You've developed your strategic plan with valuable input from stakeholders, and it has received board approval.
What’s the next step?
It’s time for the senior leadership team to build working agreements that establish organization-wide roles, success measures and alignment so that your team can bring the plan to life.
Here are some questions we discuss with association leadership teams to help bridge the gap between strategy and implementation...
Roles: Who will be involved in implementation and how will they be involved?
Guiding Questions:
- What is the role of the leadership team in operationalizing the plan?
- What is the role of the board and volunteers in operationalizing the plan?
- What is the role of staff in operationalizing the plan?
Establishing roles for implementation requires clarity and communication. At a high level, it is important to establish who within the organization will take the lead on translating priority strategic objectives into more tactical operational roadmaps and milestones, who will “do the work” associated with each tactical plan, and who will participate in periodic discussions of progress.
Typically, all or a subset of the senior leadership team is charged with mapping out the operations plan - including the steps to be taken, the milestones to be hit, and the persons to be involved in advancing the work.
Those involved in executing the work, typically association staff and volunteer committees, will bring a unique perspective as they become engaged in the process. They may even flag additional steps like additional research or resources needed that could be critical to successful execution.
Finally, it’s important to identify and plan for the right group of people (likely the senior leadership team) to come back together to review progress and discuss the timeline or resource adjustments.
Progress: How will we measure and update progress?
Guiding Questions:
- At what cadence will the leadership team meet to review progress? (What will you plan to cover in those meetings? How will you update progress?)
- At what cadence will you update the board on your progress? (What is the right altitude for the board?)
- At what cadence will you update the full staff team? (What is the right altitude for the staff?)
By outlining the cadence and altitude for sharing progress you can promote a spirit of transparency. We recommend creating an overall dashboard that monitors progress. This also allows you to flex if you need to and prioritize as you need to. Examples of progress updates could include weekly confidence scores (forward-looking), quarterly reflect and reset (looking backward) and biweekly team updates (in a spreadsheet, software, etc.).
There is also the opportunity to establish how and when you’ll update the board on progress. While senior management may need to review and discuss progress and a long list of metrics on a quarterly basis, it may be meaningful for the board to review a succinct list of key performance indicators at less frequent intervals, allowing your governing body to keep their conversations and decision-making at a strategic level.
Alignment: How will we ensure we remain aligned?
Guiding Question:
- How will you keep the full staff team and the board informed, engaged and aligned with this strategic direction?
It’s important to record both the detailed, more tactical implementation plans and continue to reinforce alignment back to the high-level strategic direction.
While staff will need access to detailed documentation and clear lines of communication that support cross-functional work, it is important to also reinforce the strategic priorities and mission alignment of their work. This will help to promote transparency, accountability and engagement. Periodic all-staff communications about the ongoing work, successes, and even celebrations of challenges identified and overcome, can keep the organization aligned with its mission, even when the work to be done is new and challenging.
As discussed before, maintaining board alignment may involve updates positioned at a higher level to maintain a strategic focus. The board needs information to support an ongoing connection to the organization’s strategic focus. They also need to cultivate a comfort level and sense of trust to allow staff and volunteers to plan, implement, measure, discuss, and change course as needed to continue advancing the mission and strategy.
Establishing norms on the roles, progress and alignment of the operations plan can help embed your strategy into your overall process and culture, creating a measurable and realistic road map.
