Top Leadership Blind Spots: Vision and Planning

This session will be focused on the following leadership tools:

Personal Vision

Are you focused on personal dreams and priorities?

Is your vision for the business in conflict with your personal dreams and aspirations?

Do you need to privately review your vision every year to accommodate changes that may have occurred?

A personal vision statement is a written description of the vision for your life. It helps guide you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. A meaningful personal vision statement always begins with this current moment in time—now. It might be appropriate for your personal vision statement to look six years out or to look two or three decades into the future. You may want to do both. It all depends on your situation and your current stage in life.

“Highly successful people know that there is a beginning and an end to this trip. For some reason, some people think too many things are forever.” —David Sandler

Building the Organization's Vision, Mission, Values & Beliefs

• What is your organizational vision?
• What is your organizational mission?
• What are your organizational values?
• What are your organizational beliefs?

Identify what and where you want your organization to be in the future, who needs your organization, and how your values and beliefs will fulfill your mission and vision. Vision is the primary focus and end-point of planning. Without a vision, there is no need to plan and no point in planning.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else!” —Yogi Berra

Analysis of the External Environment

Acknowledge that growth and success are impossible unless you look objectively at the forces affecting your current and future opportunities. Analyze the reality in which your organization operates.

Participants will be able to:

• Identify the key external factors, both positive and negative, likely to affect their business over the next three to six years. ?
• Identify the key strengths and weaknesses that differentiate them from their competitors. ?
• Identify the key opportunities to pursue, as well as the most important outside threats to mitigate. ?
• Revisit the organizational vision to ensure it is in alignment with the discovered information before moving forward.??

Why Analyze Your Business Environment?

• Leaders of organizations of excellence make analyzing the company’s external environment a major priority.
• They look at all the factors that are currently affecting the business and capable of causing adverse effects on it: economic, social, technological?

“The first responsibility of a great leader is to define reality!” - Bill Mathews

They know that without this understanding they can’t possibly make good business decisions about the best ways to increase the likelihood of organizational success. Defining reality means taking a continuous, candid look at the current and future business environment.

The SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a critical planning tool. It looks at the organization’s known strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, and also at the threats that can affect the company. Leaders of organizations of excellence complete an in-depth SWOT analysis at least once per year and review it quarterly. New information may require a modification to the plan, or may require that the plan be rewritten altogether.

A successful SWOT analysis has the following attributes:

• It is completed on the company as a whole.
• It can also be completed for each product/service or market segment.
• It should be limited to the top three strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats per product/service or market segment.
• Only facts—not opinions—are used in the analysis.
• It incorporates feedback from the management team, employees, and key allies (such as trusted customers and vendors).