Bringing Your Strategic Plan to Life

Making the Priorities Personal

Every employee should have a direct line of sight between his or her work and the organization’s top priorities. This cannot happen without a purposeful effort on the part of leadership. Below is a summary of strategies discussed throughout this document that will help to create that line of sight.

1. Ensure that the plan indentifies priorities or focus areas. If the plan reads like poetry and nothing stands out as more important than anything else, members of the organization cannot shape their work around it.

2. Hold a conversation or World Café (p. 18) within each office, department, unit, organization about the plan priorities. Questions can be:

• How do the priorities in the plan relate to our work?

• What are we doing now that supports these priorities?

• What other actions can we take in this office/department/unit to achieve these goals or support the priorities?

• What new skills do you think you or others will need to make these goals a reality?

• What resources will we need?

• How will we know we are making progress?

3. Ask employees to set their annual performance goals according to the priorities. (Some priorities will not fit as well as others in any given unit.) Evaluate annual performance accordingly.

• In one college, a top priority was retention of first year students. The maintenance staff at first thought they had no role to play in this priority, but after discussion, members decided that they had a role in making the campus as welcoming as possible. Goals they came up with focused on improved signage and more aggressive trash removal in certain campus areas both of which had been identified as student complaints. They also agreed that they would drop whatever they were doing to help students and guests who appeared to be lost. The first two--signage and trash removal--are measurable. The third will be difficult to measure beyond anecdotal reports, but still very much worth doing.

4. Require all requests for professional development funds to indicate how that activity supports the priorities. Prioritize requests and make decisions about professional development fund allocation based on relationship to priorities.

(Beyond conferences and workshops, professional development can include books, DVDs, downloads, on-line learning, opportunities to shadow in other parts of the organization, benchmarking with other organizations, writing and submitting articles for professional journals, etc.) These options can be discussed as part of the employee performance appraisal process.

5. Discuss their position descriptions with all employees. Are they accurate? What duties need to change in light of the plan priorities?

6. Make the vision or priorities visible in as many ways as possible (posters, mugs, screen savers, mouse pads, Email signatures, business cards, etc.)

• Visitors and employees who walk into the main office of the Wisconsin Historical Society Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin see a huge framed poster of the organization’s values and plan priorities.

7. Reward and thank employees who put extra effort into strategic priorities. Rewards can be significant or modest based on the organization’s capacity. Besides formal recognition or awards, consider movie tickets, books, gift certificates, flowers, thank you notes, cookies, dining out, etc.

• Be specific when thanking people. Rather than “Thanks for your work” say something like, “Thanks for everything you did to plan and publicize the Volunteer Appreciation Golf Outing. We had a record turnout thanks to you.”

Your Ideas for making the plan personal: