Strategic Planning - Look at the Forest, Not the Trees!

And you may want to say, well, Mark, what is looking at the forest versus looking at the trees actually has to do with HR? Well, let me spend a couple of minutes talking through that with you. When you walk in the forest or a national park, or maybe a local park in your area, what do you really focus on?

Most of the time when you're sitting there and the ground level, you're really focusing on the trees, perhaps the shrubs, you may be looking at different , uh , wild flowers that are in the area. Perhaps you even have the pleasure of having a Creek or a, a brick in the area that you're listening to and watching.

But what would happen if you actually, instead of looking just at the immediate landscape that you can see , uh, over, you know, over the first couple of hundred feet of your walk, what if you actually send a drone up in the air and you'll look at the same forest from about to 500 feet or a thousand feet or 2000 feet, what do you think you'd see then you're going to actually see something very, very different.

Aren't you, even though you're looking at the same forest, you're going to see something from a very, very different perspective. It's similar for most, you know, when you think about most business owners or CEOs of, or middle market sized companies, where do they focus?

Most of their time, they focus their attention on their daily, weekly, and perhaps monthly tasks and quite often, and several of the clients that I work with or have worked with in the past, they really focus on the fire of the day. So one of the best things they do is actually where their fire had to work every day.

And a lot of times by eight 30 or nine o'clock in the morning, guess what their agenda and the strategy, and maybe focusing on business development for that day is thrown out the window or they're focusing on the next crisis of the day. So when you think about that, it's really, really critical that organizations span.

It doesn't matter what size the organization is, whether it has 20 people or 200 people or 2000 spending some of the time, at least 10 to 20% of a CEO's times has to be focused on working on the business versus working in the business. Because I would guarantee you that most of the owners I work with their spouse , their focus is working in the business and actually not working on the business.

So when you think about that, one of the key things that I try to do with my clients is focus on at least once a year, whether it's usually it's at the latter part of the year, maybe November, December, or sometime the early part of January, focus on doing a strategic planning session with them. And this doesn't have to be something that is a long drawn out, you know, week long week-long session with a hundred people in the room.

This can be something very, very simple and all depending on the size of the company that you're working with. But when you're thinking about it, the key thing is, first of all, who needs to be in the room, you've got to have your key leadership team there.

Of course, the other thing you probably want to do is have some, perhaps outside key influencers, maybe there's people that have an advisory group, or you have a board of directors, but actually working with them to actually create , um, sit down with and , and , uh , with you. And these are the people that are actually going to think differently than you, because you don't want people who are just going to agree with your point of view.

You actually want people who are going to be thinking very differently from you. And that's why sometimes having some outsiders, like maybe even your banker, or if you have a CPA or a CPA firm that you work with, or other organizations that you work with externally, having them invited to , because they're going to have a very different perspective and they may be bringing more of that strategic look where they're looking at the forest versus looking at the trees of the business.

One of the key things you have to there to do too , is really focused on from a strategic perspective, focus on your classic SWAT analysis. And I think all of you probably know that, well, if not just a short recap on that, you know, SWOT strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So strengths weaknesses are internal. So what are the strengths and weaknesses of your actual business and the opportunities and threats are actually external.

And that's something that has been done classically for decades within large organizations. And it's one of those things I definitely would recommend you doing too .

When you think about it, all of us have room in our business to improve whether it's quality, whether it's trying to break into a new market, whether it's trying to bring in a new product or a product line within your business, perhaps it could be something as dramatic as making a major business transformation within your organization and on the opportunities and threats side, it could be looking at macro types of things, such as your competition. What are your competitors doing?

Who are your competitors , um, who are your top list of maybe your top 10 or 15 customers? And what is the makeup of those customers? Are they demanding something that you're, are they demanding a lot of things maybe that they're demanding today that they're not, they weren't asking four or five or 10 years ago, and how are you pivoting your business to be able to take care of their needs for tomorrow?

So, and then the other thing would be looking at from that perspective is what are the opportunities out there? Is there some sort of a technology opportunity that you should be imparting ?

Is there an opportunity to possibly, if your organization has gone through a tough challenge or there's been an economic downturn or something like that, are there opportunities to grow your business by perhaps picking up an , uh , a company that's had some tough times and picking them up by via an acquisition? So those are all types of things you need to be thinking about, even from a threat perspective, are there governmental changes are happening? Are there changes in taxation?

Is there going to be new political leadership? Those are all types of things you need to be thinking about. So, and again, today, even if you're running a small company of a hundred people and your revenue is about, let's say 20 million, $20 million in revenue annually, what are the influences internationally what's going on from , uh , you know, major competition such as maybe China or Russia or Brazil what's happening there. So those are key things you should do.

One of the other big things I would talk about, and I'd really , uh, you know, really challenge you to do is make sure you have somebody who's an outside external , uh, facilitator. Who's helping you actually run your strategic planning session, because if you, as the CEO or a business leader within the company tries to run it, guess what? You're going to have some natural bias like it or not.

You're going to bring your biases around the business or on the business that are going to be infused in that strategy session. So, and , and if you don't have somebody who is an objective, third-party coming into do that session for you, there's a good chance. You know, if you're staring things in a certain way, even if you don't think you are, you probably are, and that's not going to be giving you an optimum outcome regarding what you want to get out of that strategy session.

The key thing you want to wind up with out of that strategy session is a number of goals. Probably no more than 10. I'd recommend somewhere closer to three to seven key growth goals that you want to implement for the next , uh, for the next year or the next fiscal year for you. And then you also want to be looking at assigning stakeholders as to who would be the owners of actually those different , uh , major initiatives within your business.

So assign ownership have at least maybe three, no more than seven key priorities or strategies or initiatives assign owners. And then look at putting together a , having each of those owners or stakeholders, then be able to put together a detailed timeline after your strategic planning session that you can go ahead and actually implement for that year. And I will guarantee you that will give you a much success, a much more successful than focused year than perhaps you've had in the past.

If you just take a day or possibly even just a half day to do that within your organization, at least on an annual and possibly in a quarter The basis. Thanks for much , uh , so much for listening, I guess that covers it for today. For more things pertaining to HR, visit HRcatalystconsulting.com. And don't forget to like us subscribe to our podcast until next time. This is Mark Mitford. Thanks for listening. Take care.