Leading with Strategy

37Humanizing Action Planning: Bridging the Doing Plan and the Being Plan

Most organizations treat action planning as a technical process, a means to assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and define deliverables. It's where strategy execution gets mapped out, often in tidy columns and color‐coded charts. But something crucial is usually missing from that picture.

If culture is how we do things here, then why are most action plans silent on how people will show up as leaders, as teammates, as humans?

The Flawed Divide: Strategy Versus Culture

I once sat in a strategy session where a senior executive leaned back in his chair and declared, “Leaders deal with the hard stuff, products, services, innovation. Human relations? That's the fluffy side.”

I wish I could say that was an anomaly.

Too often, people‐ and culture‐related goals are handed off to HR while “real strategy” moves forward elsewhere. The problem with this split is simple: Execution doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens through people. And how people collaborate, lead, and behave is what makes or breaks execution.

This false divide—strategy as rational, culture as emotional—is exactly what we need to challenge. And this is where we need a shift in how we think about action planning itself.

Rethinking the Purpose of Action Planning

The core purpose of an action plan is to realize strategic objectives. These ...