Barbara Mutedzi
How can you make your business, your department and or your team’s strategy clear, transferable and translatable to all areas of your business, department each person in your team? By creating an Actionable Strategy.
An Actionable Strategy, asks you to answer 5 questions. Take out a pen and paper:
⚡️ Question 1: What is the Purpose of your business, team and or department? Why are you here?
⚡️ Question 2: What is the Vision of your business? That is, the long term goal?
For your strategy to be actionable, it is important to translate Vision into Long term goals. You do this by first of all changing Question 2 to:
⚡️ What do you Envision all aspects of your business, department and team to look like? Next step is to break this question down further by asking:
⚡️ Question 2.1: ‘Knowing that we envision….,this is what we would like to accomplish, in x number of years in all areas of the business, department and team. List what these areas are so you are clear.
⚡️ Question 3: Now that we know our long term goals, and by virtue of having listed them in question 2, we also have a timeline, what are the actual Mission Activities we need to engage in, to support these goals?
What you are doing here, is breaking the long term goals into actionable activities to be completed in each year, quarter, month, week and even day. This gives you a ‘To Do’ list with activity + timeline
⚡️ Question 4: What are our Values? How are we going to embody them in all that we do? It is not about having the values printed and posted in your space, and or memorized, but actually embodying them.
This speaks to the way that you do what you do. The way in which you do what you do, cultivates your culture, your character and personality of your brand.
⚡️ Question 5: How do I create a document that I can share with everyone, one that we can also use as a monitoring and evaluation + performance evaluation matrix? Put together an Implementation plan. This is how:
List all the mission activities in one column going down. Next to each mission activity, place the time that it is supposed to be completed by.
Next to each timeline, place the ideal resources needed to accomplish this task by this designated time.
Once you have the ideal resources, then list the resources you currently have, so you can at least start the activities.
The journey is to be resourceful with the resources you currently have. Instead of waiting until you have all the resources to begin.
If you are to seek funding and support, or are needing to use your profit to re-finance your business, the gap you see between the ideal resources you need and the resources you currently have, will help you see what financial, talent, infrastructure etc…support you need as you go along.
Real-Life Example
I used to work for Population Services International (PSI) as a Qualitative Research Expert. Research is my other love. One of the most successful things I did for myself and my team when I was there, was the ask the question:
Why are we here? And what is expected of us?
Our role was to carry out research studies that supported new and national public health programs and products; as well as to carry out monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for programs that were already in effect.
We knew the programs and products that were already running, making it easy to set up M&E activities over designated timelines specific to these programs.
Most of the new programs, were established right at the beginning of the year, making it easy to also schedule most of them in, or at least leave room in the annual calendar for their inception.
Part of my role was as the ‘communication bridge’ between the research and program departments. It was important that we all worked in tangent with each other, so that we were all aligning to the organization’s purpose.
Knowing the research, monitoring and evaluation activities that needed to be carried out for the year and or quarter, made it easy to know what needed to be completed by when, by whom and with what resources.
I took out a manilla folder (I am a visual person), and I did the following: In column one, I listed all the studies to be completed in order of when they needed to be completed by. I double checked these dates with the program departments.
In column 2, I listed the expected dates of completion. In column 3, I placed the required resources + resources we currently had in column 4.
In the resources section, this included the other people I needed to work with, from the department administrator, the leader as well as other qualitative researchers to achieve the designated activities.
I placed this large manilla document on the wall behind me, so that everyone who walked into the office could also clearly see what needed to be achieved by when, by whom and how.
This process, made working together as a team and department – clear, focused, easily translatable and transferable to everyone involved.
When all departments and teams in an organization align to the overall purpose and vision of the organization, this reduces siloed activities, misuse of resources, whilst opening up for quick pivot as needed and transformational growth of the organization.
*Barbara Mutedzi is a life coach
