Great Strategic Plan! – So why are we not making good progress?

Organizations spend a lot of effort and money on getting the leadership team together to plan for the future. That’s great! This wonderful effort is often diminished by the lack of coordination to develop a road map to get there; one that focuses on the team that needs to execute this strategy.
There can be a huge chasm between the strategy and the operation. Employees can be quite confused because they do not understand why the changes are happening and they feel as though things are being done “to them” instead of “with them”. Remember, they were not all present at the discussions so they do not have the background information to reach the same conclusions.
Strategic planning sessions need two key follow up activities before the execution begins.
1. Strategic goals translation and alignment
2. The Change Management Plan which includes the Communication Plan
The translation and alignment process seeks to evaluate how the strategic goals will be achieved by the (new) actions of each department. It often identifies what current processes and actions of employees need to change and just what the new actions need to be, with the explanations off how those changes will contribute to the overall strategic goals. New goals relevant to the current department activities need to be identified and adopted. These new behaviors need to be closely monitored and coaching provided so that the new norm is achieved and the pain of transition is minimized.
These elements are all inputs to the Change Management Plan which will be discussed in the next edition.

The OPTIMizer

Vol 3, March 12, 2017

A blog of ideas, information and good practices that help transform operations processes and business results.

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