Thrive Your Business with Strategic Planning Facilitator

Do you need a professional strategic planning facilitator to run the strategic planning process?

In some organisations, top managers do strategic planning as a one off project. The CEO is the process leader and project manager.

In other enterprises, the CEO, while leading the process, may have some administrative support for the process.

Larger organisations may have planning departments with staff specialists to enable and support the process through all phases.

However, in many cases, it might be wise to use a strategic planning facilitator. The strategic planning facilitator helps the chief executive and their colleagues to work through the planning process.

Strategic planning is a major commitment of time for managers. This commitment may yield value, or not. An independent professional facilitator will cost money. However, they can assist you get better results for the time used in planning.

Not every single interaction in the planning process needs a planning facilitator. Their services can be particularly useful for the major meetings. Having the facilitator conduct the workshop on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is very helpful.

Regardless of whether or not you use an external strategic planning facilitator, it is wise to check that the strategic planning team are prepared for the task.

For team members to be prepared to make the process work, they should be ready, willing, and able to-

• meet their commitments to the tasks expected from them in the process
• make commitments to each other, and
• share the organisation’s goals, values and culture.

A few members might be very new to the organisation. They may require some coaching to work with the rest of the team. Other members may not be ready for significant changes flowing from executing new strategies. They may require some individual counselling.

When selecting the team, the CEO needs to decide not only who should be in the team, but also how ready the team is for the strategic planning assignment.

A strategic plan contains the top decisions needed to ensure the future of your organisation. It is risky to base such important choices on the personal and subjective views of a few members of your own management team. An impartial, objective, and trustworthy outsider could minimise the effects of genuinely held, but possibly misguided ideas that exist in all organisations.

If this outsider uses a systematic approach to strategic planning, they should be able guide the planning team efficiently and effectively through the process. This will create an effective strategic plan that has the enthusiastic support and commitment of the managers of your organisation.

A systematic planning process includes many details. An experienced strategic planning facilitator can ensure the thorough execution of every step. The planning team members can concentrate their efforts on using their deep knowledge of the enterprise to fill out the substance of the plan, without distraction from process details.

Strategic planning consultants steer the team through the process. They keep the team on course, avoiding obstacles of ego created distractions, undue time on war stories, and so on.

So, grow your business successfully with professional Strategic Planning Facilitator.

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