Tag Archives: action plan

Whose Plan?

“You have a team meeting,” I describe. “Someone has to talk and it’s not you, because no one listens to you. So, who talks?”

“My team?” Gordon answered slowly.

“Yes,” I nodded. “You describe the essence of the vision and the performance Standards. The team sets out the action plan.”

“But my team may not know what steps to take and besides, it will take too long to get them all to agree,” Gordon protested.

I nodded and smiled. “I didn’t say that your team would get there quickly. Sometimes you have to go slow now, so you can go fast later. You need your team, involved, engaged, thinking, solving problems and making decisions. You are not going to get there by telling them what to do.”

Gordon was skeptical, “But, what if I am not getting what I want?”

“If you are not getting what you want, then you are asking the wrong questions.”

Goal Setting is Not the First Step

Miriam crept into the conference so as not to disturb the rest of the meeting. Everyone was working hard on their business plan for 2020. “I’m having a bit of trouble,” she said. “I know all the steps for the plan, but I am just stuck.”

“And, from our structured planning model, step one is what?” I asked.

“Step one is to create the vision for my department. And that was easy. I think I got it all captured in a couple of sentences. It’s the rest of the plan that I am having difficulty with.”

“Interesting,” I replied, “that you can capture that much detail in two sentences.”

“Well, you are right,” Miriam confessed. “There isn’t a lot of detail, but I thought it would be better if it was short.”

“Miriam, here is the way the vision part of the plan works. The more detailed it is, the clearer the images are, the easier it is to write the rest of the plan. Instead of two sentences, write two pages. I want to know who your customers are and what services you provide. You probably have more than one customer segment, tell me how they are different and how your services to each are different? Tell me what position you hold in the marketplace, what your market share is? Who are your competitors? Tell me what your competitive advantage is, what are your core competencies? Who are your key personnel, how do you find them, how do you grow them? Tell me about your facilities, your plant? How do you control quality? How do you guarantee performance?”

Miriam left the room with a bit of thinking to do. A couple of days later, I read her vision statement. It contained all the detail we talked about and more. The plan that followed was clear and detailed, all driven by a carefully constructed word picture of the future.

The first step in the plan is vision.
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Vision
Inventory of Current State
Goals
Action Plan
Resources (Budget)
Communication Plan
Follow-up Steps