6 Characteristics of a Great Strategic Plan

In this Mike on the Mic episode of The Better Leadership Team Show, I share the six characteristics that define a truly effective strategic plan. Drawing on over 35 years of coaching and consulting experience, I explain why most strategic plans fail and what leaders must do differently to drive focus, execution, and results. This episode breaks down how clarity, alignment, impact, speed, urgency, and accountability work together to turn strategy into action—and why mastering these fundamentals is essential for building a great leadership team and a great company.

Thanks for listening! Connect with us at mike-goldman.com/blog and on Instagram@mikegoldmancoach and on YouTube @Mikegoldmancoach

Transcript

Mike 0:02

Get your decisions. 70% right. Get them 70% right, and then. Execute the hell out of those decisions and learn and zig and zag and tweak it because the extra time you spend to get from 70% right to 90, 95, a hundred percent right, number one is not adding real value. Because the world is changing and the chance of you being right is smaller and smaller. And again, number two, that extra time could be spent executing, adding value, learning, and growing. So speed means getting to 70% right And then just have at it. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Mike Goldman 0:57

You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go.

Foundational Concept 1: Clarity

Foundational Concept 2: Alignment

Foundational Concept 3: Impact

Foundational Concept 4: Speed

Foundational Concept 5: Urgency

Foundational Concept 6: Accountability

Conclusion and Recap

Mike 1:29

In this episode, I wanna talk about strategic planning and more specifically, I wanna share with you from my 35 plus years coaching consulting. Yes, I'm that old. what I found to be. Six really important characteristics of a great strategic plan. Now, first, why do we even need a strategic plan? Or why do we need a great strategic plan? Well, the right plan focuses the organization. On the results that matter. It's not just about everybody working hard. We get a lot of great smart people, get'em all working hard and we're gonna accomplish great things. That's garbage. People need to know where their focus needs to be, to focus on those results that matter. And a great strategic plan identifies those. It gets everyone. Pulling in the same direction. It improves decision making. How do we make decisions? How do we make the right decisions if we don't know where we're headed? And it improves the chance of creating a great company and I believe the three characteristics of a great company are consistent and significant, top and bottom line growth. A growing, fulfilling environment for all team members and impact on the world, adding significant value to clients, vendors, team members, community. A great strategic plan improves the chance of. Accomplishing all of those things. So what I wanna share with you in these six characteristics are six foundational concepts. It's not a strict methodology. I do have a methodology for how I do strategic planning with my clients, but I don't want to, try to get you using my. Strict methodology. These are characteristics that regardless of what kind of planning process you are using, these characteristics should add value to that process. To take whatever is great about your process or not so great about your process and hopefully add value to it and make it even stronger. So I'm gonna dive right in. So the first. Foundational concept is clarity. Now, what do I mean? What do I mean by clarity? it's really clarity, as simple as it sounds, clarity around the terms you are using. In my methodology, the, your, the purpose is the reason why you don't achieve your purpose. You live your purpose every day. Your big, hairy, audacious goal is a 10 to 15 year flag on top of a mountain that tells you what mountain you are gonna climb, and it challenges the organization to greatness. It rallies the troops around that man on the moon type. Big, hairy, audacious goal. Then there are three in my methodology. There are three different types of priorities. Now, again, I'm not trying to sell you on my methodology, but I'm using as an example to being clear around terms. People throw words around like, projects, priorities, rocks, initiatives, competencies that we need to be clear what all those means. And in my methodology as an example, there are three different. Types of priorities or three different names for priorities based on the timeframe. Very often organizations talk about all these things they want to do in their strategic plan. It's our five point plan to do these things, but the timeframe is not clear. So in my methodology. The three different timeframes of priorities. Number one, a three year priority. I call an initiative a one year priority. I simply call an annual priority, and a 90 day priority is a rock. Yeah. Now again, you don't have to use those terms, but it's an example of when people throw out the word goal or project or priority, we need to know what they mean. And in my methodology, if someone says priority, we know they mean. A, an annual priority. If someone says initiative, we know they mean three years. Rock means 90 days. So we need to be really clear about terms, the other terms that we need to be clear on. Is accountability versus responsibility. I've mentioned this in probably a number of other podcast episodes, but it's an important part of this foundational concept of clarity is we need to know the difference between accountability and responsibility. When we throw those words around interchangeably, we cause confusion within our organization. The way I define them is responsibility is about who is rolling up their sleeves to get the job done. Responsibility could be one person, it could be 500 people. I can stand in front of an entire company and say something like, we are all responsible for giving our clients Wow. Levels of service. Because directly or indirectly, all of the members of that company are, have some impact. At some level. They're rolling up their sleeves to get that job done. But who is accountable for wowing our clients? That comes down to one person who's accountable for. A certain number of marketing qualified leads who's accountable for implementing our new CRM system. In all those cases, there may be multiple people responsible, but we need one and only one person accountable for defining what wowing our clients means for defining how we're gonna measure it, for communicating whether we're in the red, the yellow, the green. For coming up with a strategy to hit whatever that target is. One person accountable, multiple people responsible. So again, you know what I'm really trying to get out here is clarity of terms, whether it's a term around a priority or accountability versus responsibility, et cetera. So number one, foundational concept is be clear, be. proactive about defining the words that you are using so you don't just throw out a word like, goal. What's our goal? And have people say, well, what do you mean? Do you mean our KPIs? Do you mean our annual priorities? Do you mean, you know, our three year initiatives or our BHAG? What do you mean when you say goal? Use your words purposefully. So number one concept, foundational concept is clarity. Number two is alignment and in alignment. I'm gonna talk about two different types of alignment. one type of alignment is the connection between long term and short term. Very often I see companies that have these big, bold, beautiful visions of the future, but then when you look at what they're doing day to day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, there's no real marriage between their short term. Actions and their midterm and their long-term vision, and then they wonder why they're not getting where they want to get to. We need alignment. So again, I'm gonna use my methodology only as an example. Feel free to grab it if you want, but only as an example is at the highest level when we talk about. Something we wanna do, or who we are is a better way to say it at the highest level. I use a core purpose. I mentioned this a little bit earlier. I use a purpose. A purpose statement is a reason for being. It's not what you do, it's why you do it. Next level down. If you think of that as kind of your north star, you never achieve your purpose, but you live it every single day. It's like your North Star. Then you've got your big, hairy, audacious goal, which I'm ripping off from Jim Collins. That is a 10 to 15 year flag on top of the mountain. If we live our core purpose every single day, this is the mountain. That we're climbing, and here's the flag we're gonna plant. We're gonna put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. So you've got your long, you've got your purpose and your purpose and your BHAG, your long term goal align with each other. Then you've got your three year initiatives, your three year initiatives say, in order for us to achieve this. BHAG. What are the two or three or four more most important things we need to accomplish or do or become in order to reach our BHAG? Then we've got our annual priorities. The annual priorities are the first, the next 12 month chunk. Of your three year initiatives. So you've got alignment between annual priorities and three year initiatives.'cause your annual priorities are nothing more, nothing less than the next 12 month chunk of those three year initiatives. Then you've got your quarterly rocks, or your 90 day chunk of your annual priorities, and you could see if you do all that. Now we've got this beautiful connection. Between our short-term actions and our long-term vision. So that's the first type of alignment that I want to talk about. The second type of alignment is alignment around a small number of priorities for the year, a small number of rocks for the quarter, a small number of initiatives over three years. The key there is I kept saying small number. If I say, what are your priorities and you list out 8 or 10 things for me, I don't think you have alignment around a small number of priorities. If everything's a priority, nothing is a priority. So when we talk about alignment. We really need to get to the heart of what is most important, not everything that's important, but get to the heart of what's most important. That's a big part of the alignment as well. So the first foundational concept was clarity. The second was alignment. The third is impact. If we want to have. A significant powerful impact on our clients, our team members, our vendors, our communities, our bank accounts. We need to stop in our strategic planning. We need to stop trying to forecast the future when we forecast the future, which sounds like a normal, typical thing that we all do in our planning, but when we forecast the future, we. We tend to project the future based on what we're doing today and some incremental changes we can make over the next year. Or two years or three years. When we do that, which again sounds very logical, we wind up with incremental change. We wind up with incremental unexciting growth. We may not wind up with growth at all because if we're making these small, incremental improvements in what we do and our competition is doing the same thing and our clients are forever. increasing their expectations of us. Then incremental change may mean we're shrinking and not growing. So what's the alternative to forecasting the future? The alternative is creating the future. Let's not start from today and say, where will we be three years from now if we do these six new things? Let's start from three years from now, or better yet, let's start with our big, hairy, audacious call 10 years from now and say, what future do we want to create? A challenge challenges us to think much bigger than if we keep doing this or if we make these changes, where do we think we'll be? What do we wanna create 10 years from now? What do we wanna create three years from now? What do we wanna create in the next year? What will it take to make that true? When we ask those two questions, what do we want to create and what will it take to make it true? We wind up with. Much bolder visions. We wind up coming up with ideas that we never would've come up with. We wind up wowing our clients at whole new levels. We wind up growing at velocities that we never would have thought about. So we wanna create the future, not forecast the future. That was the third foundational concept around impact. The fourth concept is speed. And when I say speed, I mean, literally speed of creating the plan. Back in my management consulting days, many years ago, 20 plus years ago, every two to three years. Our clients would want to create these big, bold three to five year strategic plans. They would take months to create binders and binders of beautiful colored charts that would sit on a shelf and gather dust, because even back then, I know we like to talk about how fast the world is changing. But you know what? 20, 25, 30 years ago, the world was changing pretty fast back then too, and three to five months after those beautiful strategic plans were created, they were outta date, and we stopped holding each other accountable as we should for executing on those plans. One of the problems was we were trying to get that plan a hundred percent right? We were trying to do so much analysis to make sure the plans were accurate whatever the heck that means. And in this foundational concept of speed, what I wanna encourage you to do. It is not to try to get everything right. Don't take 2, 3, 5 months to create a strategic plan, and then the whole world is passed you by. Get your decisions. 70% right? Get them 70% right, and then. Execute the hell out of those decisions and learn and zig and zag and tweak it because the extra time you spend to get from 70% right to 90, 95, a hundred percent right, number one is not adding real value. Because the world is changing and the chance of you being right is smaller and smaller. And again, number two, that extra time could be spent executing, adding value, learning, and growing. So speed means getting to 70% right? And then just have at it. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. The fifth foundational concept is urgency. Urgency is different than speed. Urgency is making sure you've gotta fire up your butt to take action. Take action now. Not create a blueprint to plan, to get ready to take action, but to take action now and start seeing results and that urgency in my methodology. Comes in the form of 90 day sprints, these quarterly rocks. Quarterly planning in my methodology is the most important part of planning because that's where shit happens. The reason why those 90 day plans drive urgency is because. The result you're trying to hit at the end of 90 days is coming up so quickly you don't have time to screw around. If I said I wanna lose 24 pounds this year, I will still order a pizza tonight. I will still have a dessert tomorrow because I've got 12 months to lose that weight. I've got plenty of time to make it happen, but if my goal that I've committed to is to lose six pounds this quarter. I'm not gonna do any of those things. I'm gonna get right on it. There's a sense of urgency there. So the key is in these 90 day sprints, these quarterly priorities that I call rocks. So number one, foundational concept was clarity. Number two was alignment. Number three was impact. Number four was speed. Number five was urgency. The sixth and last one is accountability. And we've already talked a little bit about accountability, but it's so important that it deserves a concept all unto its own. We talked about it when we talked about clarity of terms. What I wanna dive into here is a couple of things around accountability. One is just reviewing the idea that when we say accountability, it's one and only one person. So. If you have an annual priority or you have a rock for the quarter that is implementing a new CRM tool, and I use this as an example, because I have seen screw ups over and over again and not defining accountability in the right way, accountability being one person. Here is almost every CRM conversation I've ever heard. The head of technology is super excited because they're walking into their quarterly senior leadership team meeting knowing that their job was to implement this new CRM system on time and on budget. They're excited because the CRM tool was implemented a month early and under budget, so they expect that they're gonna get a standing ovation from the rest of the leadership team. They're gonna be carried out on the leadership team's shoulders. They come in, they say, Hey everyone, great news CRM tool is implemented a month early and under budget. And not only do they not get a standing ovation, but the head of operations says, who cares? It's great that it's live and under budget, but where's the value? I was under the impression that I would be able to use the sales funnel information in there to better drive my resource requirements, my inventory requirements. But if the funnels are there at all, they're totally inaccurate. It's useless to me. Then the head of sales jumps in and says. Damn right. The sales funnels aren't accurate. I told you three months ago that if my salespeople need to go through 12 screens and spend two hours to enter a new opportunity, I am not having them sit behind their laptops. They need to be out there selling. Who's right is the head of technology, right? Is the head of operations, right? Is the head of sales, right? They're all right. The problem is there wasn't one person accountable for the outcome of implementing that CRM to achieve whatever the business case was to get the dollar value from it. Number one, there wasn't one person accountable. There were only three people responsible, and no one truly accountable for the results. Number two, they didn't specify the outcome. So, and it's about that one person accountable, but it's also about an outcome, not just getting a bunch of tasks done. Another quick example of task related versus outcome related accountability is there was a head of HR. That was working on one of her rocks for the quarter, and she informed me that her rock was to design and plan a leadership development program. To me, having a rock or an annual priority have the words design and plan in it is like fingernails on a blackboard. That's about tasks, that's not about outcomes. So I said to her, is it possible? That you can design and plan a leadership development program and not see any value from it. And her initial response was, of course not. We need more leadership development. I said, I'm not challenging whether you need more leadership development and better leadership development, but what if you design and plan a leadership development program and it's never implemented? Because leadership finds some new shiny object to chase and they don't, they don't invest the time and money in implementing your plan. What if the plan is implemented, but it's not very good? What if the plan is implemented but the leaders don't take action based on it and you never see the results from it? There's a whole lot that can go wrong and the scary thing is when it comes to task-based priorities, where the outcome is to get a bunch of tasks done, and embarrassingly, small percentage of those actually end up adding value, having real dollar based outcomes. So when you talk about the outcome of an initiative or a priority or a rock, when you talk about accountability for something, we need to identify what the business outcome is. And in the case of this HR leader, the outcome we decided upon was something that was way more focused on improving the talent density of the organization. Of increasing productivity, of improving the level that their team members were living their core values. And the way to do that wasn't necessarily to design and plan this big beautiful program very simply in that quarter, it was a more narrow focus around helping people figure out how to better assess performance. What do they need to do to better coach their people to higher performance, and how should they go about making better decisions around whether people could be coached up or coached out? That's a narrower focus than a big leadership development program, but one that could add true value in 90 days. So that's it. Those are the five, six, six. There's one bonus one there. Those are the six foundational. Concepts six characteristics of a great strategic plan, and I'll review them one more time. Number one, it's clarity. Clarity around the terms that you're using. Number two is alignment. Alignment across. Time from long term to short term and alignment around a small number of priorities that get the team totally aligned, it's about impact. The idea of creating the future rather than forecasting the future. It's speed, not taking three or five months to create a strategic. Plan, but just doing it quickly to get it 70% right and executing the hell out of it. It's urgency. Urgency around these 90 day sprints that drive action and urgency. And then accountability. Accountability, being one person and having accountability for a true outcome. If you want a great company. You need a great leadership team. I hope these characteristics and foundational concepts around strategic planning helped you get there today. Talk soon.