Get ready for success in 2024 and beyond! Crafting a plan may seem time-consuming, but it’s a crucial investment. Mark Fielding highlights five key reasons to prioritize planning, emphasizing the leader’s pivotal role. From setting direction to driving alignment, a well-communicated plan ensures everyone is on the same page, simplifies decision-making, and maximizes strategic success. Don’t just aim for success—strategically plan for it.
Now is a good time to prepare a plan for 2024 and beyond. Developing a plan takes time and resources. It requires the time and commitment of you, the owner/manager, and some of the most experienced people in your business. So, why do you need a plan? Why take time for planning? Here are five excellent reasons.
1. To set direction and priorities
Primarily, you need a plan because it sets the direction and establishes priorities for your business. It defines your business’s view of success and prioritizes the activities that will make this view your reality. The plan will help your people know what they should be working on, and what they should be working on first. Without a clearly defined and explained plan, you may very well find that your priority initiatives—the ones that will drive the highest success are being given secondary treatment.
2. To get everyone on the same page
If you find that you have people working to achieve different aims, or going in different directions, you need a plan. Once you define your strategic direction, you can get operations, sales, marketing, administration, manufacturing, and all other departments moving together to achieve the business’s goals.
3. To simplify decision-making
Plan priorities make it easier to say no to distracting initiatives. If your team has trouble saying NO to latest ideas or potential initiatives, you need a plan. Why? Your plan will have already prioritized the activities necessary for success.
4. To drive alignment
Many businesses have hard-working and diligent people putting their best efforts into areas that have little to no effect on strategic success. They are essentially concentrating on the wrong areas —because their activities aren’t aligned with the priorities. Your plan serves as the vehicle for answering the question, “How can we better concentrate and align all our resources to maximize our strategic success?”
5. To communicate the message
Many business managers/leaders walk around with a virtual plan locked in their heads—they know where their business needs to be and the key activities that will get it there. Unfortunately, the plan isn’t down on paper and hasn’t been communicated thoroughly. As a result, few people are acting on it. When your staff, suppliers and even customers know where you’re going, you allow even greater opportunities for people to help you maximize your success in getting there. You will have noticed that this article is very much focused on YOU, the leader of the business, and on the vital role YOU play in facilitating plans throughout YOUR business. So, once YOU recognize the need to plan, YOU now have the role of becoming the catalyst: for facilitating the buy-in and commitment of YOUR team and the rest of YOUR business. And, more importantly, if you or your team aren’t willing to invest in what is needed, I recommend that you don’t bother. Poor planning is often worse than no planning at all.
Mark Fielding
