Strategic Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 18. Ten Ways to Keep Your Strategic Plan from Hitting the Shelf

In This Chapter

• Making your strategic plan a living document

• Avoiding a strategic plan that gathers dust

More often than not, life and day‐to‐day operations take over a well‐intentioned strategic plan implementation. If the strategic plan is one more thing everyone has to do, it begins to feel like a burden instead of being exciting. By embedding your strategic planning into daily operations, completing items on your strategic plan becomes natural instead of something extra or something you pull off the bookshelf and review only when you happen to remember it's there. This chapter covers ten quick ways to keep your strategic plan from landing on the shelf and collecting dust.

Getting Everyone Involved from the Start

Make your organization's plan everyone's plan. Start by involving everyone on your staff from the start of the plan. If you only look to the folks at the top of your company, you're making a recipe for failure, because employees at all levels aren't only a wealth of information, but also they're the implementers of your plan. You need them to feel part of the planning process, even if they don't have a seat at the table.

As you read the chapters in this book, you find references to group exercises and employee feedback. Use this info to help develop a strategic plan that everyone feels part of, and assign every staff member a goal or objective. Then everyone has direct responsibility for achieving a piece ...