Blueprints are essential in Chip Reid’s business.
But the CEO of Current Builders has taken the planning aspect beyond construction and applied it to the direction of his company, guiding his 250 employees with a strong vision that they helped create.
The general contracting and construction management company underwent its first strategic planning session in 2005. Reid then revisited the plan in 2008, revamping the process, minus the mistakes of the first round.
After surveying employees and customers to gauge the company’s strengths and weaknesses, Reid set up five committees to tackle the goals for the next five years.
“The goals that we set within our company are really employee-driven,” says Reid, whose company posted 2007 revenue of $125 million. “The employees have to embrace the goals that we establish because if they don’t, then sometimes we may set goals that are not achievable and not for the common cause.”
Smart Business spoke with Reid about how to empower your employees to pick up the planning process and run with it.
Build a bigger committee. Initially, we only had six to eight people in it. You’re trying to come back and address 150, 250 with what your plan is, and it’s harder for them to get buy-in into it.
So what we elected to do this time … is we brought about 25 people into the strategic planning process. It’s a lot easier then to get the buy-in by these upper- and middle-level managers who are going to be facilitating the plan when they actually participated in the process.
I think setting too many goals would be a mistake and setting goals without the consensus of the people that are going to do the heavy lifting. A lot of times, the people that do all the heavy lifting in this plan are not the people that create the plan; it’s the people that manage it and execute it. If they don’t buy in to it and they weren’t part of the process of setting it, then it’s very difficult.
We found this out through our mistake of the first strategic plan. We didn’t have enough people involved in it, and getting the message out and getting the buy-in was much, much more difficult. And as a result, some of the committees failed.
