Involve others
To create an effective plan, you also need to involve people outside of the executive suite.
At Chromalox, there is a four-year growth plan and a four-year operational plan that the company refreshes every year. It goes over what worked, what didn’t work and what needs to change due to internal or external forces.
Dysert involves the top couple of layers of management in the process to get their input and to spread the word down throughout the organization.
“We try not to do the work ourselves,” he says. “We try to build consensus and buy-in by asking a larger group of people to develop those plans.
“What you get when you develop a plan that way — it takes longer and it’s harder to do it like that, but when you’re done, you have a plan that has a richer perspective and it has more buy-in from people who actually are going to do the work.”
The manager can explain that part of the process and why the company is taking a certain action or why a goal is set at a certain level.
When managers become involved in the planning, they have to show how their department is doing to help reach the company’s goals.
“We say, ‘If we’re going to accomplish these four-year plans, what do we need to get done this year? Let’s put these objectives together in a way that is specific, that is measurable, it’s actionable and it has a time frame to it.’ That’s what we use to develop the objectives for our various departments throughout the company,” he says.
For example, if the company wants to take cost out of their products, the engineering department has to give input on how they are going to contribute.
“We can find $500,000 worth of savings by re-engineering these two products to use less steel in a particular application,” he says. “So, that engineering department would have that goal to save $500,000, and then an individual who’s in that engineering group would have a goal because he is working on one of those products and that product has to save $200,000. So, that is in his objective to save $200,000 for that product, but it ties all the way back to the four-year plan.”
It’s vital to get others involved in the planning and goal-setting process, because it now empowers your managers t
o help the front-line workers understand why the company is doing something.
“That goes a long way toward helping the broader population understand what you are trying to accomplish because, chances are, there’s a manager who’s been part of this process who down the road encounters questions from people who are doing the day-to-day work,” he says.
