“One prays for miracles but works for results.” – St. Augustine

Nothing drives me crazier than working with an organization that does not have a plan. I understand that there are times to wait, there are times for discovery but there should never be a time when you do not have a plan or are not working on creating one.

Please, please, please – make a plan, then make the time to measure your success against your plan.

You are driving your people crazy when you don’t have one. Great people have plans for their lives. If you want working in your organization to be part of their long-term plans, you must show them the path.

Enough of that rant. We have been working through the five questions that Peter Drucker would ask you today if you sought his advice on your organization.

As a refresher, the five questions are:

– What is our mission (or purpose)?

– Who is our customer (core customer)?

– What does the customer value?

– What are our results?

– What is our plan?

Today, we are looking at question number five. What is our plan?

An effective plan will contain some variation of the following five essential elements:

Purpose: Why does your organization exist? What will be different about the world because it existed? The organization’s purpose answers these questions and is the filter for your vision. Does the vision serve our purpose? Purpose also helps potential team members decide if they want to join your organization. When your purpose is clearly defined, they can ask themselves if they want to spend a significant portion of their career serving this purpose. 

Vision: What is our win? Where are we going? Vision puts the purpose into action. It defines a destination on the horizon that serves the purpose. The vision should be inspiring and challenging.

Objectives – Action Steps: Objectives and action steps are how you get from where you are today to your desired vision. Objectives define the outcome desired and sets the deadlines. Action steps are how you will achieve the objectives. If well defined and time-bound, objectives and action steps will let you know if the plan is on track or if adjustments are needed.

Budget: The budget allocates the resources to achieve the plan. The budget puts the fuel in the tank for the trip.

As you are building your plan, Drucker suggests five tests for your plan. The tests are:

Abandonment: To get to where we want to go, we must be willing to abandon the things that are no longer working. Ask your team what you need to stop doing.

Concentration: We must build on our core competencies, the things we do well. We must focus our energies rather than distract ourselves chasing too many shiny objects. Drucker says if you have more than five goals in your plan, you have none. You are distracted. I suggest leaders keep top-level goals to three and place them in priority order so you know what to ignore when resources become tight. Don’t chase goals that you can’t win. Ask yourself, could we become one of the best in the world at doing this?

Innovation: Innovation gets us to tomorrow’s successes. We must be willing to change the tactics to get the vision. Ask yourself, how are we changing the way we do things to better serve our vision?

Risk-Taking: If we are too conservative in our risk-taking, we will miss opportunities. If we are too aggressive, we may bankrupt the organization. Leaders must take risks that carefully balance between the two extremes. Are you risking too much or too little?

Analysis: When planning it is important to recognize what we do not know and seek answers through analysis. The analysis allows leaders to make decisions based on the best data available. Do we know what we don’t know?

Purpose, vision, objectives, action steps and budget – all created in light of abandonment, concentration, risk-taking and analysis. Work diligently to include all of these elements in your plans to increase the odds of achieving success as you have defined it.

We’ve got some great resources to help you create your plans in our resource library. Check them out at www.valuesdrivenresults.com/resource-library/ or give us a call at (229) 244-1559. We’d love to help you in any way we can.

Curt Fowler is president of Fowler & Company and director at Fowler, Holley, Rambo & Stalvey. He is dedicated to helping leaders build great organizations and better lives for themselves and the people they lead.

Curt and the team at FHRS help leaders build great companies through Fractional CFO, strategy, tax and accounting services.

Give us a call at (229) 244-1559 if we can help you in any way.