Leadership and Strategic Planning

Leadership and Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is very important in any organizations, but its significance for human services organizations is more profound. This is because such organizations operate in environments that are continually changing, with client needs changing frequently. At the same time, the attention of the community together with media regularly shifts to emerging issues. This unpredictability calls for managers of human services organizations to develop strategic plans for coping with the frequent changes.

Strategic plans differ from one organization to another, but there are key steps that must be followed when developing strategic plans in human services organizations. The first step is to cast the vision of the organization for the duration that the strategic plan covers. It goes without saying that the objective of strategic planning is to renew an organization’s strategic direction and formulate goals as well as action plans that will help the organization to respond to change (Finley et al., 2011). It therefore follows that organizations start the strategic planning exercise by casting a clear vision of where they want to be in a given timeframe. Since the vision binds every stakeholder, it is imperative that all key stakeholders be involved in this phase. Specific stakeholders that must be included in defining the vision are shareholders, the board of directors, and community representatives.

The second step is to conduct a thorough analysis of the organization in terms of its past, core values, and the current operations, as well as services it provides and its staffing patterns. The organization’s competitive position is also analyzed. This analysis helps in identifying strategic issues or fundamental drivers of change. In short, the first step would be to conduct a situational analysis that evaluates the organization’s current strategy as well as its fit within the present environment (Finley et al., 2011). For the situational analysis to be as comprehensive and objective as possible, a key stakeholder that should be involved in this first step is a professional strategic planner (Finley et al., 2011). The strategic planner will act as a facilitator and ensure that each of the stakeholders-employees, board members, owners, and client representatives- get equal chances to present their views.

The next step is to review the statement and mission. The stakeholders may agree to either develop a new mission statement or modify the existing ones (Finley et al., 2011). Considering that mission statements provide organizations with a sense of purpose, it follows that all key stakeholders must be involved in redefining the mission (Lauffer, 2011). What this means is that in the second step of the strategic planning process, the stakeholders to be involved include employees, board members, owners, community representatives, and donors/financiers.

As is typical of all change initiatives, the strategic plan cannot be effective or successful unless initiatives of winning the support and confidence of stakeholders are created and implemented. An effective strategy of creating stakeholder commitment together with buy-in is to encourage participation of key stakeholders. According to Finley et al. (2011), engaged employees, for example, in restructuring decisions and processes generates significant buy-in, making employees highly committed to implementing proposed changes. Secondly, any questions that stakeholders may rise concerning the strategic plan must be answered satisfactorily to build stakeholders’ confidence in the entire exercise. Thirdly, regular performance reviews should be conducted to highlight any challenges or difficulties in the strategic plan, thereby correcting them before any damage occurs.

References

Finley, D. S., Rogers, G., Napier, M., & Wyatt, J. (2011). From needs-based segmentation to program realignment: Transformation of YWCA of Calgary. Administration in Social Work, 35(3), 299–323.

Lauffer, A. (2011). Understanding your social agency (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: Sage.

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