Strategic Planning and Management Insights

The strategic planning process contains various steps, exercises and opportunities to develop a culture of alignment and follow-through within your organization. This resource will serve as a step-by-step overview for the strategic planning process. Whether you're gearing up to lead your own strategy session, or plan on attending and participating in one, this guide will help you through each stage of the planning process. 

• Getting Alignment

Without alignment among the departments and individuals within your organization, a strategic plan will not go far. It's important to foster that alignment early on in the strategic planning process, in order to generate buy-in from your team, and to ensure that everyone is moving towards the same organizational goals. 

Developing alignment is best done face-to-face, but can involve a combination of different strategies, including one-on-one interviews, questionnaires and team brainstorming sessions.

For more on how to generate alignment and buy-in:

As we near the end of 2019, it’s a good time to reflect on the year that has come and gone. If you’re taking time off during the holiday season, this may be the perfect time to reflect on your highs and lows over the past year. Keeping in mind both your organization’s goals and personal goals: What were some of the successes and failures? 

Set in 1960’s New York City, AMC’s Mad Men features Sterling Cooper, a fictional advertising agency on Madison Avenue, while detailing the everyday lives of its members at work and at home. A winner of several Emmys and Golden Globes, the show is widely praised as historically authentic, well written and stylistically appealing.

Strategic Insights Gathering

On October 15th from 3:00-5:00 pm in Portland, Oregon, SME Strategy Managing Partner, Anthony Taylor, and Cascade Strategy North America CEO, Carl Cox, will be hosting a thoroughly interactive and thought provoking strategic planning event.

This May, I moved to Vancouver to join SME Strategy as co-op student. The role was described as a marketing role at a small and growing consulting company, so I was excited by the opportunity. Shortly after arriving, I realized my role would expand to be much more than originally expected. I was eventually tasked with a variety of tasks that fit into the marketing bucket, including one-to-one sales, content creation, email marketing and copywriting. 

As a student arriving straight of college, I had little knowledge of the consulting industry as a whole, let alone its size and scope. SME Strategy specializes in strategic planning, which fits under the management consulting umbrella. There was a lot to learn, and I started at the ground floor. Over the next several months, I would take courses, read about, receive mentorship, listen to coaching calls and sit in on strategic planning sessions to understand the processes involved in strategic planning. By receiving guidance and mentorship from our Managing Partner who’s facilitated strategic planning sessions around the world for businesses, schools, governments and nonprofits, I was able to learn a great deal. This is what I learned:

When organization’s sit down for their strategic planning session, there’s usually a lot on the agenda. Everyone is bringing something to the table that they feel is urgent. The reality is, only a few different strategic priorities will be settled upon by the time the meeting participants are packed up and headed home. In order for a strategy to be effective, this is the way it has to be. 

At its core, leadership is about setting a direction for an organization and its people. Anytime we deal with people, we are inevitably dealing with extreme variability. This is evident in today’s realm of leadership courses, leadership styles and leadership consultants all trying to improve the leaders of today’s businesses, schools, non-profits, teams and governments. Ultimately, it depends on the people inside an organization that will determine what style of leadership is best for them. Nonetheless, in this article I’ll try to highlight some of the benefits of each style of leadership, including some examples of well-known people who I think best embody that style.