On Tuesday we talked about the process of picking out what’s most important for you to accomplish in a day, or a week, and blocking time on your calendar to do it. Did you know you can use a similar process to keep your whole business focused on the most critical challenges you face?

When we do it for our personal calendar it’s called planning your ideal week, when we do it for the company, it’s called Strategic Planning. 

What is strategic planning?

I feel like people get intimidated by the concept of strategic planning, but it’s a pretty simple process. 

The goal of strategic planning is to get your whole team (or at least your management team) to look at what is going on inside and outside your business, so that you can formulate a point of view about what’s going to happen in the next year. Then you make a plan to position your business to do the few things that need to be done in order to be ready for THAT (whatever that is).

The process

To do that, you need to consider all the pressures, ideas, and innovations that are in your team’s head all at once — so that you can compare them and set reasonable priorities. There are always more good ideas than we can execute on, and your team is likely already thinking about how to improve their department’s performance in the coming year. By getting everyone together, you can come to a consensus about what the 3 – 5 most important initiatives are that the company is committed to accomplishing.

Without this agreement, your team members would self-select their own priorities, go off in different directions, and growth of your business is compromised. 

The result

If you get everyone together, you can decide, together, what you are NOT going to do. You put to bed everyone’s “pet projects” and instead focus everyone’s efforts on pursuing the few most critical priorities. 

Focusing on fewer things makes it more likely that you will get them done (Not half done. Not started and stalled out. DONE).

If you want to get a copy of the exact process that I use with clients to gain that clarity and focus for a whole team, you can download it here. If you want help with the process, hit reply, and we can talk about working together on it!