Strategic Planning and Management Insights

You and your team have gone through the process of creating a strategic plan, and now you need a communication strategy for how you're going to share the message and the plan with your team.

Communicating your strategic plan and vision just one time is not going to be enough. You need to constantly and consistently engage your team in the direction of the organization, and continuously communicate why and how you (the people and the organization) are wanting to go there.

In this episode of our Strategy and Leadership Podcast, Brock McDonald, the CEO of the Recycling Council of BC, joined us to chat about strategic planning, team building, establishing partnerships and leading initiatives within a non-profit environmental organization. Brock has worked with the Recycling Council of BC since 2003 where their mission is to minimize and eventually eliminate waste. 

Developing your team , creating your strategic plan, and building your culture are all moving targets. There’s no "final result", but rather endless opportunities for growth and development, and benchmarks to measure success along the way. 

As your organization grows both in size and in complexity and as your staff changes over and your strategic priories evolve, you and your team will be required to adjust how you approach your strategy and people development.

Alexa Pitoulis is a change management consultant in Vancouver who spent the past few years growing and scaling a non profit called Open Media.

Many of the keys to success in their strategic planning success were transparency, communication and culture change.

In this interview, Alexa speaks about the importance of strategy while managing growth within an organization, as well as crafting organizational culture, while creating a great experience for your people. 

Learn about her strategic planning process, and her best practices for creating culture.

According to Gallup, increasing employee engagement boosts productivity and profitability by at least 20 percent.

Compared with bottom-quartile units, top-quartile units have:

• 37% lower absenteeism
• 25% lower turnover (in high-turnover organizations)
• 65% lower turnover (in low-turnover organizations)
• 48% fewer safety incidents
• 41% fewer patient safety incidents (in applicable fields)
• 41% fewer quality incidents (defective products/services)
• 10% higher customer metrics
• 21% higher productivity
• 22% higher profitability

With results like that, it's hard to argue with the investment return in people and in HR as a strategic partner to your success.

As a business person you might be more focused on hard numbers than the "soft" things such as values and culture.

However, some of the largest businesses in the world have become so successful because of their understanding of culture as part of their organizational strategy.

Are you a manager, executive director or CEO who is looking to better understand the strategic planning process before you run it with your team?

We have just released a strategic planning training course (aka: Strategic Planning Starter Kit) to walk you through the process so that you can focus on what you do best as an organization.