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A Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up

Written by: Michael Shays

Article Overview: How do you craft a strategic plan that becomes an integral part of business as usual? You build the plan from the bottom of the organization to meet the focus from the top.

A Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up

A Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up
E. Michael Shays

Most efforts to develop a strategic plan come top down. Unfortunately, most top down strategic plans are paper tigers, especially where the implementation of the plan falls on the shoulders of middle management. Getting buy-in for a strategic plan is generally easy. The plan is somewhere at the 50,000 foot level and the time frame runs far enough into the future that middle management can continue to operate in their comfort zone for now. It is when you need to get buy-in for the operational goals that launch the plan that commitment is thin.

There is s certain truth about commitment. If one assigns a project to a particularly competent person and that project runs into more than its share of challenges, that project leader is apt to declare the project unworkable. There is a large company in Silicon Valley that is notorious for starting projects that never make it across the finish line. On the other hand, let a person self-select a project to lead, and he or she will persist in finding ways around every problem until the task is done.

Put it another way, no matter how great an idea is conceived, and how carefully crafted is the implementation, if people don’t like it, the idea will fail. Yet, no matter how poorly an idea is conceived and implemented, if people like it, they will find a way to make it work.

The partners of a professional firm of 40 managers and staff recognized that they needed a solid strategic focus. They had grown past the point where they could lead the firm from notes on the back of an envelope or in the heads of the partners. Their talk about creating a strategic plan, however, met with skepticism from the middle managers. “Done that, been there, never happened, here we go again,” were heard.

So instead of creating a full board top down plan for the staff to implement, the partners described only a strategic focus, a direction to point the firm. Then they invited others in their organization to identify what kinds of efforts would be needed to move in that direction. They came up with nineteen issues which were distributed to the entire staff.

Two weeks later the entire staff was invited to an all-day workshop to discuss these issues. Attendance was entirely voluntary. There was no judgment levied on those who chose not to attend. Twenty-one of the staff showed up. The group included people from all departments and of all rank from partner to the receptionist and an intern.

After a discussion setting the theme and the process for the day, the participants were asked to go to the front of the room and sign up to contribute to three to five of the 19 issues that they felt were most important. Some sheets had as many as eleven names, some only two. Whatever the number, those names represented the right people because they were all self-selected. If only two people were interested in a particular issue, then they were the ones who should address it. It wouldn’t serve to have anyone added to the team who was not truly interested in the issue.

During the day there were three sessions of 90 minutes each where participants went to three to five discussion groups to define specific goals for their issues complete with benchmarks and due dates. In addition they identified potential barriers that could inhibit success. Each group selected its own moderator and a recorder. The energy was high because these participants believed they could make a difference in an area important to them.

At the end of each ninety minute session the groups convened in a circle to report their findings and elicit feedback from the whole assembly. There was always a self-selected “champion” identified to lead the effort at the conclusion if their report. The pleasant surprise was that these champions included staff below the management level and surfaced potential future leaders of the firm.

The reports were typed, printed and distributed to the entire staff of the firm, including to those who did not attend the workshop. Several of those who did not attend volunteered to join a working task force. There was no more talk of “Been there, here we go again.”

Once back at work those who rose to the occasion to define the launch of a strategic plan kept to their commitments. The plan was truly defined bottom-up by people who cared. It was not necessary to get buy-in because it was their effort all along.


* * *

E. MICHAEL SHAYS CMC (ems@emsnetwork.com) is President of EMS Network, International, an association of senior consultants helping clients faced with conflict, transition, stagnation, and management dilemmas.

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Article Tags: implementation, middle management, project leader, strategic plans



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