10 Critical Errors to Avoid with Your Strategic Plan.

The beginning of the year is a great time for re-thinking your organisation's strategy. Come February most plans have already failed.

Successful strategic planning requires the avoidance of critical common mistakes that we all make over and over again.

Here are 10 pitfalls you must avoid in order to successfully execute your strategic plan.

1. Commitment from Everyone

It’s in everyone’s best interest to have a strategy but it is crucial to get buy-in from right through the organisation. Without a shared vision and commitment, even the best strategy is unlikely to succeed.

2. Not Getting the Right People Involved

Anyone who is crucial to setting forth the company's vision as well as those responsible for carrying it out should be involved. This ensures team commitment and helps resolve stumbling blocks early.

3. Failing to Focus on the Big Picture

What is your vision? Strategic planning is intended to focus on high-level thinking. Is the vision clearly defined? Make sure to give priority to those major issues critical to the organisation's success.

4. Assessing your Starting Point

Where are you now? It's easy to see yourselves as you want to be seen, our how you hope thinks will turn out in the future but you must get real. It is absolutely crucial to make an honest assessment of internal and external issues as they exist today. This may even involve bringing in one or more third parties. But without an accurate assessment of where you are, your strategic plan will be flawed. It’s just like planning a road trip.

5. Failure to Account for Continual Change

Both inside and outside of an organisation things are always changing, requiring you to constantly make assessments of how it affects you. Management teams must be fully aware of these forces and assess how they affect the market, your organisation, your customers, and your future.

6. Unwillingness to Change

Change is inevitable. Successful leaders must be nimble and ready to adjust with change, rather than fight against it--or even worse, ignore it. A good plan today may no longer apply tomorrow.

7. Failure to Set SMART Goals

A good strategic plan sets forth a vision, but also provides a working framework within it. Make sure that goals and milestones are set, and develop a timeframe for achieving them.

8. Failure to Put the Plan into Action

If you don't put your plan into action, then you are just wasting time. As Zig Ziglar said, "You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win and expect to win." Take action every minute on the things that matter.

9. Lack of Accountability

Putting the plan into action is only the beginning. If it isn’t measured it generally doesn’t get done. It's pretty simple. If no one is held accountable, nothing gets done. To make sure things get done, assign areas of accountability to specific people. Share the plan openly with the entire team, so all members are openly held accountable.

10. Failure to Monitor and Follow Through

Set regular intervals for formal review of the strategic plan and action items. Most strategic planning experts suggest this be done at least on a quarterly basis.

Start Now

If you don't have a strategic plan, or if you have one that isn't working for you, now is the time to get on track. And one last thought, does it include a Communication Strategy?