Planning for Results
Stephen Covey’s first habit of highly successful people, “begin with the end in mind”, also applies to organizations. The purpose of strategic planning is to articulate goals for the organization for the next one to five years. These goals define what the organization is expected to achieve by the specified dates.
Setting such specific goals is a key aspect of the board’s responsibility to direct the organization. Effective directors are proactive about generating ideas for organizational progress. They develop specific and time-bound goals that state very clearly “what” the organization is expected to accomplish. Then the board asks the staff to develop an operational plan indicating “how” the desired results will be achieved. The operational plan outlines the action steps or tactics that will be completed to get the desired results.
Too often board members are happy to let the staff who work for the organization many more hours per week develop the strategic plan, and then the board members simply rubber stamp the staff proposal. Such board members are abdicating their leadership responsibility. Often people who are close to the day-to-day work of the organization get caught up in choosing the right tree, even though they might be in the wrong forest. Board members who bring an industry or community perspective that is much broader than just one organization can see if the organization has been working in the wrong forest and direct major course corrections. Engaging board members to determine the big picture “whats” is an essential part of board governance.
Rather than doing the hard mental work of big picture thinking many boards spend most of their time on more familiar operational matters, deciding the “hows” of getting some job done. In the organization in which the board members are employed full-time they focus on how to do their work and develop great skills in that arena. They then exercise these great operational skills at a board meeting, forgetting to change hats when they step into a different position. They cause role confusion by encouraging staff to do the higher level work of defining the what results the organization should achieve, and allowing decisions about how the work will be done to consume board meeting time. Organizational success is accelerated when part-time board members focus on big picture thinking to state the desired results and delegate implementation decisions to full-time operational experts.
