Continue improving
While you work on achieving the different
elements of your strategic plan, it’s important
to keep in mind that a plan isn’t static.
“It has to be tweaked and advanced as you
go through the process,” Stropki says. “You
have to have that kind of debate openly in
order to be able to do that.”
Sometimes you’ll have to make changes to
both your goals and metrics if the economy
enters a recession. On the other end, sometimes the markets are in your favor, so you
have to be more aggressive. Be mindful
though that sometimes you may think you’re
doing better than you really are if the market
is in your favor.
“You have to really be objective in looking
at the organization and recognize that sometimes you’ve been successful despite yourself, and the weaknesses that are inherited in
the organization are still there. … Don’t overlook the weaknesses or the opportunities
that you have, and really continue to stretch
the element of that.”
Lastly, as new things come up, you have to
be willing to commit additional resources
to those new plans.
“Be it people resources, facilities, funding,
whatever it happens to be, you have to be
prepared then to make those kinds of commitments or else the plan can’t succeed,”
Stropki says.
He and his team do a lot of work developing that along the way.
“You don’t want to give someone the challenge of doing a plan and then say, ‘By the way, there’s no resource here to make it
work,” he says.
Even if you allocate all the resources you
can and have the best-laid plans, you may
not accomplish everything that you set out
to do. Those places you didn’t achieve are
often good starting points for creating your
next plan.
“People, for example, you can’t build all the
people programs that you want to be the
number or quality or development … in three
years, so you continue to carry forward with
it, but you take a step back and always recognize where you were and where you have
yet to go,” Stropki says.
You should also start creating your next
plan before you finish your current one.
“There’s no real stop and finish,” Stropki
says. “Even before you’re done with this,
you formally start working about a year
before the existing plan expires. Even
when the old plan expires, you’re working
on the existing plan where you’re updating
it, tweaking it — it’s a continuous process.
The only period of time where you’re not
creating is right there in the middle — then
you’re in pure execution, and you’re really
driving, and you never stop executing, and
you never stop creating.”
He says that sometimes it can be a challenge to balance executing one plan while
creating another.
“The biggest challenge is focus and commitment on the time side,” Stropki says.
“These things take a lot of time. If it’s not
an urgent situation, it’s easy to put it off,
but again, that’s where the board accountability comes into place, and you’ve got
hard deadlines. If you have to present a
plan to the board, it should be done.”
As you look toward the future, try new
things to make sure your plan continues to
grow your business. When Stropki and his
team sat down to create the 2008-2010
plan, they brought in an outside facilitator
to help ensure they got some fresh ideas.
“We just thought it’d be a good idea to
have somebody come in and maybe he
could listen in a little different way than we
were listening and throw out some ideas in
which they had some experience in working with some other organization that we
didn’t have,” Stropki says.
No matter who’s involved or what you’re
brainstorming about, it’s also important to
make sure that as you create a plan for the
next phase and while you’re working on
the current plan that you do not settle with
what you’ve already achieved.
“You’ve got to continue to challenge yourself,” Stropki says. “We have a tendency
that the more successful we’ve been, the
more you take for granted, and you can’t
do that. The dose of reality you get out of that won’t be a very good dose.”
HOW TO REACH: Lincoln Electric Holdings Inc., (216) 481-8100 or www.lincolnelectric.com