Ice Cold Leader

CHAPTER 20The Planning Process as a Leadership Tool

NOW THAT WE'VE GONE THROUGH THE ELEMENTS OF SMACCC and how to use them to make a plan that will succeed, let's discuss how the Planning Process, in conjunction with some behavioral guidelines, can be used as a leadership tool. The examples I'm going to provide are by no means the only examples of how SMACCC can be used as a leadership tool, but they are some of the most common I've come across and allow you to take the Art of the Planning Process, and your leadership effectiveness, to a whole new level.

Instilling Initiative and Autonomy: Hear the Plan First

Let's start with how SMACCC allows us to instill initiative and autonomy in our people while also giving us the ability to have a full situational awareness of the overall workflow. It's the leader's job to understand the overall Situation and set the Mission, as we discussed in the last chapter.

But once we have identified and communicated the Situation and Mission, we hand over the responsibility of how that Mission will be accomplished to our people. In other words, you tell your people the Mission, and they tell you how they are going to accomplish that Mission through Actions, Command, Contingencies, and Communication. It is as simple as that. Tell them what you want them to achieve and why you want them to achieve it, and then let them get to work to figure out how they are going to do it by focusing on the elements of SMACCC.

Empowering your people in this way ...