Create your plan
When it comes to creating a strategic plan, time is important. If
you look too far out, it’s easy to get sidetracked, but if you make it
too short, then you may find your team failing at the execution portion. Stropki and his team decided to do their planning in three-year intervals.
“It’s a compromise,” he says. “A lot of companies have five-year
strategic plans. You can’t look that far out. The markets are too
dynamic, and there are too many changes. You can have certain
things that you can recognize are five-year or 10-year kind of journeys, but you can’t quantify what you want to accomplish in those
time periods.”
Once you’ve decided on a time frame, then you have to look at what
you actually want to do during that time. There are a lot of different
projects and initiatives that your business could run with, so you
have to first decide what’s most important to focus on.
“What we tried to do is take a look at our organization and say,
‘Where are we strong? Where are we weak? Where can we
improve? What do we get from that improvement?’” Stropki says.
“There are a lot of things you can do or you can identify that can
be done, but you always have to make choices in regards to what
those priorities are and the amount of time and the resources that
you have and what gives the best return to shareholders.”
It’s crucial that you have a process that promotes people expressing their opinions and ideas.
“We recognize that, as a group, we succeed or fail,” he says. “In
order to be able to do that, all people’s opinions have to be
expressed in order to come to a consensus of where we should be
spending our time and energy.”
If you don’t allow everyone to share in the creation of the plan,
then ultimately they won’t buy in to it.
“If they don’t buy in to the plan, then how are they going to go
back to their constituents and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’
if they don’t believe in that on their own?” Stropki says.
He also notes that not every idea will be used, but every idea can
be heard. To get every idea, you have to include many people in the
debate.
“You’ve got to involve more people — not less people — because
you want to get the ideas of people, and you have got to get the
buy-in of people,” he says. “If people are handed a plan of which
they did not help create, they are not going to buy in as you want
them to buy in.”
This also requires getting a large cross section of the company
involved when you’re planning.
“That doesn’t mean you can involve everyone in the organization,” he says. “It’s not practical, but you have to rely on enough
people within the organization that they really have the breadth of
knowledge of the people, the markets, the dynamics that are going
to be important as far as the plan is concerned. It can’t be a person’s plan. It can’t be a few persons’ plan. It has to be enough of the
organization that you’re really capturing the thoughts and the
experience of the people that are going to make the plan work.”
For Lincoln Electric, each of the company’s five regions was represented in the planning process along with the corporate executives.
After they put the initial plan together, he sent each of the regional leaders back out into their respective parts of the world to get
more input from all of their people.
“They went back to their regions and said, ‘OK, with these elements, what do we need to do within our region to accomplish the
corporate objectives, which obviously have financial implication
associated with it, and what are we going to do to adapt this?’”
They collaboratively worked with each of their staffs to develop those specific initiatives to focus on in
order to accomplish the bigger strategy.
“Then they come back and presented it to
us and do some consulting and consolidating of the ideas to be sure that we feel we
can achieve the objectives, and that those
rolled up objectives are going to reach the
corporate objectives,” he says.
The number of people you need to
involve in the creation of a strategic plan
varies from business to business, but
Stropki offered some insight into how to
know if you were right after the fact.
“You know based on what you get as a
final plan,” he says. “You’ll see that when
you go to communicate that plan whether
people are enthusiastic about it. Most
importantly, you’ll know when you’re done
— did you accomplish what you set out to
accomplish? If you didn’t, chances are it’s
because you didn’t have the right information in the creation of the plan.”
