If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. Everyone knows that. The main reason leaders do not plan is that it seems like more work in an already busy environment. But the biggest danger in failing to plan is that your activities will be incongruent—and your valuable time will be wasted with activities that don’t move you toward your goals. You will be working very hard, but not accomplishing much.
Even when you have a plan, you can find that you are not implementing the plan. There are two major reasons for this failure:
Many CEOs feel like they are on a treadmill. They don’t dare stop or slow down because they are afraid they will be thrown from the machine. Your daily activities must be a part of the task; you must allow time each day to concentrate on developing and implementing your long term plans. To exit this treadmill, you must find a way to keep your current activities moving while also moving forward on the truly important items.
Some CEOs do not work their plan because they lose faith. Early on, they have a dream. Then things get bogged down. This plays out as they find they are working only on the daily activities, instead of the activity of “moving things forward”.
CEO’s are smart enough to refocus their activities and work on the long term plans, but many do not. They are simply working too hard and cannot see a way that they can do one more thing.
Real-life Example
Ryce owns a landscape company. She had great understanding of the overall business dynamics as well as the future direction of the industry. She knew, for example, that she had to add landscape design to overcome the lower-price competition of the small operations that were doing only the simple mowing and trimming tasks. These “value-added” services would dramatically change her business.
However, Ryce always seemed to be bogged down in the day-today details of the business. She was very slow in developing her plan to transform the business to meeting the new dynamics of her industry. Ryce suffered eroding margins, high employee turnover, and countless headaches before the pain of not following her plan forced her to refocus her activities. She eventually began to feel like she was not making the progress she should.
Fortunately, Ryce refocused and added landscape design and other higher value tasks in time and successfully re-charted the course of the business. She is now very successful.
Solution
Planning is a three tier pyramid. The power of the pyramid is in the top layer, which is vision and goals. The layer below is strategy. The lowest layer is the daily activities; these activities have the least potential to move your company forward, but consume most of your time. If you only work at the lowest level your company will never meet its potential.
These three levels must be worked together to be totally effective. Your daily activities may seem urgent, but some of the time you use for these MUST be redirected towards developing your strategy. You must work on developing and implementing the strategy that is needed to make your company’s vision or plan become a reality. When you are effective at this, you will get off of the treadmill and your company will grow.
This sound simple, but how can it be done when you are fighting your daily “fires”? You already know what your vision and goals are for the company. Write them down. This should only be a few key phrases. Then pick a few, key strategies necessary to accomplish your vision and write these down.
To make the time to do this, find some of your routine activities to delegate or stop doing altogether. Please do not rationalize that there are not any activities you can stop or that there is no one to delegate to. This is almost always untrue.
Now, with your new-found time, invest that time in activities that drive those key strategic initiatives. If you do so, you will see change: doing tasks only fixes today’s problems. Working on strategic items that fit your vision fixes problems permanently.
Bill Boyer is the President of CEO Focus, a coaching company for small company CEO’s. He can be reached at bboyer@ceofocus.com or 757-233-2577.
Planning and Implementation - To learn more about this author, visit Bill Boyer's Website.
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Bill Boyer
(Visit Bill's Website)
Bill Boyer has over 35 years experience
working with businesses, from small to
major international corporations with
extensive experience in operations,
distribution and finance.
Bill has held CEO, COO, CFO, and other VP
positions with Burlington Industries, The
Disston Company and Hickson PLC and other
corporations. He has also been an
individual coach/consultant with many
smaller corporations.
Bill holds a BS in Industrial Management
from the University of Richmond, and is a
graduate of executive programs at the
University of Virginia.
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