Steps to effective strategic planning?

Define the organizational mission

Where I am? Who I am? What do I represent? What is my role in my environment? These are questions that allow reflection on the definition of a company’s mission. The mission is the company activities’ description, of its reason for being. 

What is the reason for the business? Answering this question is not difficult, but it is convenient that when defining the mission, we dedicate more time to its answer, because behind that question there are several edges whose approach can help define an appropriate vision.

For this, we are going to break down that big question into a series of smaller questions that will help you define the business mission:

• What do we do?
• What is the organization’s business?
• What is the role of our company in society?
• To whom do we offer our products and services?
• What makes us different from the competition?

Answering these questions will help you reflect to answer the bigger question: Why? The why of your business. This is a fundamental input for what follows: The organizational vision.

How to define the organizational vision?

The vision is the future image of the company. Therefore, it is drawn in the long term.

We can consider the organizational vision as the dream to fulfill, therefore it must be achievable and at the same time ambitious, challenging, and of course, motivating. How to define the vision of your business? The following questions will allow you to reflect to achieve it:

• What is your company’s short, medium, and long-term goal?
• What opinion do you want society, customers, and other stakeholders to have about you?

So far, we’ve outlined the mission and vision of the organization. In other words, we are already clear about “where I am and where I am going”.

Create organizational values

Organizational values are the beliefs and concepts that the organization respects and practices that are above daily practices to seek short-term profits. To create your organizational values, you should answer these questions:

• What do we believe?
• How would we like to be seen?

How to define organizational objectives

Objective simply means that level you want to reach, a state that must be achieved.

Therefore, an organizational objective is a situation that the organization wants to obtain, something that the company tries to achieve. It considers the organization as a whole and once they are achieved, it becomes necessary to define new objectives. 

Objectives are usually defined by shareholders, a group of top managers, or by a single person, usually who holds the reins of the company. The importance of organizational objectives include:

• It achieves the articulation of activities and efforts in all the employees of the company.
• They are a unit of measurement for stakeholders, by allowing the company’s productivity and success to be measured and compared, either against its competitors or over time.
• Stakeholders are the reflection of success, efficiency, and performance.