Dan Schneider

How to Make Your Succession Plan Useful
January 15, 2008

That famous person Anonymous once said “People don’t plan to fail. They fail to plan. And, once they do, they fail to execute.” 

Most business people understand the benefit and often go through all the steps of a potentially successful planning process. Still, business offices around the world are filled with SPOTS – Strategic Plans on the Top Shelf. So, what’s really going on here? Why don’t people plan in the first place? Why don’t they implement the plan once they have it?

There are a variety of reasons. Probably the most common is people who have to implement the plan don’t see a connection between what the planners have put down on paper and what happens in the real world. They see the strategic plan as something that’s an “addition” to what they do rather than an integral part. In short, it’s more work; and, even worse, it doesn’t seem to be related to the results they are expected to produce. The plan and the real world are not in alignment.

There is a way to make the plan useful. And here are some suggestions you may want to follow.

• Keep the mission/vision/purpose simple. Many planning teams get carried away and leave the planning session with a politically correct document that says so much that, in reality, it says nothing. The mission/vision/purpose statement is not supposed to confuse. It’s supposed to motivate and inspire.

• As you write your values statement, use the present tense. Even though you’re planning for the future, your behavior occurs in the present. Help people keep their eyes on the prize by giving them a clear and present focus of behavioral and attitudinal expectations.

• As you begin the now historic SWOT analysis, don’t draw conclusions about what you need to do. That comes later in the process. The SWOT analysis should be simple, declarative sentences that state what is really going on in the present. It’s an opportunity to be brutally objective about your organization’s strengths, weaknesses (limitations, as we call them), opportunities, and threats. In effect, this business analysis helps you identify the benchmarks of your current performance and how it enables or impairs future performance.

• No matter what your business line, you have several strategies that you can follow to accomplish your goals. Prioritize your business strategies so that you optimize you resource utilization. By the way, your resources are people, time, and money.

• Set SMART objectives. Make them specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. If you have more than five to seven strategic objectives, you’ve probably included some operational objectives that are important but not necessarily strategic to the operation. 

• Write out some Integrated Action Plans that detail action steps, individual responsibility, due dates, resources available, and outcomes. These action plans should become part of every staff meeting so that people know they are important.

• Build your operating budget around the Strategic Plan. Most organizations budget before planning, and the budget then becomes the real plan. That’s backwards. Make the budget fit the plan. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish when you follow all the steps, in order.

Posted by Dan Schneider on January 15, 2008 | Comments (0)