization’s mission, programs, resources, and where support is needed. Before you can improve your statements and approaches, you need to define what exactly they are.

Identify what internal processes are working and which ones aren’t. Pinpoint which processes are causing problems, creating bottlenecks , or could otherwise use improving. Then prioritize which internal processes will have the biggest positive impact on your business.

Identify solutions. Work with the respective teams when you’re creating a new strategy to benefit from their experience and perspective on the current situation.

Update your strategic plan with the solutions. Update your strategic plan and monitor if implementing it is setting your business up for improvement or growth. If not, you may have to return to the drawing board and update your strategic plan with new solutions.

4. Scenario model

The scenario model works great if you combine it with other models like the basic or issue-based model. This model is particularly helpful if you need to consider external factors as well. These can be government regulations, technical, or demographic changes that may impact your business.

Organizations trying to identify strategic issues and goals caused by external factors

Identify external factors that influence your organization. For example, you should consider demographic, regulation, or environmental factors.

Review the worst case scenario the above factors could have on your organization. If you know what the worst case scenario for your business looks like, it’ll be much easier to prepare for it. Besides, it’ll take some of the pressure and surprise out of the mix, should a scenario similar to the one you create actually occur.

Identify and discuss two additional hypothetical organizational scenarios. On top of your worst case scenario, you’ll also want to define the best case and average case scenarios. Keep in mind that the worst case scenario from the previous step can often provoke strong motivation to change your organization for the better. However, discussing the other two will allow you to focus on the positive—the opportunities your business may have ahead.

Identify and suggest potential strategies or solutions. Everyone on the team should now brainstorm different ways your business could potentially respond to each of the three scenarios. Discuss the proposed strategies as a team afterward.

Uncover common considerations or strategies for your organization. There’s a good chance that your teammates come up with similar solutions. Decide which ones you like best as a team or create a new one together.

Identify the most likely scenario and the most reasonable strategy. Finally, examine which of the three scenarios is most likely to occur in the next three to five years and how your business should respond to potential changes.

5. Self-organizing model

Also called the organic planning model, the self-organizing model is a bit different from the linear approaches of the other models. You’ll have to be very patient with this method. 

This strategic planning model is all about focusing on the learning and growing process rather than achieving a specific goal. Since the organic model concentrates on continuous improvement , the process is never really over.

Large organizations that can afford to take their time

Businesses that prefer a more naturalistic, organic planning approach that revolves around common values, communication, and shared reflection

Companies that have a clear understanding of their vision

Define and communicate your organization’s cultural values . Your team can only think clearly and with solutions in mind when they have a clear understanding of your organization's values.

Communicate the planning group’s vision for the organization. Define and communicate the vision with everyone involved in the strategic planning process. This will align everyone’s ideas with your company’s vision.

Discuss what processes will help realize the organization’s vision on a regular basis. Meet every quarter to discuss strategies or tactics that will move your organization closer to realizing your vision.

6. Real-time model

This fluid model can help organizations that deal with rapid changes to their work environment. There are three levels of success in the real-time model: 

Organizational: At the organizational level, you’re forming strategies in response to opportunities or trends.

Programmatic: At the programmatic level, you have to decide how to respond to specific outcomes or environmental changes.

Operational: On the operational level, you will study internal systems, policies, and people to develop a strategy for your company.

Figuring out your competitive advantage can be difficult, but this is absolutely crucial to ensure success. Whether it’s a unique asset or strength your organization has or an outstanding execution of services or programs—it’s important that you can set yourself apart from others in the industry to succeed.

Companies that need to react quickly to changing environments

Businesses that are seeking new tools to help them align with their organizational strategy

Define your mission and vision statement. If you ever feel stuck formulating your company’s mission or vision statement, take a look at those of others. Maybe Asana’s vision statement sparks some inspiration.

Research, understand, and learn from competitor strategy and market trends. Pick a handful of competitors in your industry and find out how they’ve created success for themselves. How did they handle setbacks or challenges? What kinds of challenges did they even encounter? Are these common scenarios in the market? Learn from your competitors by finding out as much as you can about them.

Study external environments. At this point, you can combine the real-time model with the scenario model to find solutions to threats and opportunities outside of your control.

Conduct a SWOT analysis of your internal processes, systems, and resources. Besides the external factors your team has to consider, it’s also important to look at your company’s internal environment and how well you’re prepared for different scenarios.

Develop a strategy. Discuss the results of your SWOT analysis to develop a business strategy that builds toward organizational, programmatic, and operational success.

Rinse and repeat. Monitor how well the new strategy is working for your organization and repeat the planning process as needed to ensure you’re on top or, perhaps, ahead of the game. 

7. Inspirational model

This last strategic planning model is perfect to inspire and energize your team as they work toward your organization’s goals. It’s also a great way to introduce or reconnect your employees to your business strategy after a merger or acquisition.

Businesses with a dynamic and inspired start-up culture

Organizations looking for inspiration to reinvigorate the creative process

Companies looking for quick solutions and strategy shifts

Gather your team to discuss an inspirational vision for your organization. The more people you can gather for this process, the more input you will receive.

Brainstorm big, hairy audacious goals and ideas. Encouraging your team not to hold back with ideas that may seem ridiculous will do two things: for one, it will mitigate the fear of contributing bad ideas. But more importantly, it may lead to a genius idea or suggestion that your team wouldn’t have thought of if they felt like they had to think inside of the box.

Assess your organization’s resources. Find out if your company has the resources to implement your new ideas. If they don’t, you’ll have to either adjust your strategy or allocate more resources.

Develop a strategy balancing your resources and brainstorming ideas. Far-fetched ideas can grow into amazing opportunities but they can also bear great risk. Make sure to balance ideas with your strategic direction. 

Now, let’s dive into the most commonly used strategic frameworks.

8. SWOT analysis framework

One of the most popular strategic planning frameworks is the SWOT analysis . A SWOT analysis is a great first step in identifying areas of opportunity and risk—which can help you create a strategic plan that accounts for growth and prepares for threats.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here’s an example:

[Inline illustration] SWOT analysis (Example)

9. OKRs framework

A big part of strategic planning is setting goals for your company. That’s where OKRs come into play. 

OKRs stand for objective and key results—this goal-setting framework helps your organization set and achieve goals. It provides a somewhat holistic approach that you can use to connect your team’s work to your organization’s big-picture goals.  When team members understand how their individual work contributes to the organization’s success, they tend to be more motivated and produce better results

10. Balanced scorecard (BSC) framework

The balanced scorecard is a popular strategic framework for businesses that want to take a more holistic approach rather than just focus on their financial performance. It was designed by David Norton and Robert Kaplan in the 1990s, it’s used by companies around the globe to: 

Communicate goals

Align their team’s daily work with their company’s strategy

Prioritize products, services, and projects

Monitor their progress toward their strategic goals

Your balanced scorecard will outline four main business perspectives:

Customers or clients , meaning their value, satisfaction, and/or retention

Financial , meaning your effectiveness in using resources and your financial performance

Internal process , meaning your business’s quality and efficiency

Organizational capacity , meaning your organizational culture, infrastructure and technology, and human resources

With the help of a strategy map, you can visualize and communicate how your company is creating value. A strategy map is a simple graphic that shows cause-and-effect connections between strategic objectives. 

The balanced scorecard framework is an amazing tool to use from outlining your mission, vision, and values all the way to implementing your strategic plan .

You can use an integration like Lucidchart to create strategy maps for your business in Asana.

11. Porter’s Five Forces framework

If you’re using the real-time strategic planning model, Porter’s Five Forces are a great framework to apply. You can use it to find out what your product’s or service’s competitive advantage is before entering the market.

Developed by Michael E. Porter , the framework outlines five forces you have to be aware of and monitor:

[Inline illustration] Porter’s Five Forces framework (Infographic)

Threat of new industry entrants: Any new entry into the market results in increased pressure on prices and costs. 

Competition in the industry: The more competitors that exist, the more difficult it will be for you to create value in the market with your product or service.

Bargaining power of suppliers: Suppliers can wield more power if there are less alternatives for buyers or it’s expensive, time consuming, or difficult to switch to a different supplier.

Bargaining power of buyers: Buyers can wield more power if the same product or service is available elsewhere with little to no difference in quality.

Threat of substitutes: If another company already covers the market’s needs, you’ll have to create a better product or service or make it available for a lower price at the same quality in order to compete.

Remember, industry structures aren’t static. The more dynamic your strategic plan is, the better you’ll be able to compete in a market.

12. VRIO framework

The VRIO framework is another strategic planning tool designed to help you evaluate your competitive advantage. VRIO stands for value, rarity, imitability, and organization.

It’s a resource-based theory developed by Jay Barney. With this framework, you can study your firmed resources and find out whether or not your company can transform them into sustained competitive advantages. 

Firmed resources can be tangible (e.g., cash, tools, inventory, etc.) or intangible (e.g., copyrights, trademarks, organizational culture, etc.). Whether these resources will actually help your business once you enter the market depends on four qualities:

Valuable : Will this resource either increase your revenue or decrease your costs and thereby create value for your business?

Rare : Are the resources you’re using rare or can others use your resources as well and therefore easily provide the same product or service?

Inimitable : Are your resources either inimitable or non-substitutable? In other words, how unique and complex are your resources?

Organizational: Are you organized enough to use your resources in a way that captures their value, rarity, and inimitability?

It’s important that your resources check all the boxes above so you can ensure that you have sustained competitive advantage over others in the industry.

13. Theory of Constraints (TOC) framework

If the reason you’re currently in a strategic planning process is because you’re trying to mitigate risks or uncover issues that could hurt your business—this framework should be in your toolkit.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a problem-solving framework that can help you identify limiting factors or bottlenecks preventing your organization from hitting OKRs or KPIs . 

Whether it’s a policy, market, or recourse constraint—you can apply the theory of constraints to solve potential problems, respond to issues, and empower your team to improve their work with the resources they have.

14. PEST/PESTLE analysis framework

The idea of the PEST analysis is similar to that of the SWOT analysis except that you’re focusing on external factors and solutions. It’s a great framework to combine with the scenario-based strategic planning model as it helps you define external factors connected to your business’s success.

PEST stands for political, economic, sociological, and technological factors. Depending on your business model, you may want to expand this framework to include legal and environmental factors as well (PESTLE). These are the most common factors you can include in a PESTLE analysis:

Political: Taxes, trade tariffs, conflicts

Economic: Interest and inflation rate, economic growth patterns, unemployment rate

Social: Demographics, education, media, health

Technological: Communication, information technology, research and development, patents

Legal: Regulatory bodies, environmental regulations, consumer protection

Environmental: Climate, geographical location, environmental offsets

15. Hoshin Kanri framework

Hoshin Kanri is a great tool to communicate and implement strategic goals. It’s a planning system that involves the entire organization in the strategic planning process. The term is Japanese and stands for “compass management” and is also known as policy management. 

This strategic planning framework is a top-down approach that starts with your leadership team defining long-term goals which are then aligned and communicated with every team member in the company. 

You should hold regular meetings to monitor progress and update the timeline to ensure that every teammate’s contributions are aligned with the overarching company goals.

Stick to your strategic goals

Whether you’re a small business just starting out or a nonprofit organization with decades of experience, strategic planning is a crucial step in your journey to success. 

If you’re looking for a tool that can help you and your team define, organize, and implement your strategic goals, Asana is here to help. Our goal-setting software allows you to connect all of your team members in one place, visualize progress, and stay on target.

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The essential components of a successful L&D strategy

Over the past decade, the global workforce has been continually evolving because of a number of factors. An increasingly competitive business landscape, rising complexity, and the digital revolution are reshaping the mix of employees. Meanwhile, persistent uncertainty, a multigenerational workforce, and a shorter shelf life for knowledge have placed a premium on reskilling and upskilling. The shift to a digital, knowledge-based economy means that a vibrant workforce is more important than ever: research suggests that a very significant percentage of market capitalization in public companies is based on intangible assets—skilled employees, exceptional leaders, and knowledge. 1 Intangible Asset Market Value Study, Ocean Tomo.

Learning and development—From evolution to revolution

We began in 2014 by surveying 1,500 executives about capability building. In 2016, we added 120 L&D leaders at 91 organizations to our database, gathering information on their traditional training strategies and aspirations for future programs. We also interviewed 15 chief learning officers or L&D heads at major companies.

Historically, the L&D function has been relatively successful in helping employees build skills and perform well in their existing roles. The main focus of L&D has been on upskilling. However, the pace of change continues to accelerate; McKinsey research estimates that as many as 800 million jobs could be displaced by automation by 2030.

Employee roles are expected to continue evolving, and a large number of people will need to learn new skills to remain employable. Unsurprisingly, our research confirmed our initial hypothesis: corporate learning must undergo revolutionary changes over the next few years to keep pace with constant technological advances. In addition to updating training content, companies must increase their focus on blended-learning solutions, which combine digital learning, fieldwork, and highly immersive classroom sessions. With the growth of user-friendly digital-learning platforms, employees will take more ownership of their professional development, logging in to take courses when the need arises rather than waiting for a scheduled classroom session.

Such innovations will require companies to devote more resources to training: our survey revealed that 60 percent of respondents plan to increase L&D spending over the next few years, and 66 percent want to boost the number of employee-training hours. As they commit more time and money, companies must ensure that the transformation of the L&D function proceeds smoothly.

All of these trends have elevated the importance of the learning-and-development (L&D) function. We undertook several phases of research to understand trends and current priorities in L&D (see sidebar, “Learning and development—From evolution to revolution”). Our efforts highlighted how the L&D function is adapting to meet the changing needs of organizations, as well as the growing levels of investment in professional development.

To get the most out of investments in training programs and curriculum development, L&D leaders must embrace a broader role within the organization and formulate an ambitious vision for the function. An essential component of this effort is a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that engages the organization and encourages collaboration. The ACADEMIES© framework, which consists of nine dimensions of L&D, can help to strengthen the function and position it to serve the organization more effectively.

The strategic role of L&D

One of L&D’s primary responsibilities is to manage the development of people—and to do so in a way that supports other key business priorities. L&D’s strategic role spans five areas (Exhibit 1). 2 Nick van Dam, 25 Best Practices in Learning & Talent Development , second edition, Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing, 2008.

  • Attract and retain talent. Traditionally, learning focused solely on improving productivity. Today, learning also contributes to employability. Over the past several decades, employment has shifted from staying with the same company for a lifetime to a model where workers are being retained only as long as they can add value to an enterprise. Workers are now in charge of their personal and professional growth and development—one reason that people list “opportunities for learning and development” among the top criteria for joining an organization. Conversely, a lack of L&D is one of the key reasons people cite for leaving a company.
  • Develop people capabilities. Human capital requires ongoing investments in L&D to retain its value. When knowledge becomes outdated or forgotten—a more rapid occurrence today—the value of human capital declines and needs to be supplemented by new learning and relevant work experiences. 3 Gary S. Becker, “Investment in human capital: A theoretical analysis,” Journal of Political Economy , 1962, Volume 70, Number 5, Part 2, pp. 9–49, jstor.org. Companies that make investments in the next generation of leaders are seeing an impressive return. Research indicates that companies in the top quartile of leadership outperform other organizations by nearly two times on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). Moreover, companies that invest in developing leaders during significant transformations are 2.4 times more likely to hit their performance targets . 4 “ Economic Conditions Snapshot, June 2009: McKinsey Global Survey results ,” June 2009.
  • Create a values-based culture. As the workforce in many companies becomes increasingly virtual and globally dispersed, L&D can help to build a values-based culture and a sense of community. In particular, millennials are particularly interested in working for values-based, sustainable enterprises that contribute to the welfare of society.
  • Build an employer brand. An organization’s brand is one of its most important assets and conveys a great deal about the company’s success in the market, financial strengths, position in the industry, and products and services. Investments in L&D can help to enhance company’s brand and boost its reputation as an “employer of choice.” As large segments of the workforce prepare to retire, employers must work harder to compete for a shrinking talent pool. To do so, they must communicate their brand strength explicitly through an employer value proposition.
  • Motivate and engage employees. The most important way to engage employees is to provide them with opportunities to learn and develop new competencies. Research suggests that lifelong learning contributes to happiness. 5 John Coleman, “Lifelong learning is good for your health, your wallet, and your social life,” Harvard Business Review , February 7, 2017, hbr.org. When highly engaged employees are challenged and given the skills to grow and develop within their chosen career path, they are more likely to be energized by new opportunities at work and satisfied with their current organization.

The L&D function in transition

Over the years, we have identified and field-tested nine dimensions that contribute to a strong L&D function. We combined these dimensions to create the ACADEMIES framework, which covers all aspects of L&D functions, from setting aspirations to measuring impact (Exhibit 2). Although many companies regularly execute on several dimensions of this framework, our recent research found that only a few companies are fully mature in all dimensions.

1. Alignment with business strategy

One of an L&D executive’s primary tasks is to develop and shape a learning strategy based on the company’s business and talent strategies. The learning strategy seeks to support professional development and build capabilities across the company, on time, and in a cost-effective manner. In addition, the learning strategy can enhance the company culture and encourage employees to live the company’s values.

For many organizations, the L&D function supports the implementation of the business strategy. For example, if one of the business strategies is a digital transformation, L&D will focus on building the necessary people capabilities to make that possible.

Every business leader would agree that L&D must align with a company’s overall priorities. Yet research has found that many L&D functions fall short on this dimension. Only 40 percent of companies say that their learning strategy is aligned with business goals. 6 Human Capital Management Excellence Conference 2018, Brandon Hall Group. For 60 percent, then, learning has no explicit connection to the company’s strategic objectives. L&D functions may be out of sync with the business because of outdated approaches or because budgets have been based on priorities from previous years rather than today’s imperatives, such as a digital transformation.

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To be effective, L&D must take a hard look at employee capabilities and determine which are most essential to support the execution of the company’s business strategy. L&D leaders should reevaluate this alignment on a yearly basis to ensure they are creating a people-capability agenda that truly reflects business priorities and strategic objectives.

2. Co-ownership between business units and HR

With new tools and technologies constantly emerging, companies must become more agile, ready to adapt their business processes and practices. L&D functions must likewise be prepared to rapidly launch capability-building programs—for example, if new business needs suddenly arise or staff members require immediate training on new technologies such as cloud-based collaboration tools.

L&D functions can enhance their partnership with business leaders by establishing a governance structure in which leadership from both groups share responsibility for defining, prioritizing, designing, and securing funds for capability-building programs. Under this governance model, a company’s chief experience officer (CXO), senior executives, and business-unit heads will develop the people-capability agenda for segments of the enterprise and ensure that it aligns with the company’s overall strategic goals. Top business executives will also help firmly embed the learning function and all L&D initiatives in the organizational culture. The involvement of senior leadership enables full commitment to the L&D function’s longer-term vision.

3. Assessment of capability gaps and estimated value

After companies identify their business priorities, they must verify that their employees can deliver on them—a task that may be more difficult than it sounds. Some companies make no effort to assess employee capabilities, while others do so only at a high level. Conversations with L&D, HR, and senior executives suggest that many companies are ineffective or indifferent at assessing capability gaps, especially when it comes to senior leaders and midlevel managers.

The most effective companies take a deliberate, systematic approach to capability assessment. At the heart of this process is a comprehensive competency or capability model based on the organization’s strategic direction. For example, a key competency for a segment of an e-commerce company’s workforce could be “deep expertise in big data and predictive analytics.”

After identifying the most essential capabilities for various functions or job descriptions, companies should then assess how employees rate in each of these areas. L&D interventions should seek to close these capability gaps.

4. Design of learning journeys

Most corporate learning is delivered through a combination of digital-learning formats and in-person sessions. While our research indicates that immersive L&D experiences in the classroom still have immense value, leaders have told us that they are incredibly busy “from eight to late,” which does not give them a lot of time to sit in a classroom. Furthermore, many said that they prefer to develop and practice new skills and behaviors in a “safe environment,” where they don’t have to worry about public failures that might affect their career paths.

Traditional L&D programs consisted of several days of classroom learning with no follow-up sessions, even though people tend to forget what they have learned without regular reinforcement. As a result, many L&D functions are moving away from stand-alone programs by designing learning journeys—continuous learning opportunities that take place over a period of time and include L&D interventions such as fieldwork, pre- and post-classroom digital learning, social learning, on-the-job coaching and mentoring, and short workshops. The main objectives of a learning journey are to help people develop the required new competencies in the most effective and efficient way and to support the transfer of learning to the job.

5. Execution and scale-up

An established L&D agenda consists of a number of strategic initiatives that support capability building and are aligned with business goals, such as helping leaders develop high-performing teams or roll out safety training. The successful execution of L&D initiatives on time and on budget is critical to build and sustain support from business leaders.

L&D functions often face an overload of initiatives and insufficient funding. L&D leadership needs to maintain an ongoing discussion with business leaders about initiatives and priorities to ensure the requisite resources and support.

Many new L&D initiatives are initially targeted to a limited audience. A successful execution of a small pilot, such as an online orientation program for a specific audience, can lead to an even bigger impact once the program is rolled out to the entire enterprise. The program’s cost per person declines as companies benefit from economies of scale.

6. Measurement of impact on business performance

A learning strategy’s execution and impact should be measured using key performance indicators (KPIs). The first indicator looks at business excellence: how closely aligned all L&D initiatives and investments are with business priorities. The second KPI looks at learning excellence: whether learning interventions change people’s behavior and performance. Last, an operational-excellence KPI measures how well investments and resources in the corporate academy are used.

Accurate measurement is not simple, and many organizations still rely on traditional impact metrics such as learning-program satisfaction and completion scores. But high-performing organizations focus on outcomes-based metrics such as impact on individual performance, employee engagement, team effectiveness, and business-process improvement.

We have identified several lenses for articulating and measuring learning impact:

  • Strategic alignment: How effectively does the learning strategy support the organization’s priorities?
  • Capabilities: How well does the L&D function help colleagues build the mind-sets, skills, and expertise they need most? This impact can be measured by assessing people’s capability gaps against a comprehensive competency framework.
  • Organizational health: To what extent does learning strengthen the overall health and DNA of the organization? Relevant dimensions of the McKinsey Organizational Health Index can provide a baseline.
  • Individual peak performance: Beyond raw capabilities, how well does the L&D function help colleagues achieve maximum impact in their role while maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

Access to big data provides L&D functions with more opportunities to assess and predict the business impact of their interventions.

7. Integration of L&D interventions into HR processes

Just as L&D corporate-learning activities need to be aligned with the business, they should also be an integral part of the HR agenda. L&D has an important role to play in recruitment, onboarding, performance management, promotion, workforce, and succession planning. Our research shows that at best, many L&D functions have only loose connections to annual performance reviews and lack a structured approach and follow-up to performance-management practices.

L&D leadership must understand major HR management practices and processes and collaborate closely with HR leaders. The best L&D functions use consolidated development feedback from performance reviews as input for their capability-building agenda. A growing number of companies are replacing annual performance appraisals with frequent, in-the-moment feedback. 7 HCM outlook 2018 , Brandon Hall Group. This is another area in which the L&D function can help managers build skills to provide development feedback effectively.

Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field

Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field

Another example is onboarding. Companies that have developed high-impact onboarding processes score better on employee engagement and satisfaction and lose fewer new hires. 8 HCM outlook 2018 , Brandon Hall Group. The L&D function can play a critical role in onboarding—for example, by helping people build the skills to be successful in their role, providing new hires with access to digital-learning technologies, and connecting them with other new hires and mentors.

8. Enabling of the 70:20:10 learning framework

Many L&D functions embrace a framework known as “70:20:10,” in which 70 percent of learning takes place on the job, 20 percent through interaction and collaboration, and 10 percent through formal-learning interventions such as classroom training and digital curricula. These percentages are general guidelines and vary by industry and organization. L&D functions have traditionally focused on the formal-learning component.

Today, L&D leaders must design and implement interventions that support informal learning, including coaching and mentoring, on-the-job instruction, apprenticeships, leadership shadowing, action-based learning, on-demand access to digital learning, and lunch-and-learn sessions. Social technologies play a growing role in connecting experts and creating and sharing knowledge.

9. Systems and learning technology applications

The most significant enablers for just-in-time learning are technology platforms and applications. Examples include next-generation learning-management systems, virtual classrooms, mobile-learning apps, embedded performance-support systems, polling software, learning-video platforms, learning-assessment and -measurement platforms, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and small private online courses (SPOCs), to name just a few.

The learning-technology industry has moved entirely to cloud-based platforms, which provide L&D functions with unlimited opportunities to plug and unplug systems and access the latest functionality without having to go through lengthy and expensive implementations of an on-premises system. L&D leaders must make sure that learning technologies fit into an overall system architecture that includes functionality to support the entire talent cycle, including recruitment, onboarding, performance management, L&D, real-time feedback tools, career management, succession planning, and rewards and recognition.

L&D leaders are increasingly aware of the challenges created by the fourth industrial revolution (technologies that are connecting the physical and digital worlds), but few have implemented large-scale transformation programs. Instead, most are slowly adapting their strategy and curricula as needed. However, with technology advancing at an ever-accelerating pace, L&D leaders can delay no longer: human capital is more important than ever and will be the primary factor in sustaining competitive advantage over the next few years.

The leaders of L&D functions need to revolutionize their approach by creating a learning strategy that aligns with business strategy and by identifying and enabling the capabilities needed to achieve success. This approach will result in robust curricula that employ every relevant and available learning method and technology. The most effective companies will invest in innovative L&D programs, remain flexible and agile, and build the human talent needed to master the digital age.

These changes entail some risk, and perhaps some trial and error, but the rewards are great.

A version of this chapter was published in TvOO Magazine in September 2016. It is also included in Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field , August 2018.

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Jacqueline Brassey is director of Enduring Priorities Learning in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, where Nick van Dam is an alumnus and senior adviser to the firm as well as professor and chief of the IE University (Madrid) Center for Learning Innovation; Lisa Christensen is a senior learning expert in the San Francisco office.

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