Harness the Power of Strength-Based Strategic Planning
Employees have more confidence to envision the future when they carry forward the best practices of the past. Here’s how you can help them do that.
Strategic planning enables you as a leader in your catalog company to identify long-term goals and mobilize your group’s resources to achieve sustainable results. Strategic planning also can be a powerful tool to identify and communicate your company’s core operating values and aspirations.
However, all too often, strategic planning can be a frustrating exercise that offers little long-term impact or meaning for the average employee. How can you ensure that your planning efforts are effective, energizing and contribute to your company’s success? In most cases, you need to change your model and focus on leveraging your existing strengths.
Historically, organizations have adopted a problem-solving model for improving performance — but this assumes that organizations somehow are problems to be solved. The process involves identifying substandard performance and its root causes, brainstorming solutions, and developing remedial action plans. No doubt, your intention in these cases is to lift sub-standard performance to an acceptable level. This is a good way to solve a specific problem, but it doesn’t lead to dramatic innovation and change.
Strength-based planning leverages the best practices and collective, compelling vision for an organization as the basis of the planning effort. It assumes that every organization does something well. The key to your company’s long-term success is to identify those strengths both in terms of core competencies and moments of excellence. The planning effort then develops your organization, processes and systems to enable those exceptional moments of high performance to be the norm.
Appreciative Inquiry
One highly effective model for strength-based planning is Appreciative Inquiry. This is a capacity-building approach that builds on your employees’ strengths and your company’s assets to create an empowering vision of the future that leads to action. Appreciative Inquiry typically encompasses a cycle that includes the following processes:
Discovery. Inquire into exceptionally positive moments.
Dream. Share the stories and life-giving forces.
Design. Create shared images of a preferred future.
Delivery. Innovate and improvise ways to create that future.
The power of Appreciative Inquiry is rooted in your focus on a positive, energizing topic. Organizations move in the direction of where they put their attention. Focusing on problems will yield more problems. But focusing on strengths will yield more success and innovation. For example, the leverage in studying backorders vs. high order fulfillment, or causes of soft sales vs. profitable marketing campaigns will yield entirely different results.
Effective topics for catalogers have included: igniting leadership at every level in an organization; creating innovative copy and design; and optimizing margins throughout the supply chain. Once you’ve determined your planning topics, you can begin putting into action your best practices.
Discovery Phase
The goal: Learn about employees’ exceedingly positive moments.
The purpose: The discovery phase’s purpose is to inquire about and draw out employees’ peak moments, best practices and examples of excellence in their job performance.
To do: Interview employees and ask them to share stories of their best experiences related to your company’s values. For example, ask employees to describe:
- the best moments of coordination between departments,
- examples of inspirational leadership they’ve seen, and/or
- descriptions of the best catalog design collaborations.
These employee stories will generate comprehensive and compelling descriptions of what’s working well and what gives life to your catalog company.
Dream Phase
The goal: Create a compelling image of your company’s future.
The purpose: This process creates a sense of possibilities rooted in experience — rather than the typical blue sky brainstorming sessions based purely on speculation. Employees have more confidence to envision the future when they carry forward the best parts of the past.
To do: Ask employees to share their hopes and highest aspirations for the company. These images generally are grounded in the reality of what actually has happened.
Creating positive, powerful visions and dreams empowers people to take action, particularly when you interview employees throughout the company. This is critical to the successful implementation of the plan.
Design Phase
The goal: Create an organization to achieve the desired future.
The purpose: Once the future vision for your company is articulated, you’ll want to create a solid, strategic plan to achieve it.
To do: Distill elements of the plan into broad initiatives such as increase sales, improve margin management or achieve operational efficiency. Then ask employees to recommend the ideal organization, processes, systems and investments to successfully achieve the plan. Consider all ideas, and allow any employee to share perspectives on possible solutions. Evaluate recommendations in terms of potential effectiveness, impact on the company and return on investment.
While this phase is tangible and strategic, it’s still fueled by an enthusiastic collective vision of the future based on past success.
Delivery Phase
The goal: Develop a sustainable model to implement change.
The purpose: Mobilize your entire company to achieve the future that was articulated in the earlier steps.
To do: Invite each employee to identify ways in which he or she can contribute to a successful implementation of the plan.
Delegate throughout the company responsibilities for managing the myriad initiatives. This creates a shared sense of ownership in the plan’s success. Also, cross-departmental collaboration can be tremendously motivating and may establish stronger internal working relationships.
Monitor at least monthly the company’s progress toward achieving the plan. Participants can modify and improvise the strategic initiatives throughout the year as your business changes and develops.
Appreciative Inquiry Questions to Ask Employees
Start small by incorporating Appreciative Inquiry questions into staff meetings. Build on successes, and infuse the philosophy into every aspect of planning and management. Following are a few Appreciative Inquiry questions to ask your staff:
1. Share a story about a high point, a peak experience you’ve had working with the company. Or describe a time when the company was functioning at its very best.
2. Share a story about when you were most proud, were excited and involved. Describe how you felt, and what made the situation possible.
3. Without being humble, describe what you value most about yourself, your work and the organization.
4. If you had three wishes to strengthen the health, vitality, competence and success of our company, what would they be?
Other examples of Appreciative Inquiry questions on specific topics include:
Partnership. Organizations, at their best, encourage exceptional partnerships in which everyone is aligned and sharing responsibility in the company’s success. Partnerships require honesty, trust, respect and a focus on common interest, as well as a willingness to respect differences and agree to disagree. Exceptional partnerships will result when all parties mutually gain from the relationship.
Questions to ask employees:
1. Describe a time when you felt the greatest sense of alignment and partnership among our internal departments. What happened? How did this make our collective effort more successful?
2. Imagine all the possibilities for new and enhanced partnerships among our internal departments. What are the three most compelling opportunities for partnership that you see — those which promise the most unprecedented results for both you and the organization?
Operational Excellence. No doubt, product fulfillment during the holiday 2004 season required an incredible collective effort from all your departments.
Of course, there were many successes, as well as opportunities for continued learning. Extraordinary organizations build on their successes for sustainable growth and leverage past challenges for continued improvement. Questions to ask your staff:
1. As you look back at the holiday 2004 season, there were many ups and downs, peaks and valleys. Please reflect on one of your high points in the season. Can you remember a time that stands out for you, a time when you felt most effective, engaged or proud of your contributions?
2. Describe some of the season’s operational highlights, moments that demonstrated excellence in planning, execution or coordination between areas that make you especially proud?
3. Imagine it’s three years from now and the catalog effort completely reflects your grandest vision of operational excellence. All systems, processes and the organization are operating at their peak. Describe what’s happening. What are three key changes that have had the greatest impact on the coordination, operations and profitability?
Conclusion
By taking these steps you will join the many other organizations I’ve seen that have transformed employee morale, improved effectiveness and increased bottom-line profitability by leveraging their internal strengths to create a powerful future.
How Appreciative Inquiry is Used by Catalogers
Appreciative Inquiry is a capacity-building approach that builds on your employees’ strengths and your company’s assets to create an empowering vision of the future that leads to action. It has been used effectively in catalog companies for:
- strategic planning,
- building internal capacity,
- engaging customer feedback,
- developing merchandise assortments,
- energizing catalog creative and
- building strong organizations.
John Kinsella has 22 years of experience in executive management at high-profile retail companies including Williams-Sonoma and Smith & Hawken. His consulting practice draws upon his expertise in strategic planning, operations management, leadership development, marketing and organizational development. You can contact him at (707) 888-8310.
