- Take Aim! Company Scope: A strategic planning guide for all leadership decisions. Your company’s one sheet. Works best as guidance for the team and an ongoing collaborative process with leaders. Communicate throughout your entire organization for alignment and growth.
- Value Proposition: A strategic planning tool that can also be used for marketing. Works best as a collaboration with leadership team members as part of the ongoing strategic & communication plan for the entire organization. Craft with your leadership team then work on how to effectively deliver this value and communicate it to customers and prospects. Bonus: Use from the employee standpoint to better inform your recruiting and retention tactics for the best team members.
- Strategic Anchors: Great guide for overall strategic direction, from The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Works best as a collaborative, facilitated activity with the entire leadership team. Pre-work is recommended. Create lists of deliberate ways your company performs each function. List unique methods and evaluate what themes and patterns emerge. Choose the most prevalent three to create alignment on future decisions and aid strategic planning sessions.
- Porter’s Five Forces Worksheet: Great tool for evaluating competitive pressures for overall strategy or specifics products/service offerings. On this worksheet from Best Progress, LLC, the higher the score, the more competitive pressure exists. Develop action plans to combat competitive pressures or evaluate additional product/service options.
- Performance-Potential Matrix: Used for analyzing products, services, markets, branches, stores, divisions, customers, team members and leaders. Best used as a collaborative process gathering input from key leaders and team members who have direct knowledge of the items in the category being analyzed. Map your items and be sure to map again at a later date to track movement.
- Ideal Profile: A tool for determining alignment of a specific product/service offering, role, or team member to the company culture. It starts with a comparison of the best and worst customers or team members to identify the common traits on both sides of the equation. Then formulate an action plan for finding & retaining the best and avoiding the wrong fits.
- Ideal Work Week: A tool for personal effectiveness and time management, best individually or with a direct report. Introduced by Ben Gill, this helps leaders design a schedule with a focus on balancing the different roles. Use it to schedule your priorities, and stop prioritizing your schedule!
- Start-Stop-Continue: For personal, departmental or overall company improvements. Focusing on a general or specific topic, this can be done individually and collaboratively. The key is to make sure you have equal tasks in each of the three categories. Then, use it to develop action plans.
- SWOT: For evaluating departmental and company growth strategies, best as a collaboration with leaders. Make sure you don’t reverse items in opposing categories, come up with new thoughts. Bonus: Have each department head complete this annually for their area of the business and share with the rest of the leadership team for input and action plan generation.
- HOSHIN: For prioritization on your most critical initiatives. Developed by Matthew Cross, this works best as a targeted exercise, individually or collaboratively, with someone facilitating the process. With a team, it helps you narrow down the most critical initiatives, then clearly gives you the starting point that can have maximum impact.