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Five Common Strategy Mistakes Creating a corporate strategy — and putting in place the goals and tactics necessary to execute on that vision — is a challenge for most businesses. As you start to plan for the coming year, be sure to avoid these common strategy mistakes. 1. Not prioritizing A strategic plan with too many goals can be paralyzing. Instead of accomplishing a few key goals, you can dilute your team's efforts and miss your goals completely. Take time during every planning session to prioritize your goals based on what's important to your overall strategic vision — for example, where you want your business to be three or five years down the road. If you find yourself with an overwhelming number of goals, take time to pare down the list to the top two or three objectives, which will leave you with a clear, attainable project plan that will get your business where it needs to be. 2. Ignoring outside forces Market research — covering your company's strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your competitors — is essential for determining your position in the marketplace. Yet, many companies fail to execute well on the next step — assessing opportunities and threats, which are the outside factors that occur within the market itself. These external factors — which include everything from shifting populations and new regulatory issues to competitive and market developments — are particularly important to honing any kind of strategic plan. 3. Complicating communications Many strategic plans fail because of poor communication across groups. Be on the look out for terminology or jargon used by one group that can be misunderstood by another. These terms can slow down or alienate project teams. When you're developing a long-term strategy, involve the different departments of your business so that everyone remains on the same page. 4. Creating goals to impress Try to avoid setting corporate goals that are based on the desire to impress outside groups. These "show goals" may include setting unrealistically high sales goals, insisting that you will grab more market share than is possible, or expecting growth rates that are significantly out of line with industry norms. These kinds of goals can quickly dishearten employees — those that don't buy into the goals may question the competence of senior management, and those that do may be demoralized when they can't be achieved. 5. Not paying attention to experience Past experience is often the best gauge of future performance. But many plans fail to take this into consideration under the mistaken impression that "new" means starting from scratch. Strong company-wide knowledge management practices can solve this dilemma. Pay attention to each project's successes and failures by documenting processes and results that can be applied to future endeavors. One common trap is keeping this knowledge in the head or in the files of the project manager. Get this information out onto your network to encourage active sharing across your organization. |
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