Strategic Brilliance Part 2: 4 Ways To Get Your Team More Involved In Strategic Planning

My first article in this series discusses how to craft excellent strategic planning and align your team. In this second article, we delve into ways to get your team more involved and therefore, more committed to your strategic plan.

Many employees enjoy their jobs—and they’re often quite good at them. But getting team members to go beyond their day-to-day duties and directly contribute to strategic planning isn’t always easy.

It might seem as though you’re asking them to do “extra work” when, in fact, a total understanding and commitment to a well-crafted strategic plan is key to every organization’s success. Here are four ways you can get your team more involved and engaged:

1. Ask them for ideas and feedback.This may seem like an exceedingly obvious suggestion, but you’d be surprised how many organizations restrict strategic planning discussions to the C-suite. The big challenge is figuring out an efficient, cohesive and equitable way to gather ideas and feedback from everyone.
Consider approaches such as surveys, “town hall” gatherings, department meetings and breakout groups. Granted, this can generate more content to process and data to analyze. But you’ll gain greater insight into current organizational strengths and weaknesses—and it can help boost employee engagement as well.

2. Integrate strategic planning into performance evaluations.One way to clarify that involvement in strategic planning isn’t extra work is to ask employees to identify at least one of their quarterly, semi-annual or annual performance goals to a strategic objective. This way, you can give them actionable items to accomplish, and you can measure progress toward objectives more easily.

Your supervisors will be important contributors to this approach. Ensure they’re well-informed about your strategic planning objectives and the reasoning behind them. Supervisors will also need to be well-prepared to answer questions and offer coaching once employees have selected their goals.

3. Communicate progress regularly.Often, employees don’t know or care much about strategic planning because they’re either unaware of the objectives or staff members aren’t kept up to speed on how the objectives are going. For starters, be sure to clearly roll out your strategic plan at least annually—perhaps in a carefully written, easy-to-read email.
Explain not only what the objectives are, but also why you’ve chosen them. Make the case for why your organization is heading in this direction. From there, provide regular updates via various communication channels (emails, department meetings, one-on-one conversations with supervisors, etc.).
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4. Celebrate together!If there’s one thing that every team member loves, it’s a win. Be sure your team members know when your organization has accomplished its strategic planning objectives. And don’t just tell them—celebrate! Hold a victory lunch or set aside time during a holiday gathering to cheer for all the great things you’ve accomplished during the year thanks to good strategic planning and the hard work of your staff. It may take a year or two, but your team members will likely start looking forward to the celebration and working harder to have another one.
Use these four simple (and easy) actions to involve your team in your strategic planning and you can get even better results, faster! Here's to your strategic brilliance!