Strategic Planning for the General Manager

There are many obvious advantages to planning strategically for both the organization and the manager. Strategic planning provides guidance for an organization. It makes the manager more alert to changes occurring within the organization and the business environment and it allows managers to be more open to change. Strategic planning also provides a rationale for the allocation of resources, it allows the manager to steer resources into areas of the organization that are necessary for or supportive of the strategy, for example putting people into teams. Strategies provide unity in an organization by ensuring that decisions made in the different departments are related to each other. In addition, planning strategically creates a proactive stance for the organization, allowing it to be proactive rather than reactive and showing its employees that it knows where it is going.

For strategic planning to work the General Manager needs to be both an administrator and an entrepreneur. These involve very different sets of skills and key tasks.

Entrepreneurial skills and tasks for the general manager:
Be innovative: develop and find new initiatives
Competitiveness: develop a level of competitiveness
Deal with threats: Look at possible threats to the organization and put strategies in place to deal with them
Promote innovation: promote a style of management in the organization that includes creativity and innovation
Cross fertilize: allocate and re-allocate resources (human, technical and financial) at various levels within the organization
Add and subtract: know how to add or subtract business units to or from the organization and its business and know what to add or take away
Know your business environment: ensure that your strategy is evolving in line with the environment the business is in

Administrative skills and tasks for the business manager:
Make it work: use strategic planning to ensure that the organization is functional, that it works and is efficient
Reward: link reward systems to your strategic objectives
Motivate: stimulate productivity and efficiency, motivate staff and be understanding
Correct: put in place corrective actions for poor performance
Disperse: diffuse the strategy throughout the organization, through for example meetings with the different departments, reports etc.

There are five tasks for the general manager in planning strategically:

1. To develop the concept of the business' mission
2. To translate the mission into short, medium and long term objectives
3. To craft a strategy that fits the organization
4. To implement the strategy
5. To evaluate the strategy

Learn more about this author, Catherine Leahy.
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