Our strategic planning session is all but forgotten. Help!

We did a strategic planning session six months ago and were all very up beat about it. Now though it is largely forgotten. What should we do?

There are two favourite times for businesses to conduct strategic planning sessions – in June prior to the start of the new financial year and in December prior to the new calendar year.

And there are two favourite times for businesses to notice that their strategic plan has lapsed; in June when ‘calendar year ‘ planners find themselves reminded of it by the strategy-day talk of ‘financial year’ planners and in December when the rest of us get swamped by the media’s obsession with planning and goals for the year ahead.

Strategy days are fantastic, they fill the team with excitement, possibility and energy and fill the business with fresh ideas and activity. But within a month of the strategy-day there is a tendency for the management team to revert to focusing on just the operational issues, after all these always feel more urgent.

A good way to help keep the management team focused on the strategy of the business is to set aside a monthly meeting in which only strategic matters are discussed.

Ideally this meeting last for about two hours and is non-negotiable, everyone in the management team must attend. The format of the meeting is that progress on each of the company’s core strategies is discussed for about half the meeting and the remainder of the meeting is set aside for an in-depth review of progress on one of the core strategies.

This meeting schedule works particularly well when each core strategy has a single ‘owner’ in the management team. The ‘owner’ is accountable for the progress on projects underway within the strategy and reports back to the management team at the meeting. The ‘owner’ needn’t be responsible for, or the champion of, the project, but because they are accountable for its progress, and because they have to report back to the rest of the team, you can be sure they will make it happen!

If you want to make your management team even more accountable then try bringing in an external person to the meeting as a type of ‘chairman’. For teams that are very forgiving of each other’s shortcomings (in terms of getting things done) the presence of an external party raises the stakes.

So if you did your strategic plan back in June and it is now languishing in a drawer you have just enough time to dust it off and organise your first monthly strategy meeting before Christmas. What a great way to set yourself up for a new look 2010.

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Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).