Strategic Planning Coaching Services
Strategy development can be a complex and time-consuming process that involves, and ultimately impacts, people and resources from across your team or organization. Organizational strategy requires high performance teamwork. HET for Strategy Teams provides a framework and practical tools to help you create a long-term plan for achieving your organization’s mission. Drawing on our experience and examples of work with hundreds of other Strategy Teams, we help you gain perspective and insight, make informed decisions, and work as a Highly Effective Team®.
Sample Strategic Planning Process. Read more about this process.
How We Can Help Your Strategy Team Succeed
Our team of HET Consultants and Coaches work with your Strategy Team from start to finish. We help you learn and apply HET methods and tools to articulate your strategy, identify your priorities, and actively manage work across the organization while engaging in high performance teamwork. Our consulting and coaching practices align with each of the three modules of HET for Strategy Teams.
At the outset, in Module 1: Structure, Roles & Decisions, we help you organize your strategic planning process. We provide you with guidance to identify and engage the stakeholders and team members you need to sponsor, develop, and oversee the implementation of your strategy and to make sure they are clear about their roles and responsibilities. We then work with you to develop a project plan and facilitate agreements for implementing it.
Then, in Module 2: Strategy Articulation & Prioritization, we work with you and your team to develop an initial set of strategic options. We bring extensive experience in conducting research and offer a well-developed suite of survey tools so that you gather data, validate information, and test new ideas to refine your strategic thinking and to conduct additional research where needed. From there, we help you create a theory of change, strategic planning framework, and proposed projects for a three- to five-year implementation plan, including a budget.
During Module 4: Active Management, we help you develop and implement a communication plan so that your people, teams, and the organization are aligned with your highest priorities and are available to support the launch and management of year-one projects to implement your strategy.
Throughout, we provide you with HET methods, tools, and services to make sure the work is done and that it has the intended impact. We help your team adopt a rhythm for teamwork, bring measures to assess progress, and commit to goals for team alignment to implement your strategy.
Module 1: Define Structure, Roles & Decisions
The Structure, Roles & Decisions module is depicted visually as the leading edge of the HET Wave, because it usually happens only when a new team is forming or during an organizational restructuring. Unless the entire organization is a start-up, structure does not get revisited every quarter or every year the way the other HET strategy modules may. Structure may periodically need to be updated as strategy changes, but structural changes should be much rarer than the regular changes we expect to see in our priorities, processes, and results.
Module 2: Strategy Articulation & Prioritization
In the second stage of the cycle of teamwork, Strategy Articulation & Prioritization, your team sets the vision for the change you want to see in the world and builds the strategy and body of work your team needs to perform to bring that vision to reality. The Strategy Articulation & Prioritization process can be painful, political, polarizing, and create conflict. This is because we often realize that:
- We may not be aligned on our vision and desired strategy outcomes,
- We may have an overlapping or incomplete strategy framework that causes us to step on one another’s toes or allows work to fall between the cracks, or
- We are trying to do too many things for our given capacity and deadlines.
Going through this process is necessary for us to get aligned on what we are trying to do together, how we are going to do it, and what is most important, so that we can prioritize, focus, implement and succeed.
Module 4: Active Management
Once your strategy is clearly defined, HET helps you and your team implement and make it a reality (using Module 3, Project Planning & Implementation). After a period of execution, you use the fourth stage of high performance teamwork, Active Management, to make sure you deliver on the work you promised to do and that it achieves the change you want to see in the world. Active Management is a two-step process: making sure the work is done, and then making sure the work has the intended impact. If the work is not done, we cannot assess its impact. Once the work is done, if we do not assess its impact, we will not know whether to maintain or adjust our strategy.