Strategy Planning Gone Wrong: What To Avoid During Your Strategic Planning
Every nonprofit, startup and small business needs a plan. That seems like common sense, and in fact, it is common sense among most professionals. Yet, there is a difference between a quick meeting out of the blue that turns into a long unstructured brainstorming session, and a structured three-part strategic planning session among stakeholders that provides valuable year-long insight.
Maybe you are one of the lucky individuals that has sat in on the strategic planning session. Or this could be your first opportunity. Either way, here are all too common pitfalls of strategic planning and strategic leadership that we have noticed in our years of nonprofit consulting.
Too many cooks in the kitchen.
If you end up in a strategy session and you see that everyone from your mid-size nonprofit has been invited, get ready for a long and arduous battle. The key to a strong strategy is to have a variety of voices from all aspects (marketing, development, volunteerism, leadership, HR) but too many voices bring in too many differing agendas, and oftentimes nothing can be accomplished with setting goals. Chose your team wisely.
You didn’t prioritize your objectives.
If the meeting starts with a rough outline and starts to saunter off into chaos, you’ve entered the realm of poor planning. You need to prioritize what objectives you want to accomplish with each session. You need goals for outlining your goals. Goals on top of goals on top of goals. It’s a “goals all the way down” situation--within reason. Make sure that each strategy session has focus. Maybe the first one is to establish board member maintenance or to fill out your organizational history and capacity worksheets. (Our Strategic Planning Toolkit can organize this for you.) Go in with clarity, leave with insight.
Developed a strategic plan but didn’t share it with the right people.
So maybe you developed a wonderfully articulate and detailed strategic plan, and then you shelved it. Maybe it was passed around to staff members maybe it was emailed to some board members. Your strategic plan is a marketing tool! You want to share with stakeholders, potential board members, any foundation contacts, and of course staff members. Sharing this could open up windows in terms of in-kind donations, funding, resources, and valuable feedback. Your finished product is going to be your compass for filling out grants and even establishing your strategic leadership among other small businesses.
Mismanagement of the Plan.
We see this happen during our nonprofit consulting for strategic planning: burnout and mismanagement. Smaller nonprofits-think teams of two people-look over all the work and planning sections that they need to fill out, and they think it does not apply to them. “There’s no reason to fill out a board profile if we do not have a board”. First off, you probably have an advisory board and do not realize it. People who offer advice or guidance off to the side. Filling out each section of your strategic plan is vital for setting not only the tone of your organization but also in establishing goals. Maybe you don’t have a board, but fill out a profile for potential board members. Or advisors. Start to visualize through paperwork-yay!-what your nonprofit is going to look like within 1-2 years.
There’s also burnout from strategy meetings. At the first meeting, you might have your entire leadership team, the board, and a perfect balance of stakeholders. The meeting goes for two hours. People are tired of brainstorming, and people grow tired of bagels and coffee. The next meeting is set for a few weeks later. Half the people show up this time. Welcome to burn out. This is why it’s important to schedule your meetings within a timeframe so that people don’t, 1). Forget what was discussed, 2). Get too busy, 3). Have time to back out of what they didn’t realize was a larger commitment. Make sure that you address these barriers in the first meeting. Being a part of the inner strategy circle takes commitment and as long as you make everyone aware of expectations, you are mitigating potential burnout. Also, be able to convey and get everyone on board with the idea of the strategic plan being a “living document”. You might put in a majority of the work while creating the plan, but throughout the year you will need to revisit the work and revise. You and your team have created this logistical and goal-oriented baby, you simply can’t dump it off somewhere and forget about it.
This living document takes time, resources, and the brainpower and expertise of many. It is always a large undertaking and usually an aspect that many people want to avoid because of the impending workload. That’s why we created a toolkit with worksheets to help organize and plan out what your strategic planning session should look like. We go from the start (organizational history and mission statements) to finish (capacity of your nonprofit and a completed strategic plan document). This toolkit covers board member profiles, mission statements vs vision statements, goal timelines, S.M.A.R.T.E.R goal setting, and much more through guided instruction. We highly recommend it for those entering into their first strategic planning session and for anyone seeking a bit of a shortcut into pre-production of their strategic planning meeting.