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3.0SponsorsTransformationalLeadershipandtheStrategicPlanning.pptxSponsors, Transformational Leadership and the Strategic Planning Process
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Leaders perform political, spiritual, and intellectual functions as well as managerial and group-maintenance tasks. These range from providing vision and strategies for change, to mobilizing a constituency, to facilitating group decisions or creating coalitions.
—Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics
We often become so ingrained in our ways of doing things that we forget that change is more common than stability. We accommodate small changes with relative ease, but occasionally, a game changer arrives, major change that alters the landscape radically and quickly.
Professor Stanley K. Ridgley
Drexel University
What is a Strategic Inflection Point?
An strategic inflection point is an event that results in a significant change in the progress of a company, industry, sector, economy, or geopolitical situation and can be considered a turning point after which a dramatic change, with either positive or negative results, is expected to result.
Companies, industries, sectors, and economies are dynamic and constantly evolving.
Inflection points are more significant than the small day-to-day progress typically made, and the effects of the change are often well known and widespread.
When an inflection point is identified, it is often a sign that the affected industry must make
certain fundamental changes in order to continue to operate.
Inflection points can be a result of action taken by a company, or through actions taken by another entity, that has a direct impact on the company.
Additionally, inflection points may be caused by an intentional action or an unforeseen event.
Importance of the Leadership Role
Basically, strategic planning is not a substitute for effective leadership.
There is no substitute for effective leadership (and committed followership) when it comes to planning and implementation.
Strategic planning is simply a set of concepts, procedures, and tools designed to help executives, managers, and others to think, act, and learn strategically
on behalf of their organizations and their organizations' stakeholders.
At its best, strategic planning and strategic management help leaders pursue virtuous ends in order to
create significant public value and advance the common good.
At its worst, strategic planning drives out strategic thought, action, and learning; makes jobs more difficult;
and keeps organizations from meeting their mandates, fulfilling their missions, and creating public value.
Whether strategic planning helps or hurts depends on
how formal and informal leaders and followers at all organizational levels use it—or misuse it.
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So What is Leadership?
We define it as “the inspiration and mobilization of others to undertake collective action in pursuit of the common good”.
This suggests that leadership and leaders are not the same thing.
Effective leadership in public and nonprofit organizations and communities is a collective enterprise involving many people
playing different leader and follower roles at different times.
Often the word leader is applied to individuals in formal, and top, positions of authority—for example,
CEO, board chair, senior manager, president, executive director—within an organization.
The term can be applied to people who use both formal and informal authority, as well as other assets,
to help achieve worthy outcomes and contribute to societal well-being.
Note: The same people can be leaders and followers at different times over the course of a strategy change cycle.
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Important Responsibilities (or Paths) to take….
The following interconnected leadership roles or tasks are important if strategic planning and implementation are to be effective:
Understanding the context
Understanding the people involved, including oneself
Sponsoring the process
Championing the process
Facilitating the process
Fostering collective leadership
Using dialogue and deliberation to create a meaningful process, clarify mandates, articulate mission, identify strategic issues, develop effective strategies, and possibly develop a vision of success
Making and implementing policy decisions
Enforcing rules, settling disputes, and managing residual conflicts
Putting it all together and preparing for ongoing strategic change
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Understanding Self and Others
Understanding oneself and others is particularly important for developing the strength of character and insight that invigorates leadership
and increases the chances that strategic planning and implementation will help the organization.
Leaders should seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the people who are or should be involved in strategic planning and implementation,
including themselves.
Perhaps the most important strength is a passion for fulfilling the organization's mission and contributing to the well-being of multiple stakeholders.
Yet this strength must be coupled with a degree of humility and open-mindedness if a leader is to avoid the descent into self-righteousness and rigidity.
In addition, personal strengths include professional or technical competencies, interpersonal skills and networks, and a feel for complexity—that is, the ability to view
the organization from multiple perspectives and choose from a repertoire of appropriate behaviors.
In strategic planning, the personal qualities of moral integrity, self-efficacy, compassion, and courage are especially important in
helping participants develop the trust and determination to take risks, explore difficult issues and new strategies, and pursue what might be unpopular causes.
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What’s a Transformational Leader?
Transformational leadership is a theory of leadership where a leader works with teams to identify needed change, creating a vision to guide the change through inspiration, and executing the change in tandem with committed members of a group;
it is an integral part of the Full Range Leadership Model.
Transformational leadership serves to enhance the motivation, morale, and job performance of followers through a variety of mechanisms;
these include connecting the follower's sense of identity and self to a project and to the collective identity of the organization;
being a role model for followers in order to inspire them and to raise their interest in the project;
challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of followers, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance their performance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_leadership
Full Range Leadership Model
The Full Range of Leadership Model (FRLM) is a general leadership theory focusing on the behavior of leaders towards the workforce in different work situations. The FRLM relates transactional and transformational leadership style with laissez-faire leadership style.
Laissez-Faire is French for "Let them do (what they want)". This leadership style can be seen as the absence of leadership, and is characterized by an attitude avoiding any responsibility. Decision-making is left to the employees themselves, and no rules are fixed.
The term transactional leadership refers to the transactions between a leader and followers. Transactional leadership is a style of leadership in which leaders promote compliance by followers through both rewards and punishments.
In contrast to the two above mentioned leadership styles, transformational leadership follows a different, more long-term oriented philosophy:
Short-term, egotistic goals, are substituted by long-term, higher-ranked values and ideals.
This paradigm change usually increases commitment, self-confidence, and employee satisfaction.
The following six dimensions of transformational leadership have distinguish:
Role model
Future vision
Individual support
Promotion of group goals
Intellectual stimulation
High performance expectation
Sponsoring the Transformational Process
Process sponsors typically are top positional leaders.
They have enough prestige, power, and authority to commit the organization to undertaking strategic planning and to hold people accountable for doing so.
Sponsors are not necessarily involved in the day-to-day details of making strategic planning work—the champions do that—
but they do set the stage for success and pay careful attention to the progress of the process.
They have a vested interest in a successful outcome and do what they can to make sure it happens.
They also typically are important sources of knowledge about key strategic issues and effective strategies for addressing them.
The information they have about the organization and its environment is invaluable.
They also are likely to be especially knowledgeable about how to fit the process to key decision points so that
strategic planning dialogue and discussion can inform decisions in the relevant arenas.
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Championing the Process
The champions are the people who have primary responsibility for managing the strategic planning process day to day.
They are the ones who keep track of progress and also pay attention to all the details.
They model the kind of behavior they hope to get from other participants:
reasoned, diligent, committed, enthusiastic, and good-spirited pursuit of the common good.
Champions should keep the following guidelines in mind:
Keep strategic planning high on people's agendas.
Attend to the process without promoting specific solutions.
Think about what has to come together (people, tasks, information, reports) at or before key decision points.
Organize time, space, materials, and participation needed for the process to succeed.
Pay attention to the language used to describe strategic planning and implementation.
Keep rallying participants and pushing the process along.
Develop champions throughout the organization.
Be sensitive to power differences.
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Process Facilitators
Process facilitators are often helpful in moving a strategic planning process along because of their group process skills, the attention they can give to structuring and managing group interactions,
and the likelihood that they have no stake in the substantive outcomes of the process, particularly if they are outsiders.
The presence of a facilitator means that champions can be free to participate in substantive discussions without
having to worry too much about managing the group process.
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Facilitating the Process
Strategic planning facilitators should consider following these guidelines:
Know the strategic planning process and explain how it works at the beginning and at many points along the way.
Facilitators play a key role throughout in explaining to participants where they are, where they can head, and how they might get there.
Tailor the process to the organization and the groups involved.
Planning processes must be fit to the unique circumstances in which organizations (initiatives, programs, collaborations, communities) and groups find themselves.
Convey a sense of humor and enthusiasm for the process and help groups get unstuck.
By helping groups reframe their situations imaginatively, invent new options, channel conflict constructively, and tap hidden sources of courage, hope, and optimism, facilitators can provide or find important resources to help groups move forward
Ensure that participants rather than the facilitators are doing the work.
Skilled facilitators give participants many chances to interact in small groups, to produce idea-covered flip chart sheets and walls, stakeholder diagrams, strategy maps, reports, and presentations.
Press groups toward action and the assignment of responsibility for specific actions.
Part of keeping the process moving is to make sure that participants engage in timely action. If the whole process is devoted entirely to thinking and strategizing without taking action, people will quickly quit participating. Further, much effective learning only occurs in the aftermath of action.
Congratulate people whenever possible.
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What is Strategic Planning?
It can be defined as a deliberative, disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that
shape and guide what an organization (or other entity) is, what it does, and why.
Strategic planning can be thought of as a “way of knowing” intended to help leaders and managers discern what to do, how, and why.
Strategic planning can help leaders and managers successfully address major issues or challenges facing an organization (or some other entity),
and those issues or challenges not amenable to simple technical fixes.
As experience with this kind of deliberative approach has grown, a substantial and expanding inventory of
knowledge, concepts, procedures, tools, and techniques has developed to assist leaders and managers in their deliberations.
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A 10-STEP STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS
Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process
Identify organizational mandates
Clarify organizational mission and values
Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
Identify the strategic issues facing the organization
Formulate strategies to manage the issues
Review and adopt the strategic plan or plans
Establish an effective organizational vision
Develop an effective implementation process
Reassess strategies and the strategic planning process
Note: These 10 steps should lead deliberatively to actions, results, evaluation, and learning. It must be emphasized that these outcomes should emerge at each step in the process.
In other words, implementation and evaluation should not wait until the end of the process but rather should be an integral and ongoing part of it.
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Step 1: Initiating and Agreeing on a Strategic Planning Process
The purpose of the first step is to negotiate agreement among key internal (and perhaps external) decision makers or opinion leaders
about the overall strategic planning effort and the key planning steps.
The support and commitment of key decision makers are vital
if strategic planning in an organization is to succeed.
Further, the involvement of key decision makers outside the organization usually is crucial to the success of public and nonprofit programs
if implementation will involve multiple parties and organizations
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The agreement turns a general approach into a specific process design.
Creating an effective specific design requires the negotiators of the initial agreement to think strategically about the strategic planning process. The agreement should cover:
The purpose of the effort
A statement of desired outcomes (however sketchy) to be achieved
Preferred steps in the process and the way ongoing feedback and learning will be accomplished
The form and timing of reports
The role, functions, and membership of any group or committee empowered to oversee the effort, such as a strategic planning coordinating committee (SPCC)
The role, functions, and membership of the strategic planning team
A general sense of how stakeholders will be engaged over the course of the process
A general sense of how the information and communication technology (ICT) and social media will be used to help the process along (see Resource B)
The likely requirements for success
Any important limitations or boundaries on the effort
Commitment of resources necessary to proceed with the effort
Note: Some stakeholder analysis work will be needed in order to figure out whom to include in the series of initial agreements.
A stakeholder is defined as any person, group, or organization that can place a claim on an organization's (or other entity's) attention, resources, or output or that is affected by that output.
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Step 2: Identifying Organizational Mandates
The formal and informal mandates placed on the organization consist of the various “musts” it confronts—
that is, the various requirements, restrictions, expectations, pressures, and constraints it faces.
Actually, it is surprising how few organizations know precisely what they are (and are not) formally mandated to do.
Typically, few members of any organization have ever read, for example, the relevant legislation, policies, ordinances, charters, articles, and contracts that outline the organization's formal mandates.
Even if they have read these materials, too many strategic plans do not include explicit reference to many of the applicable formal mandates, so they may be overlooked.
In addition, many organizational members do not understand the informal mandates—
typically political in the broadest sense—that the organization faces.
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Step 3: Clarifying Organizational Mission and Values
An organization's mission, in tandem with its mandates, provides the organization's most obvious raison d'être and social justification for its existence.
An organization's mission and mandates also point the way toward the ultimate organizational end of creating public value at reasonable cost.
For a government, government agency, or nonprofit organization, this means
there must be identifiable social or political demands or needs that the organization seeks to fill.
Identifying the mission or purpose of the organization, however, does more than justify the organization's existence.
Clarifying purpose can eliminate a great deal of unnecessary conflict in an organization and help channel discussion and activity productively.
Agreement on purpose also defines the arenas within which the organization will collaborate or compete and, at least in broad outline, charts the future course of the organization.
Moreover, an important and socially justifiable mission is a source of inspiration and guidance to key stakeholders, particularly employees.
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Step 4: Assessing the Organization's External and Internal Environments
The planning team should explore the environment outside the organization to identify the opportunities and challenges (or threats) the organization faces.
It should explore the environment inside the organization to identify strengths and weaknesses.
Basically, “outside” factors are those the organization can't control, whereas “inside” factors are those it can.
Opportunities and challenges usually (though not necessarily) are more about the future than the present;
Strengths and weakness are more about the present than the future.
Note that communities are more likely to think in terms of assets rather than strengths.
The analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges (or threats) can be referred to as a SWOC/T analysis.
Being clear about what is can be an extraordinarily helpful prelude to discerning what ought to be
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Step 5: Identifying the Strategic Issues Facing an Organization
Strategic issues are fundamental policy questions or critical challenges affecting
the organization's mandates, mission and values, product or service level and mix, clients, users or payers, costs, financing, organization, or management.
Finding the best way to frame these issues typically requires considerable wisdom, dialogue, and deep understanding of organizational operations, stakeholder interests,
and external demands and possibilities.
The first four steps of the process are designed deliberately to slow things down so that there is enough information and interaction to
inform deliberations so that needed wisdom might emerge.
More colloquially, the process is designed to increase deliberators' knowledge so as to avoid too much bullshit.
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he [or she] is talking about.”
The process is designed to unfreeze people's thinking so that knowledge exploration, development, and learning might occur.
Strategic planning focuses on achieving the best fit between an organization and its environment.
Strategic issues, virtually by definition, involve conflicts of one sort or another.
The conflicts may involve ends (what); means (how or how much); philosophy (why);
location (where); timing (when); and who might be advantaged or disadvantaged by different ways of resolving the issue (who).
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Step 6: Formulating Strategies and Plans to Manage the Issues
A strategy is defined as a pattern of purposes, policies, programs, projects, actions, decisions, or resource allocations that define
what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it.
Strategies can vary by level, function, and time frame and obviously in terms of how well they perform
against expectations or requirements.
This definition is purposely broad in order to focus attention on the creation of consistency across
rhetoric (what people say),
choices (what people decide and are willing to pay for),
actions (what people do), and the consequences of those actions.
Effective strategy formulation and implementation processes link rhetoric, choices, actions, and consequences into
reasonably coherent and consistent patterns across levels, functions, and time.
They also will be tailored to fit an organization's culture,
even if the purpose of the strategy or strategies is to reconfigure that culture in some way.
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Step 7: Reviewing and Adopting the Strategies and Plan
Once strategies have been formulated, the planning team may need to obtain an official decision to adopt them and proceed with their implementation.
If the strategies are part of a formal strategic plan, this will almost certainly be needed.
This decision will help affirm the desired changes and move the organization toward reorganizing in the new pattern, where the knowledge exploration of the previous steps can be exploited.
The SPCC will need to approve the resulting strategies or plan, but relevant policy- and decision-making bodies and other implementing groups and organizations are
also likely to have to approve the strategies or plan, or at least parts of it, in order for implementation to proceed effectively.
In order to secure passage of any strategy or plan, it will be necessary to continue
to pay attention to the goals, concerns, and interests of all key internal and external stakeholders.
Finding or creating inducements that can be traded for support can also be useful. But there are numerous ways to defeat any proposal in formal decision-making arenas.
So it is important for the plan to be sponsored and championed by actors whose knowledge of how to negotiate the intricacies of the relevant arenas can help ensure passage.
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Step 8. Establishing an Effective Organizational Vision
In this step, the organization develops a description of what it should look like once it has successfully implemented its strategies and achieved its full potential. This description is the organization's vision of success.
Few organizations have such a description or vision, yet the importance of these descriptions has long been recognized by well-managed companies, organizational psychologists, and management theorists.
Such descriptions can include the organization's mission, its values and philosophy, basic strategies, its performance criteria, some important decision rules, and the ethical standards expected of all employees.
Some might question why developing a vision of success comes at this point in the process rather than much earlier. There are two basic answers to this question.
First, it does not have to come at this point for all organizations. Some organizations are able to develop a clearly articulated, agreed-upon vision of success much earlier in the process.
Communities often start with visioning exercises in order to develop enough of a consensus on purposes and values to guide issue identification and strategy formulation efforts, therefore indicates the many different points at which participants may find it useful to develop some sort of guiding vision.
Second, most organizations typically will not be able to develop a detailed vision of success until they have gone through several iterations of strategic planning—
if they are able to develop a vision at all.
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Step 9: Developing an Effective Implementation Process
Just creating a strategic plan is not enough. The changes indicated by the adopted strategies must be incorporated throughout the system by an action (or actions) plan in order for
them to be brought to life and for real value to be created for the organization and its stakeholders.
Action plans should detail the following:
Implementation roles and responsibilities of oversight bodies, organizational teams or task forces, and individuals
Expected results and specific objectives, requirements, and milestones; or alternatively, clear principles to guide the effort in situations of high complexity and significant feedback effects
Specific action steps and relevant details
Schedules
Resource requirements and sources
A communication process
Review, monitoring, and midcourse correction procedures to build in capacity for ongoing learning
Accountability procedures
It is important to build in enough sponsors, champions, and other personnel—along with enough time, money, attention, administrative and support services, and other resources—to ensure successful implementation.
You must “budget the plan” wisely to ensure that implementation goes well.
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Step 10: Reassessing Strategies and the Strategic Planning Process
Once the implementation process has been under way for some time, it is important to review the strategies and the strategic planning process
as a prelude to a new round of strategic planning.
Attention should be focused on successful strategies and whether they should be maintained, replaced by other strategies, or terminated for one reason or another.
Unsuccessful strategies should be replaced or terminated.
Effectiveness in this step really does depend on effective organizational learning, which means taking a hard look at what is really happening,
being open to new information, wisely assessing the situation, and committing to mindful organizing.
Mindful organizing is based on five principles:
really trying to understand what might count as failure,
reluctance to simplify,
sensitivity to operations,
commitment to resilience,
and deference to expertise
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Tailoring the Process to Specific Circumstances
The Strategy Change Cycle is a general approach to strategic planning and management.
Like any planning and management process, strategic planning must be tailored carefully to specific situations if it is to be useful.
More generally, the Strategy Change Cycle's causal logic is as follows:
(1) desired outcomes (including creating public value)
(2) can be produced or facilitated by actions (for example, issue identification, strategy formulation, and implementation activities),
(3) whose production or facilitation in turn is guided by process design features (for example, the design of forums for deliberation, choices regarding stakeholder engagement, guidelines and limits on analysis, connection to decision points, and specific planning steps),
(4) which are tailored to process context features (relevant aspects of the internal and external environment).
This means that upstream process design—and particularly that which is embodied in the initial agreement to proceed—should be tailored
to the context and informed by downstream requirements for success, including those linked directly to achieving desired outcomes.
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In Concussion
The Strategy Change Cycle is, therefore, not a recipe, cookbook, computer program, algorithm,
or type of auto repair manual.
It is more like a guide to collaboratively and deliberatively design a vehicle and the journey you will take using the vehicle, including
deciding (ultimately, if not initially) exactly where you want to go.
The Strategy Change Cycle is also not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
it is a referent approach that will help you keep in mind the logic of strategic planning so that you can adapt and make use of that logic in specific situations as circumstances demand and warrant.
The Strategy Change Cycle as an abstract approach helps you work deliberatively with other people to make change;
what the approach means in practice will be worked out via participation and deliberation with others over the course of the process.
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Specifically, the Strategy Change Cycle will help remind you of the importance of:
Having a process sponsor(s) and a process champion(s)
Carefully designing and using a series of settings for deliberation—formal and informal forums, arenas, and courts
Emphasizing the development of the initial agreement(s)
Intensely attending to stakeholders via careful analysis and effective engagement
Gaining clarity about mission and mandates and knowing the difference between the two
Understanding the organization's internal and external environments
Focusing on the identification and clarification of strategic issues and knowing there is an array of available approaches for doing so
Seeing strategies as a response to strategic issues and knowing there are many approaches to formulating strategies, including incorporating useful aspects of existing or emerging strategies
Attending to the requirements for successful strategy implementation and evaluation
Building capacity for ongoing implementation, learning, and strategic change
Periodically reassessing strategies and the strategic planning process as a prelude to the next round of strategic planning
Remaining flexible throughout the process while still paying attention to all necessary requirements that must be met along the way and the logic that links them
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