The Problem is a lot of founders and CEOs are not good planners and therefore are not good leaders.
The solution is to look at leadership and good planning as synonymous and teach leaders good planning skills. Good leaders are the key to Real Entrepreneurial Success as well as Real Intrapreneurial Success in more mature organizations.
Good leaders will be instigators of change, or you could call good leaders “Game Change Agents”. Change occurs in several key ways:
- You may change the Strategic Plan or Business Model,
- You may add or change products and services,
- You may choose to focus on a different customer mix,
- Financial adjustments may affect change positive or negative,
- You make add or eliminate key personnel,
- Some or all of these may cause the enterprise culture to change,
- But last and certainly most important Leadership can affect change.
By way of definition: Intrapreneurship is the practice entrepreneurship –some call intrapreneurship innovation—in a larger corporate structure. Some companies like Apple do this very well while others like Eastman Kodak did not wake up in time.
Most People I Surveyed Don’t Plan
Recall I wrote a book late last year titled 5 AT A TIME, a self-help guide to planning life and career/business 5-years at a time. In the book, I mentioned that only about 20% of the several hundred people I have surveyed are doing any kind of life or career planning and certainly are not putting any detailed thought into the exercise like a 5-year plan. When I do find exceptions (the 20%) I find men and women who are leaders in their home, in their profession or business, in their church, in their school, and in their community.
I think there is solid potential for another 20-30% of the adult populations to learn leadership skills, take on leadership characteristics, and in doing so they will by necessity become a better planner and positive change agents. Lots of us are disciples of Dave Ramsey and what is he teaching? Financial discipline and planning (in his case he might call it budgeting), and not just for the short term but certainly 3-5 years out. His message and methods fit nicely with 5 AT A TIME. In his best-seller “THE TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER”, Dave Ramsey speaks of A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness-emphasis on Planning.
There are 5 P’s of planning: Proper planning prevents poor performance. Thus, my motto: “If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”. Regardless of what you are doing, there is a proper approach to execute the task with a well thought our plan.
To get a little deeper into Leadership and its link to Quality Planning let’s look at the 4 different types of planning which a good leader can clearly delineate:
- Strategic Planning: probably thought of as the major form of planning and it is perhaps the most important. A Business Plan is a Strategic Plan. Why is a Strategic plan important? Because a goal without a plan is just a wish!
What is a Strategic Plan: If it is your business it is your vision for the next 3-5 years; a means to determine what you are good at; helps determine what to do with your time, human capital, and money; and it’s an iterative, living document (Plan, do, Evaluate, Plan, do, evaluate). Another Business Coach, John Storm, calls it “Thinking, Engaging, Doing” with the thinking step as the key planning building block.
- Tactical Planning: seems like a military term but it is also a powerful marketing technique. Understanding your competition through SWAT Analysis and positioning yourself with a Tactical Plan to beat them or outperform them. Capture the high ground, the marketing advantage, the momentum to grow, outperform and remain resilient.
- Operational Planning: This is one of my favorite areas of planning because it involves your supply chain and building processes to operate your business. Building a good supply chain map covering A to Z; raw materials all the way through to quality control, customer satisfaction, and return policies; is one of the most powerful planning tools you can create. You can layout ways to continuously improve processes, identify steps that can be taken out of processes while improving quality, and create unbelievable cost reduction drivers. And the power of supply chain or operational saving is recognized as a “dollar saved nearly allows turns in to a dollar of profit”.
- Contingency Planning: Contingency planning combines forecasting of possible future events, preparation of scenarios that might occur one or two steps out, and how to react to them. Think of it as a chess match as you plan your moves one and two steps ahead. Contingency planning puts you an in a ready position to react to now “a planned contingency’, allows you to have already thought through a pivot strategy or move, and you will have thought of financial and human resource consequences and prepare your contingency reactions to make this just another day at the park. In my book 5 AT A TIME, a guide to planning life and career 5-years at a time, I think Contingency Planning is one of the most important and powerful aspects of a 5-year plan. It helps reduce the stress and worry about living your life and managing your career.
Practice using these four types of planning will make a good leader into a great leader, and an even better Team Leader and Game Change Agent, as he includes his key management organization in these planning activities and commitments.
Authored by Brad Lienhart, CEO Lienhart Leadership Consulting, bradlienhart.com, lienhartb@yahoo.com.