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Annual Strategic Planning Ideas
updated 2 years, 9 months ago
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Hi everyone!
Every year our company does a strategic planning session to set goals for the upcoming year. The first few years we did it internally with SWOT analyses and similar activities. Then for the past two years we’ve used a local company to facilitate the event.
Now we’re looking to try something new. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Maybe something your company has done in the past, or maybe you’ve worked with some national facilitators that you’ve brought in to assist?
Looking for any and all ideas related to strategic planning and team building. Thank you!
-Jess
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Hi Jessica,
We do an annual offsite event and have each dept. head develop their own strategies that show how they contribute to the overall company goals.
For example, we have a company scorecard that lists 10 metrics that show if we are hitting our growth goals and that rolls down to our operations &, sales teams. They report on the same metrics but at their dept level. We then dive deeper and ask them to work with their teams to see if these are the correct metrics to be tracking and get their feedback. So by the time we get to the offsite with the executive teams, we have the buy in from the entire leadership team and their employees. I think it depends on the size of your company, ours is rather small, but we have found success in taking the metric route rather than the SWOT analysis route.
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We use OKRs as our guideline for creating goals (more on that linked here).
Our strategy sessions are always interactive and run by the whole team – we divide and conquer – so no one is running a monologue all day putting people to sleep.
Last year we did an exercise called “How, Now, WOW!”. The team (12 investment professionals) threw out any and every idea they could think of, be it a new investment idea, a technology need, staffing needs, research themes. We then organized those ideas into buckets of How, Now and WOW!.
- How: idea that will take more planning and organizing to implement; can we even implement it?
- Now: easy to implement now.
- WOW!: innovative or game changing idea that requires more thought and planning to implement.
After grouping all of our thoughts, we were able to identify common denominators and focuses for the year.
The team used these focus areas to come up with their own individual goals, to help achieve the team goals.
We make it a point each year to have our strategy session offsite to get out of a normal routine. We did the Nasher Sculpture Center one year, the Brain Performance Institute another year. I try to think outside the box when looking for venues and add an educational element into our day.
