WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Strategic Planning Skills
Strategic Planning Skills
As the modern workplace continues to evolve, business models must be reviewed regularly to identify an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, set objectives, and prepare for uncertainties. Individuals with strategic planning skills are highly sought-after by businesses looking to reach new heights.
Strategic planning skills are critical in making informed decisions, setting performance metrics, managing crises, and evaluating performance. Developing strategic planning skills opens the door to diverse career opportunities in any industry that requires planning, reorganization, and optimal performance.
This guide will focus on strategic planning skills, why you need them, and how you can conveniently acquire them and apply them in the workplace.
What Are Strategic Planning Skills?
Strategic planning skills refer to the expertise needed to develop sustainable and obtainable long-term goals for a business or an organization and provide the road map to achieve them. These skills may involve analyzing business plans, thinking critically, prioritizing tasks, and making decisions to help businesses scale.
Strategic planning is the process of evaluating the needs of a business, setting specific goals, establishing a plan of action to achieve the goals, and measuring the results. This evaluation and thinking process helps you identify weaknesses within a business and identify opportunities for growth.
Why Are Strategic Planning Skills Important?
With strategic planning skills, you can review business models and formulate a long-term sustainable vision to help businesses remain profitable. You can implement procedures that help identify your institution’s strengths, weaknesses, workforce performance, and new investment opportunities.
Let’s explore why strategic management skills are important:
- Goal clarity: As a strategic planner, you can develop specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, and clear goals. Setting clear goals helps your workforce understand what you intend to achieve and how their specific roles tie to the goal.
- Focused decision-making: You can analyze existing business models to identify their strengths and weaknesses. The findings help you make informed decisions on how to solve business challenges and find new opportunities and the best actions to help the business grow.
- Long-term sustainability: Strategic planning skills are critical in designing business models that stand the test of time. This includes implementing procedures that can aid the business in using, managing, and maintaining its resources responsibly to continuously remain competitive in the market.
- Transparency: As a business owner, you can set and use ethical procedures in all your dealings and provide relevant data whenever asked to. Openness and honesty enhance customer relationships, build trust, improve brand reputation, and motivate your workforce.
- Organizational culture: You can involve all stakeholders of a business in crafting the bigger picture of the business. You create a common voice and sets of belief, values, and guidelines and influence how you conduct business in a competitive landscape.
- Long-term vision: As an organization leader, you can write down a comprehensive plan defining what you want to achieve in the future and the framework to get there. You can set multiple relevant, measurable, and attainable goals and implement them holistically to drive your business toward achieving its long-term success.
- Accountability: As a leader, you become responsible for your business's long-term performance and sustainability. You can structure a clear plan defining the roles of each employee to achieve collective productivity and realize your business’ full potential.
What Are the Benefits of Having Strategic Planning Skills?
Though thousands of businesses are founded each year, only about 50% of new startups survive for five or more years. This data validates the value of strategic planning in creating measurable, attainable, and sustainable goals for the long-term success of a business.
Here are the benefits of having strategic planning skills:
- Self-confidence: Competence in strategic planning skills gives you a sense of self-belief, trusting your ability to develop long-term, sustainable goals. Overall, it helps you identify your strengths, foster business relationships, make informed decisions, and take up bigger roles in life.
- Personal growth: Strategic planning skills improve reasoning, behavior, abilities, confidence, and decision-making. You focus on setting goals that expand your knowledge, self-awareness, and accountability.
- Goal achievement: Strategic planning is the foundation upon which individuals, businesses, and organizations build up their goals. By developing an actionable plan, you can strive to execute small measurable goals that make up the bigger vision.
- Customer satisfaction: Customers are the lifeblood of any business. You can leverage strategic planning skills to implement procedures that personalize user experience, offer multiple customer support channels, respond to customer queries and feedback professionally, and follow up with customers. These strategies improve customer satisfaction, convincing more people to be loyal to your brand.
- Adaptation to change: Change is inevitable. As a leader, you must be prepared for risks and uncertainties by designing flexible goals that can be restructured to accommodate change. This could mean having an emergency fund account, data backup plans, or trying a new product or service.
Examples of Strategic Planning Skills in the Workplace
In the workplace, strategic planning skills are critical in evaluating a business's performance, profitability, financial position, customer relations, and identifying areas that need more resources.
Here are examples of how you can use strategic planning skills in the workplace:
Make Informed Decisions
Business managers can evaluate business models, day-to-day guidelines, and long-term goals to support organizational decision-making. For example, accountants can audit financial statements to check whether the business is profitable and make appropriate decisions on the way forward.
Task Prioritization
Organizations can create a list of tasks and execute them depending on their urgency, importance, and available resources. Task prioritization helps businesses beat deadlines, take on more orders, and enhance productivity.
Performance Evaluation
Businesses can use surveys or other procedures to collect, measure, and analyze the productivity and potential of their workforce. This helps managers assign roles and set clear, specific, and attainable goals for every employee.
Setting Performance Metrics
Managers can set up targets for their teams and design procedures to measure the quality, quantity, efficiency, and productivity of every employee. The results are compared to the targets to see if the employees achieved specific goals.
Crisis Management
Companies develop strategies to identify potential threats to the business and implement effective preventive or control measures. For instance, businesses use firewall software to keep their networks secure. A business can use cybersecurity specialists to stop attacks and restore normal network traffic performance during cybercrime attempts.
How Can I Use Strategic Planning Skills?
Strategic planning is among the most sought-after professional skills today. With new startups and existing businesses trying to maintain their competitive advantage, there's a demand for professionals with strategic planning skills to help develop long-term sustainable business models.
Here are various ways you can use strategic planning skills:
- Business management: As a business manager, you can use innovative and strategic thinking to analyze different business environments. You can set performance metrics, allocate resources, and evaluate results to measure the productivity and efficiency of individuals or teams.
- Solving business problems: You can analyze business models in real time, identify bottlenecks, and help businesses implement the best practices to realize growth.
- Managing human capital: As a business administrator, you can leverage management strategies and tools to maximize workforce contribution and create organizational excellence.
- Making informed decisions: You can use analytics from employee performance, financial statements, and sales reports to influence decisions about the goals of the businesses.
- Optimizing processes: By implementing strategies that motivate employees, improve efficiency in your business, and reduce operational costs, you can maximize productivity and profitability.
- Identifying opportunities and risks: You can filter through business models and strategic procedures to identify untapped trends that present new opportunities or patterns that pose risks to the business.
How Can I Learn Strategic Planning Skills?
WGU's School of Business offers specialized degree programs like a B.S. in Finance, an M.S. in Management and Leadership, and an MBA in IT Management. Additionally WGU offers programs in IT and healthcare that focus on strategic planning skills. These degrees are designed to help you learn the best strategic planning and management tools that prepare you for the diverse job market.
In our degree programs, you’ll be able to:
- Analyze the current business environment and challenges to build a strategic plan.
- Apply strategic planning frameworks that include basic phases, such as analysis or assessment, strategy formulation, and strategy execution.
- Define success criteria for organizational objectives.
- Define the tactics required to make progress toward the long-term plans for an organization.
- Determine goals and results of strategic plans.
- Develop a master plan for decision-making regarding healthcare issues.
- Develop a mission, vision, goals, and objectives to guide an institution's activities, budgeting, and resource allocation.
- Develop business strategies for the three time-standard frames: long-term, medium-term, and short-term.
- Develop human resource (HR) strategy, vision, and goals that align with and support the organization's strategy and goals.
- Facilitate strategic planning in a process in which organizational leaders determine their vision for the future and identify their goals and objectives (e.g., profitability goals) for the organization.
- Forecast the human resources required to achieve a business objective.
- Identify the ways in which the human resource (HR) function can support the organization's strategy and goals.
- Implement human resource (HR) strategy, vision, and goals that align with and support the organization's strategy and goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
By incorporating strategic planning skills into daily work routines, you can prioritize tasks, evaluate performance, adapt to change, set clear sustainable goals, and manage crises.
Yes, strategic planning skills can help individuals and teams make better decisions. They can measure performance or scrutinize existing procedures and goals to make informed decisions about the long-term sustainability of their businesses.
To enhance strategic planning skills, Individuals can enroll in programs that offer strategic planning courses, such as a B.S. in Business Management at WGU.
They can also read books, articles, and case studies on strategic planning, and participate in strategic projects or initiatives for hands-on experience. Collaborating with peers, mentors, and experts in the field offers learning from personal experiences and expertise.
