How to Make Your Strategic Plan a Reality
If you were an investor in Starbucks, what would your reaction be if Chairman Howard Schultz announced that in the future he and his senior management team will be devoting substantially all of their time to making coffee?
As unlikely as it may seem, it is a scenario being played out in many professional service firms. Partners are so busy attending to the day-to-day needs of clients, they have little time to lead and manage their organizations. In many firms, Partners meet for a few hours each week to address urgent operational issues. Strategic decisions impacting future growth — such as development of personnel and retention of clients — are often delayed and opportunities lost. Even when strategic decisions are made, little time is spent determining how they will be executed.
In our experience, most leaders of professional service organizations already know how to grow their businesses. On paper, your strategic plan probably includes most or all of the following six components:
• Hiring more and better talent
• Retaining that talent
• Improving client satisfaction
• Defining your brand and attracting better business
• Improving productivity through better leadership and management
• Building technical and professional depth through training and mentorship
Facing great demands for your time, the greatest challenge most of you face is how to execute your strategic plan or, in other words, how to put it into action. I recommend a three-step process that will focus you on a few key strategic initiatives that will most impact your future growth.
1. Begin by rating your current performance in each of the six strategic areas described above on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 1 representing totally unacceptable performance and 10 representing outstanding performance. This identifies your firm’s performance gaps and helps prioritize where you will allocate your valuable time and resources.
2. Now create an action plan to close each of those performance gaps. First, identify specific actions you will take to close each performance gap. For the plan to work, it is important for you to estimate how much time it will take to complete each action and identify who will perform the action. Then, determine the specific outcome that will demonstrate the action has been completed, the deadline for achieving that outcome, and how you will measure progress towards that outcome.
3. By now you are probably asking, “Where do you think I am going to get the time to do that?” This brings us to the third and most difficult step: Becoming masterful at delegating work to junior professionals.
Failure to effectively delegate work has widespread consequences:
Profitability is compromised when partners do work that lower-cost professionals could do.
Morale, development, and employee retention suffer when your employees miss opportunities to do more meaningful work and to be coached and mentored by partners.
Opportunities are lost, because there is no time to plan and execute growth strategies.
Given these consequences, you may wonder why so many professionals struggle with delegating work. Some of the reasons we have heard include:
• I don’t have confidence that my employees will do the job as well as I do it.
• It’s more convenient to do it myself rather than take the time to explain how I want it done and then check back to make sure it was done correctly and on time.
• I don’t know how to manage and mentor others.
• I’m afraid of losing control. What if the quality of the work doesn’t meet my standards and the client isn’t satisfied?
• It will create worry and anxiety if my client calls and I don’t personally have all the answers.
• I’m more concerned with meeting my own billable hour requirements.
• If I stay busy enough doing billable work, nobody will bother me to take on marketing, recruiting or administrative tasks I do not enjoy.
Becoming masterful at delegating work requires a major change in your management behaviors and practices. To support such a change, leaders have to understand and buy into the benefits of the change. Your organization’s compensation structure should be aligned with the desired change, and you will need training and support to successfully make the change.
The benefits of effectively delegating work clearly outweigh the risks involved. When your employees have the experience of working on important matters and being mentored by successful leaders, it will enhance their satisfaction, development and retention. Profitability will improve as lower-cost employees take on work previously done by partners. Partners will have more time to manage and mentor junior professionals, and to plan and execute strategies for future growth.
In most cases, your organization’s leaders and managers will need training and support to develop effective leadership and management behaviors and practices. This includes developing greater self-awareness and awareness of the behaviors and practices that will influence and motivate others to meet or exceed your organization’s expectations.
Our belief is that every organization’s future success is linked to the personal and professional development of its leaders. A well-executed strategic plan that emphasizes that development will contribute significantly to your success.
posted by Rich Freedman @ 8:58 AM
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