Great managers – the power of effective business planning

By now you are:

• Recruiting, screening and hiring self-motivated, emotionally intelligent people who fit your culture;
• Properly training them and testing for self-sufficiency;
• Properly assessing them and enabling them to maximize their self-sufficiency in their roles; and
• Working towards spending your time engaged in the highest value activities as dictated by your job description.

So what’s next? Proper business planning.

What is the power of proper business planning?

1. It provides the opportunity to update your vision for your team in a way that (hopefully) obtains buy-in from everyone in your team (i.e. they believe in and are excited by the vision);
2. It sets achievable and measurable goals for your team that they will feel proud to accomplish and that can be celebrated when accomplished;
3. It provides a plausible roadmap as to how to reach these goals in a way that everyone in the team understands, and they believe in the roles that they play as part of the plan; and
4. It empowers everyone in your team.

Point number four is one that is often missed when undertaking a business plan. One of the key factors in maximizing employee engagement and an employee’s job satisfaction is that they feel that they are empowered to carry out their role. Proper business planning provides a fantastic opportunity to start this process.

Why do I say this? Let’s start with defining what empowerment means. One of the best definitions that I have found is as follows:

“Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one’s own destiny.”

One of the key factors in taking control of one’s own destiny is the ability to determine one’s goals and the actions to take and resources needed to achieve them (i.e. the business plan). Proper business planning goes to the heart of this for every member of a team including the manager and his/her subordinates. Yet, quite often, business planning is done in a way that does not pay enough attention to this particular benefit from planning.

Every person in a team should be able to contribute to the business plan for a team in a way that drafts a personal business plan for them as well. Many people do not know how to do this and, accordingly, will need support from their manager in order to become self-sufficient in this skill. You have undoubtedly heard the saying, “Failure to plan is a plan to fail.” This applies to all employees and is the starting point to empowerment.

Should you have any questions or feedback regarding the content of this article please email me. ©

By Terry Thompson, Surrey, BC, CYBF Mentor, tthompson112@roadrunner.com