I am too busy to implement my strategic plan. Help!

We have a strategy and an annual plan, but we always seem to be so busy getting on with the nuts and bolts of the business that we don’t seem to be making any headway with implementing it.

One of the most common dilemmas, concerns, grumbles – call it what you will – of CEOs is that employees are so busy working on the daily-do of the business that the “stuff” that needs to be accomplished, to actually push the business forward, never seems to get done.

I was reminded of this yesterday when the frustated CEO of a medium sized manufacturing business was saying that despite having spent a significant amount of management time developing a five year strategy and a one year plan, the team had pretty much spent the past financial year doing the same as they had the year before.

Planning time was coming around again and he wanted to be sure that this year the business actually made some headway.

Here are some of my suggestions:

• Split the annual plan into quarterly plans together with quarterly goals and quarterly priorities. The quarterly priorities are the key initiatives you are going to work on that quarter.

• Allow your business only three quarterly priorities; a maximum of five if you really can’t whittle them down. Granted, limiting the priorities down to three is not easy, but the process of choosing the three will ensure your business is focusing on the right things.

• Pick a top priority, the number one initiative that gets done no matter what. Yes, it’s tough to pick just one but the very act of making such a decision will underpin your success.

• Hold one person accountable for each priorty. Often a management team will decide that more than one person is “accountable” for a priority; it doesn’t work – when more than one person is accountable, no-one is.

• It’s often worth reminding your management team that accountability for a priority doesn’t mean delivering it singlehandedly, but rather assembling and leading a team to get it done.

• For obvious reasons, such as time and enthusiasm, don’t let any one individual be accountable for more than one priority per quarter. In my experience, for every member of the management team who shirks priority-accountability there is another who feels compelled to do everything.

• Not a hard and fast rule, but where possible avoid the CEO having a priority-accountability; let her/him concentrate on steering the ship rather than drive it.

• Hold a quarterly meeting for the whole of your company and use it to explain the priorites for the quarter. Remember to keep the message simple – it will only work if everyone understands it. And make this meeting fun too, celebrate the previous quarter’s achievements, and generally make it something that employees look forward too.

Businesses that are growing rarely, if ever, have too few opportunities. Businesses that grow profitably know that deciding which of these opportunities to pursue, and sticking to that choice, is the key to success.

That’s not to say you can’t tinker with new ideas, you can, provided the quarterly priorities get done first!

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses.  Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).

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