It’s business planning season, which hopefully means you and your team will soon be reviewing recent performance, outlining future initiatives, creating budgets, and listing new hires. While leaders want to build a plan that provides clarity and specificity, the plan should also be so energizing and compelling that our teams want to implement it. It must also contain clear accountabilities, so there’s no confusion about who does what.
Today, we’re going to learn a blindspot or two in the annual business planning process and receive tips on how to overcome them. In this episode, we’ll discuss why most strategic and annual plans fail — and what to do about it. Our guest is Michael Hyatt, bestselling author and CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company, which specializes in leadership development.
The most common reason strategic and annual plans fail is organizations are too stuck in the day-to-day work to pause, look ahead, and plan for the future. Leaders also hesitate to plan because they’re waiting until they feel confident about how to do it and what they want in the plan. However, as Michael reminded us in the episode, courage precedes confidence, so leaders must act in spite of fear. Lastly, strategic and annual plans fail because they’re quickly turned into relics as they’re placed on shelves or hidden on hard drives, never to be looked at again.
It’s hard to build a plan for an unknown goal just like it’s hard to specify directions to an unclear destination. This is why Michael tells us that vision is the first and most important part of your strategic plan. Together, your vision and strategy collectively represent what most call a strategic or annual business plan. The vision defines where we’re going, and the strategy articulates how we’ll get there.
Remember, Michael encourages us to go beyond a vision statement to develop a Vision Script so we have the details needed to build a plan. A Vision Script is a three- to five-page written document outlining a clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive picture of your organization’s future, including the four major components of your organization — team, product, marketing, and impact.
You won’t develop your vision or strategic plan until you’ve scheduled time on your calendar to do it. Michael personally spends one day per year working on the vision for his company and a week per year working with his team on the strategic plan. Book the appointment, communicate it to your team, ask for any information you’ll need on hand, and maximize your time by reading Michael’s book, The Vision Driven Leader before your vision development session.
If our plans don’t show up in our planners, strategic planning will feel like a waste of time. To develop and activate your vision and strategic plan, Michael recommends taking the following steps:
While these steps will conclude the development of your strategic plan, you’ll now need to align your team to empower them to execute. You can do this by completing a few additional steps, namely communicating the vision to the entire team and transforming annual goals into quarterly goals, weekly priorities, and daily actions.
Michael Hyatt’s, Vision Building Starter Kit is a bundle featuring some of Michael’s best, free resources related to developing your vision, such as:
With a purchase of Michael’s book, The Vision Driven Leader, you’ll also receive:
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