Monthly Archives: May 2019

Strategic planning for leaders

Strategic Planning for Leaders and Managers

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Strategic planning for leaders and managers is crucial for business and organizational success, especially in the fast-changing business landscape today.


The onset of automation and artificial intelligence is expected to create tremendous change in the workplace and many existing jobs will disappear and new ones created.


Thus, it is essential that business owners, leaders and managers devote time to strategic planning in order to be ready to meet the changes that are coming.


Trends can may offer opportunities or threats to your organization. Are you ready to take advantage of the opportunities that these trends and changes will offer? Are you equipped to face the challenges and threats that the changing times will present you?


Strategic Planning is for Everyone

Of course, business owners and directors are responsible to steer the organization in the right direction. But all managers need to spend time doing their own strategic plan for their department. It need not be as in-depth a plan, but it should be done annually.


There should be a strategic planning team at the directors’ level and managers can involve some of their team members. This will make it a participative approach and be easier to implement the new decisions and communicate the changes to all team members.


Trends

Trends can be researched to see what the experts are predicting that can have an impact on your business. Trends in various areas should be researched to see what could impact your organization and department.


Trends can be classified by areas such as economics, demographics, technology, marketing, innovation and more. For example, two areas within technology that is being talked a lot about now is automation and artificial intelligence.


Automation and artificial intelligence are predicted to create massive disruption to the workforce in the coming years. New jobs that don’t exist now will be created and many up to 50% of existing jobs will disappear according to a recent study by RBC.


Both automation and artificial intelligence will greatly affect all categories of doing business no matter what industry you are in, so studying the potential impact on your business and what to do to prepare is essential.


Strengths and Weaknesses

Considering the trends and potential impact on your organization, it is imperative to assess your strengths and weaknesses. These changes can be opportunities and others may be threats depending on your strengths and weaknesses.


This is a great point of discussion for your planning team and from there can unfold goals on how to act to capitalize on the opportunities and face the threats.


Make a list of the strengths and weaknesses in your organization or department and determine those that are the most powerful in terms of acting on the opportunities and dealing with the threats.


Mission and Goals

One you have done your research and assessed your capabilities you can set goals for the organization and department. This may also entail setting a new mission statement.


There can be one must achieve goal for the organisation and then key goals set by each director or manager for their respective areas.


Goal achievement must be planned and broken down into action steps. The SMART goal planning form can be used for this purpose.


Communication the Strategic Plan

A plan is great, but it must be put into action and communicated. Change and uncertainty can foster fear and anxiety in people and the only way to counter that affect is to inform people of the coming changes and provide training and support.


Large corporations have change agents who assist the managers and employees in implementing and adapting to the changes. This role falls on the shoulders of the managers in smaller organizations.  Taking a participative and coaching leadership style approach can greatly aid in implementing the change and making it easier for employees to sail through any uncertainties.


Tracking and Measurement

All plans and goals need to be tracked and measured to see if they are working. Tracking and measurement mechanisms need to be determined and reviewed on pre-determined dates for the planning team.  


If things are not on track as planned, adjustments need to be made. This is where problem solving techniques are crucial for teams as everyone must be involved in contributing to the new mission and goals. When roadblocks occur, employees need to be equipped with the proper skills to solve problems in teams.


The Business Owner

Last week I attended the C2MTL conference on commerce and creativity in Montreal and I met with a business owner who really impressed me. He was directing a multi-faceted organization that operated in Europe, South America, Canada and the US.


His organization has grown to more than 1,300 employees and he is concerned about how to have people keep learning and sharing their knowledge.


After listening to his story and challenges I suggested that what he needed to do was to put most of his energy to strategic planning rather than running the day to day affairs. He responded that that was exactly what he was doing and had managed to delegate all day to day running of the business to his directors.


While this may not be possible for all business owners, it is a good indication of the importance highly successful business leaders place on the importance of strategic planning in this age of rapid change and complex business operations.


employee performance

How to Deal with Mediocre or Poor Performing Long-Term Employees

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I’ve often discussed with business leaders and managers about how to deal with mediocre or poor performing long-term employees.


In fact, this came up recently in a group discussion with a few business owners who I am coaching on dealing with challenges in reaching specific business goals.


One of the members has a goal to diversify the client base of the company to not be reliant on public contracts only. To achieve this requires him and his partner devoting time to strategizing and business development.


The main obstacle is time, but it goes deeper than just scheduling time and this is where the performance of a long-term manager/employee comes into play.


The business owner and his partner find themselves having to help the manager/employee when her workload increases past a certain point. In other words, they end up doing her job and this makes it very difficult for them to spend time to work on their goal.


It seems that this has been going on for quite some time and now, they don’t know how to deal with it. The business owner says things like well, that’s the way she is and she won’t change; we have to help her or the work won’t get done and it will hurt our business; she doesn’t use her team well to assign tasks and delegate and we can’t get her to improve in that skill.


The problem here is that this issue was identified but not addressed many years ago. Now they feel it is too late to fix. But the business cannot scale if this situation lingers. So, what are the solutions?


Solutions


Here are my recommendations to the business owners and anyone who is in a similar situation.

  1. Meet with the employee and discuss the situation. Explain the goal to diversify the customer base and how important it is for the company and the employees.
  2. Explain to the employee that they need to devote time to work on this and that you can no longer keep helping the employee do their work if the new goal is to be achieved.
  3. Ask the employee to think about how they can work with her team to become more autonomous. Listen to the persons response and gauge her willingness to work on the problem. Give her time to think about solutions and schedule another meeting in a couple of days. Let her know you are willing to provide the support required.
  4. Meet again with the employee and discuss solutions to the problem. Once you are satisfied with the solutions, ask the employee what support they would need from you to apply these solutions. Make sure the solutions and support needs are written down by both of you.
  5. My suggestion is to use my win-win agreement process and form to put the commitments in writing. The employee should be the one to complete the form and submit it to you. The form states the performance commitments of the employee along with the request support commitments from you. It also includes rewards and penalties for achieving or not achieving the goal.
  6. Do what you need to provide the support commitments in the agreement. Schedule a review meeting to track the progress of the performance commitments and discuss and find solutions to any challenges.  Keep scheduling additional sessions until the commitments have been met and the solutions implemented.

I suggest using the same process for new employees once the basic orientation and training period has been completed. There are always new performance goals that can be set. This is how you assure the organization can continue to grow and scale.


In the example used in this article, the penalty might be a demotion from manager to employee. Right now, the business owners are putting up with the current situation. They are not doing their job as leaders in confronting the employee and making the hard decision, which might be demotion.


The buck always stops at the top and leaders cannot afford to make excuses for the poor performance of their employees and managers and play the role of rescuers. This impedes the organization from growing and sends the wrong message to all the managers and employees.


developing autonomous teams

Two Essential Skills for Developing Autonomous Teams

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In this video I explain the two key skills that all team members must learn and apply if teams are going to become autonomous and self-directed.


These skills are confronting team members or employees from other departments on performance issues using diplomatic disagreement. The other skill is learning and applying mutual coaching techniques.


In the video I give an example of a situation that happened with a client.