As a long-term corporate executive, I’ve been involved in the generation of many strategic plans, and frankly, I’m a believer. Properly done, the strategic plan provides clarity and focus to an endeavor, and can be the basis to define meaningful measures and milestones to accurately measure progress towards success. More than once a strategic plan has allowed me to achieve much more than I initially thought possible and it is very satisfying to look back and say “Wow! We really did what we said we were going to.” So it’s no surprise that awhile back I started wondering why individuals didn’t create strategic plans for themselves, to help focus and guide them in achieving what they want out of life. And so I created one for myself. I’m not going to bore you with all of the details, although I will share some along the way as I lead you through the process for yourself. But I will say it produced marvelous results and I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. So I’d like to help you do the same. Creating a good strategic plan takes some time and effort, though, so I’m not going to cover it all in one post. Rather I will break it down into a few individual steps. This first one will focus on what a strategic plan will provide for you, what are the key elements, and what you need to do to complete the first one, The Mission.
First, let’s answer the key question: why bother? People typically don’t have difficulty filling their time. In fact, I noticed long ago that if you hired someone, but did not assign to them specific duties (or did not assign them sufficient duties to fully occupy their time), they would create activities to fill their time (like I’m doing now!). And, in fact, everyone does this. We will always create something to occupy our attention (even if it’s just staring at a computer or watching tv). However, the question is whether the activities we are doing are producing the outcomes we desire. Furthermore, when we are facing an important decision on whether to do something different (like take a new job or move to a new location), how do we know what’s the right thing to do? In fact, at an even more basic level, how do you know whether or not you’re successful? I’ve never met someone (yet) who told me they were a failure, but few seem happy with where they’re at and surely if you’re successful, you must be happy! A good strategic plan will help you with this. It will provide clarity on what you should be doing and whether or not what you’re doing is producing the results you desire. And it will allow you to measure how you’ve progressed and grown along the way.
So what goes in the strategic plan? It can be broken into 4 parts:
- The Mission – What you do.
- The Vision – Where you want to be
- Success measures – How do you objectively measure your progress towards The Vision
- Strategies – What actions are you going to take that you expect will directly impact the success measures.
Now you can find a lot of different books and theories on strategic plans, but in my opinion, if it doesn’t at least have the 4 elements above, it will not have the full functionality it needs. And done correctly this plan will be something you use ALL THE TIME, so you want it to fully meet your needs. So let’s start with The Mission. It sounds simple enough, it’s just what you do, which is why most companies don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the proper definition of The Mission. But it actually is the most important piece of your strategic plan because it is the only part that is going to be a constraint. Your Mission is going to define what you do, and by inference, what you should not be doing. Defined too broadly it is not going to help in your decision making (e.g., if your mission is just to “Make Money”, how do you know whether you should be a Doctor or an Investment Banker?). Defined too narrowly, it is going to be overly limiting (if your mission 30 years ago was to program FORTRAN, what the heck would you be doing now?). And your Mission should be energizing…because if it is correct it will go to who you truly are. In many ways we define ourselves by what we do…what do YOU do?
So my Mission is “To improve the lives of others.” I know, sounds like altruistic hogwash. But it actually came out of me analyzing what was driving some of my more self-destructive behaviors (like continually giving away more money than I was making). Once I was able to figure out what I was really trying to do, I was able to better define actions that would produce better (and more sustainable) results. It felt “right”, and helped me get much better focused on enabling activities (like making money) that before didn’t seem very satisfying. It also helps me focus any new activities I want to try (like putting together these posts) so I’m not out doing something counterproductive. So your Mission can be anything at all. It doesn’t need to be altruistic. It just needs to speak to you. It needs to be something that you will continually say “Yes, that is what I am going to do” while simultaneously rejecting any actions that are not aligned with your mission. If you can’t succeed without doing something outside of your defined Mission, you have the wrong Mission. And you are going to use it to make decisions. That is why it is so important to get correct. Get it wrong, and you risk making some very bad decisions.
So think about your Mission and write it down. Come back to it over the next few days and see if it still makes sense. Test it against what you like to do and don’t like to do and what you think you want out of life. Once you are truly comfortable with it we can move on to The Vision which will be covered by my next post.
Good luck!