Planning and Goal Setting: Why, What, and How
Get your year off to a great start
Setting goals and making plans for the year isn’t just a fun excuse to go out for a coffee with your leadership team in January. For business owners, planning has a purpose. Failing to plan brings risk and lost opportunities.
Planning can help you to stay recession-ready, sharpen your edge, and help you to create the type of company you want to work for. We are answering questions about what you should include in planning sessions, why it’s so important, and what you stand to gain from solid strategy and defined goals.
What should my plans and goals cover?
An effective and encouraging planning meeting needs a bit of direction—as well as room for dreaming and creativity. Here are a few of the areas you should be prepared to consider and plan for:
- Overall strategy
- Budgets
- Risks and risk management
- Continuity
- People planning
1. Resourcing
2. Training and development
- Milestones (and celebrating them!)
- Optimising daily schedules and routine tasks
- Brainstorming and reviews
Each business will have specific needs and categories within these broad areas, but these are the building blocks that will form the foundation of your strategizing. We blogged last month about how you can conduct a simple and practical end-of-year review or assessment for your business, and the results will highlight focus areas for your planning. Alternatively, you can use a service like our ScoreCard assessment to get prepped and identify areas that need work.
What do I risk by NOT making plans?
More than you might think! If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always get—bad news for businesses wanting to grow, survive a recession, or adapt to a changing market.
We understand that it’s difficult, time-consuming, and even draining to sit down, make plans, and set goals for the year. However, when you fail to plan, you risk missing important opportunities or being unable to jump on them should they present themselves. Without a roadmap in place to help you navigate bumps, your leadership is likely to become reactive and you will be on the back foot rather than one step ahead of the game.
There’s more—you may not be getting the most out of your people when flying by the seat of your pants. A plan and goals provide a benchmark to measure against, opportunities to celebrate milestones and create a positive culture, and challenges that can stretch and grow teams. You are risking your ability to use your human resources to their fullest capacity and potential.
What do I stand to gain by making them?
First, it bears mentioning that any plan you make for the year should be fluid and not absolute. A strong organisation can roll with the punches and adapt to new opportunities and pressures. Your strategy should equip you, not restrict you. With a good plan in place—and effective implementation of it—you stand to grow and improve your bottom line. Research has shown strategic planning to positively affect firm performance, and our experience has certainly shown this to be true.
A good plan, well implemented, will also become business as usual as you progress through the year. New habits and processes will become part of your daily routines.
- A plan should help you to navigate the year with a feeling of clarity; knowing what you should be doing to achieve your goals.
- A good plan should also offer transparency to your team, giving them a sense of where you (as a whole organisation) are headed and why. 67% of employees do not understand their role when new growth initiatives are launched.
- A good plan will set your team up well. We often talk about getting the right people in the right seats as a basis for success. And it’s true! However, long-term success requires more: the right resourcing and the right support for those people. With a plan in place, you can equip your people effectively and deploy them in the best way possible.
Check out these case studies to get an idea of how strategic planning has created positive outcomes for our real client companies:
IDENTIFYING OPTIONS, OPPORTUNITIES, AND RISKS
As a side note: did you know that healthy conflict—that is, debate, disagreement, and robust discussion—is good for engagement and a positive culture? And that, as Gallup reports, there is a powerful relationship between engagement and performance? Having plans and goals for your organisation may create some conflict and friction in your teams. But if you can keep it healthy and productive, this might improve relationships, engagement, and the flow of ideas. Check out this blog post by Chron for more.
Top tips for mapping out your year
So we know that planning and goal-setting are beneficial in theory, but what happens when it comes time to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and start making real plans? Here are a few practical pointers.
- Plug in the non-negotiables on your calendar, because you’ll need to plan around and for them. This might include events, holidays, tasks, audits, and anything else that will be happening whether you are ready or not.
- Consider the training needs of your team members, and prioritise those by allocating time and resources early on in the process.
- Consider and agree on routine and daily schedules. Decide what days will look like; who will do what and when.
- Consider any gaps identified in your end-of-year assessment/review, or any issues and intentions that have carried over from the previous year. Decide how you will address them, and incorporate that into your plan.
- Think about the budget and/or resourcing required for any new initiatives.
A quick note on implementation
While we aren’t delving too deeply into the implementation of your plans in this article, it’s a crucial component. Statistics show that “67% of well-formed strategies fail due to poor execution”, and that “80% of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy but only 44% feel they are good at implementation”.
We’ll discuss this more in-depth next month, with ideas for how you can turn plans into reality in your business.
We wish you a fantastic new year—and with a plan in place, it’s much more likely that you’ll have one! Take a look at the array of services Emendas provides to help you identify strengths and weaknesses, plan effectively, create great teams, and put your best intentions into practice.