Should I keep my strategic plan confidential?

We have put together a great one page strategic plan, now some of the management team would like to let the staff have a copy. I’d like to keep it confidential. Help!

The most common recurring gripes that I hear from bosses about their employees can be distilled into two themes: employees making poor decisions and employees not being innovative.

You could be forgiven for thinking, when listening to some of the bosses, that employees set out to make wrong decisions and are deliberately holding back on their good ideas. But no, the vast majority of employees make decisions that they believe are right, but have misunderstood what’s important to the company. And many employees do come up with ideas that they think will be useful, but they go unnoticed by the boss who has dismissed them as irrelevant to the company’s direction.

In a past life I spent some time chairing an innovation council for a large business. One of the roles of the council was to review ideas submitted by employees and, if appropriate, give the ideas the go ahead for further development. Not infrequently the 10 people on the council would read an idea and say: “Eh? Does this person not know what business we are in?” No, believe it or not, often our employees didn’t have a good understanding of the business we were in.

Many management teams spend a huge amount of time thrashing out the foundations of a strategic plan (the purpose of the business, the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), the brand promise to name a few), set inspiring goals, determine actions and then… and then keep it to themselves.

The rationale for this, I am told, is confidentiality. “The boss doesn’t want the junior in accounts leaking this information”. Confidentiality? You mean, paranoia.

Compare the risk of your one page plan getting into the wrong hands to the benefit of having all your employees understand your business well enough to make good decisions and generate great ideas. The benefits are bound to outweigh the costs. And what if there is something particularly sensitive? Easy – take it out.

We can’t prescribe exactly how an employee should do their job, but we can give them the right information about the business so they can give it their best attempt. It’s the season of goodwill – share!

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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).