We are all probably guilty of answering, “How are you?” with “Good, busy!”
There is a certain rush that comes from having a busy day and spinning all of the plates without dropping one.
Busyness can sometimes be worn as a badge of honor. And sometimes it’s just a fact—we are all indeed very busy. But is all this busy a good thing? Does being busy make us better at running our businesses or managing our lives?
I asked a business owner yesterday what would prevent her from hiring me. Her answer: time.
Taking the time to get the leaders in the room for strategic planning—and the subsequent time it takes to keep it going—were her hurdles. Being busy, which in itself is not a bad thing, can prevent us from working on our businesses.
Or take another business owner who told me last week: “Melissa, we hired a strategic planner several years ago, and it was a massive waste of time! We sat in a room for two days and got a binder two months later that we never used.”
How does this business plan now? They don’t—and they continue to grow a profitable business. And frankly, I don’t blame them for being skeptical of strategic planning after that experience.
So what are busy business owners to do when it comes to planning? Skip it altogether and work with maximum busy-ness?
I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that honors that time is valuable but that planning is powerful.
1. Discover
Work to uncover what is and isn’t working in your business and what you want to achieve in the next year. This does not need to be a manifesto document. Write your thoughts down and look for themes. Your team is looking to you to have an opinion and a direction. While gaining their feedback and buy-in is critical, doing this pre-work should not be optional. At the end of the day, it’s your business, and your vision matters!
Share it with your favorite strategic planner in a discovery session. Plan for what a strategic planning day (seven hours max, with breaks) with your leadership team will look like.
2. Align
Preheat the discussion about where you’re headed with feedback from your team. Call a few customers (this is good for business anyway) and ask them for one piece of feedback about working with you and your team. Write down their responses.
Gather your leadership team together. Make it clear what you are trying to accomplish. Ban technology and hold yourself and your team accountable to focusing on the purpose for the day.
Work through your goals, the issues in your business, and what it will take to solve them. The actions become your tactics.
Craft a simple (not simplistic) one-page plan that outlines your goals, strategies, tactics, and metrics. Resist the urge to use corporate-speak!
3. Move
Decide on a cadence for meeting to discuss the strategic plan. This is where many leadership teams fall off the proverbial wagon: they don’t make the time because, you guessed it, they’re too busy.
Determine, quickly, how the data for the metrics will be collected, who will collect it, and where it will live. Another place plans fail is when measuring progress becomes too cumbersome.
Celebrate wins as they happen, and take the time to recognize your leadership team for their work to make the plan happen.
Of course, it’s easy for me to type this because my whole business is built on this framework. But that’s also why I believe so strongly that strategic planning shouldn’t create more busy—it should help you decide what is actually worth being busy doing.
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