If your financial year ends on 30 June, in March and April you are likely reflecting on the current year and planning for the next one. If you’re really on top of things, you’ve nearly completed your strategic planning and are preparing to update your strategic risk assessment.
Either way, your organisation’s strategic performance is on your mind.
As part of this, you may be realising that, based on your results, the current year’s plan was too ambitious. You are concerned that you will need to carry some things into the next financial year, on top of the new things expected of you or previously announced.
Your leadership team may be feeling overwhelmed even before the new year has begun. They are wondering how they can pile on more to the plates of their already stretched employees.
HOW DID YOU GET HERE?
It may have been due to a lack of clarity. Perhaps your plan was too vague, making it unclear how it should unfold in real life and fit with existing commitments. This made it difficult for employees to understand what the plan means for them, how they fit into the picture and what their work priorities should be, all affecting the plan’s execution.
Perhaps it was due to a lack of focus, making the plan too aspirational. Instead of clear alignment with its purpose and vision, the organisation was trying to do ‘all the things’, solve ‘all the problems’ and provide ‘all the services’…and all at the same time.
It may have been due to a lack of discipline. Even though you established a strategic plan and a way forward, you were guilty of ‘shiny object syndrome’. You kept going off into different directions, taking on the next new shiny initiative without testing it against your current plan and resourcing.
There may have been a lack of monitoring and review. Performance reporting was either absent or wasn’t adequately used to adjust the plan or manage stakeholder expectations along the way.
SO, WHAT IS AN ORGANISATION TO DO?
One way to deal with overcommitment is to throw money at the problem: seek additional funding, hire more employees or outsource some of the work to consultants or new business partners.
An obvious issue with this solution is that we live in a world of limited resources. You may struggle to find sustainable sources of funding or to employ and retain quality staff to assist you.
More importantly, even if you increase the amount of resources at your disposal, there is always the risk of diluting leadership’s attention.
No matter how many employees or consultants you have, all of the organisation’s strategies eventually escalate up to senior management, where the real accountability lies. There is only so much they can focus on and track, especially if some strategies do not fully and clearly align with the organisation’s purpose.
Diluting leadership’s attention is especially risky for organisations that are already going through significant change or whose maturity level requires that they embed existing strategies before they can adequately tackle new ones.
BUT THERE IS A BETTER WAY.
Consider using your end-of-year wrap-up and future planning to commit to less.
Yes, I know that this is easier said than done. But you can start by going ‘back to basics’ and prioritising strategies or commitments:
that are ‘show-stoppers’, or things that you need to meet to keep your doors open, either in terms of generating income, meeting key compliance requirements or maintaining a good reputation
that fully and clearly align with your purpose and will get you closer to your vision
that actually bring results, based on actual data.
This will also help you identify the commitments that are the result of someone’s personal agenda or shiny object syndrome, as well as ones with insufficient data about their effectiveness. These are the things you can consider putting on hold, deferring to a later period or de-implementing altogether.
And for the things that you do want to commit to, make sure you understand what they will require and how you will go about them. This will give you a more realistic view of what you can get done in a certain period of time and help you communicate a clear roadmap to your employees.
LESS IS MORE.
But reducing commitments is not easy. And it’s not always fun either.
It’s especially difficult for leaders that are ambitious, future-focussed, strategic thinkers. Their natural approach to planning is to motivate and energise employees and other stakeholders by setting ambitious goals, often underestimating the time and effort required to achieve them or overestimating the organisation’s capacity to do so.
But the benefits of committing to less are threefold. It helps you ensure that the activities you are engaging in bring meaningful results. It removes distractions, allowing employees to focus on the things that really matter. Further, this level of clarity and focus builds employees’ confidence and energises them to achieve even more.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post.