Tag Archives: Planning for the future

Strategic Assessments: Find and Leverage Your Strengths

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Over the years, I have participated in a number of leadership assessments. Almost all emphasize the importance of leading from strength. Leaders are taught to find other people or to implement systems to compensate for weaknesses. It is appropriate that strengths are the first thing to be assessed as an organization begins planning for the future. Strengths are internal factors that help achieve success. Strategic planners begin by identifying sources of data. Determine what areas of your organization you seek to examine to find your strengths. Identify measures of strengths. Understand why leading from strength is important. When leaders complete this exercise, they will be in a better place to figure were the organization should head in the future.

image of three chisels resting on a strop.
Chisels are great tools for trimming and paring wood. Their strength is at the tip where the two planes meet creating a sharp edge. Chilsels make poor clamps.
-Photo by author

GEN (R) Wesley Clark said, “I’ve never met an effective leader who wasn’t aware of his talents and working to sharpen them.” (Rath, T. & Conchie, B.). Think about the leading edge of a chisel. A woodworker doesn’t try to cut wood with the sides of the chisel. With enough force, one could certainly cut wood with the side of a chisel, but its strength comes at the leading edge, where the user carefully refines the two planes that intersect at the tip into a fine edge. A well sharpened chisel will cut most wood with simple hand pressure. While it is possible to build furniture with only a chisel, saws, planes, and clamps help the chisel be part of a team of tools that can build many things easily. It cannot hold well. Long cuts are better performed by a saw. Flattening is ideal for the plane. When it comes to trimming away wood from tenons, refining saw cuts, and creating mortises for joints the strength of the chisel’s sharp tip, make it the perfect tool. The chisel is an ancient tool, yet still occupies space in almost every modern wood shop because of its strengths. Like knowing the strengths of your tools, knowing the strengths of you and your organization helps you and other leaders identify your future based on your strengths.

Organizations often begin assessing strengths by asking only the invited planners what they view their strengths to be. Doing that is like asking an employee to write his or her own annual evaluation! Plan time to invite observations of others such as

  • Employees
  • Customers
  • Stockholders
  • Community members where you have facilities
  • Vendors, and
  • Peers.

Each of these groups sees your organization differently. They may see things as strengths you do not recognize yet are very important to your current level of success. Collect these observations as you analyze where your strengths are.

Organizations work in many different areas. I ran a small nonprofit for several years. One of the things I missed from my time in the military was easy access to legal advice. I had two lawyers whose job was to keep the command team out of trouble by vetting their ideas and orders. There were a number of times, in my nonprofit, I worried that there were legal issues I was not aware of in our operations.

Other areas to think about include

  • Operations
  • Human Resources
  • Internal and external communications
  • Industry trends and how your strengths remain relevant
  • Quality controls
  • Leadership now and moving forward
  • Employee education, and
  • Safety

This list could be longer. Adapt it to your organization and your needs. The list should be similar whether your organization is a team of engineers in the automotive industry, or a small nonprofit medical clinic in a remote community. The details however will be different.

As you work through this process, you may notice areas you expected to find as strengths are really weaknesses. Note that, but do not focus on those weaknesses now. Return to them when you get to the part on evaluating your weaknesses.

For example, you recognize in operations, you are the best widget maker in the world. As you analyze your leadership and employee education, you realize your leaders are all older. You have done little to develop the next generation of leaders. Without strong leaders in the future, your organization risks losing the top spot as widget manufacturer. You can say, “Hey, we are working on strengths in this exercise.”, and ignore what you just learned. Instead, not that weakness and evaluate it in the next step.

Anyone can pick up a ruler and tell you the length of an object. The question is what does the length matter? Measuring strengths can be difficult. For example, in the length example, are you measuring in millimeters or inches? Having a common language about the things you measure helps everyone understand the significance of the thing being measured.

photo of the Mars Climate Orbiter
-Using the same units of measure helps leaders develop a common understanding of strengths shown in data. The consequences of using a common means of measurement result in failure.
-NASA Photo

There are a number of ways to measure strengths. Data will play an important role in this respect. Everyone needs to agree on what to measure and what appropriate units of measure are. In 1999, NASA crashed a $125 million weather orbiter into Mars because some engineers uses imperial units rather than metric. It is important that everyone uses the same units of measure as you analyze your strengths.

Organizations use several common means of measuring strengths. Use the scope of your activity to measure ROI, stakeholder satisfaction, staff retention, and other measures. Determine how well is your organization achieving goals. Identify how well your organization uses it guiding principles to accomplish its mission and vision.

The US. Army evaluates leaders in a number of areas. One is how many Soldiers pass an annual fitness test. War is hard work. The Army knows Soldiers must be fit regardless of their job to fit and win our nation’s wars. Use this example as a way to identify what you should measure and what metrics actually identify strengths.

Your organization’s strengths are like the sharp edge of a woodworker’s chisel. Strengths help you cut through resistance and achieve your organization’s mission. As you develop your vision of the future, identifying and analyzing strengths help your organization determine how to apply them to the challenges you face. Strengths are internal factors you control. Data helps identify strengths. Use a common means of measuring so you have universal understanding. Examining strengths is the first step with the SWOTAR model and need to be used with the next step, examining weaknesses. Look for that post next month.

References

– (ND) Some famous unit conversion errors. (PDF) National Aeronautics and Space Administration. https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf. Retrieved February 28, 2025

Chimonyo, Y. (2024). Organizational effectiveness: A guide to assessing organizational effectiveness. The Human Capital Hub.https://www.thehumancapitalhub.com/articles/organizational-effectiveness-a-guide-to-assessing-organizational-effectiveness- Retrieved February 27, 2025

Kinicki, A. & Williams, B. (2008). Management; A practical introduction. (3d Ed.). McGraw Hill Irwin. New York, NY.

Morreale, S (October 21, 2009). Executive Strategic Thinking. [Training Presentation] Command Training Series: Executive Development Course. New England Association of Chiefs of Police. Held at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI

Rath, T, & Conchie B. (2008) Strengths based leadership; Great leaders, teams and why people follow. Gallop Press. New York, NY.

(c) 2025 Christopher St. Cyr

The Strategic Planning Cycle

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(Author’s note: this article is the second in a series on strategic planning using the SWOTAR model. This post also shows the importance of getting something done, even if it isn’t perfect. You might notice a spelling error, or perhaps a missing comma or double word. If I waited until this post was perfect, or even better, February might be half over. Given that an imperfect plan delivered on time is better than a late but perfect plan, and this series is about, perhaps an imperfect post delivered on time shows the importance of punctuality, if if the product is not perfect.)

Before diving into the SWOTAR model to collect information to develop a strategic plan, understanding the planning process is important so you execute your collect effectively, with the right people, so you end up with a workable plan in the end. If this is your organization’s first plan, SWOTAR is an great entry point to the cycle. If your organization has had one or more strategic plans that failed to achieve the desired results, this review improves your chances of success. Continuing with the map analogy, left in the glove box, a map is a useless tool to help you find your way. Likewise, a strategic plan set on the top shelf of the Chief Executive’s office bookcase is just as useless. Everyone, yes, EVERYONE in the organization needs access to the strategic plan. Execution of a strategic plan is an organizational, not an individual responsibility.

In the Army, units always attempt to get full size, full color maps for all their key leaders. Every vehicle driver has at least a strip map showing key points along the route and just off the route to help them reorient when, not if-when, they stray from the main route. Senior leaders in effective Army units know that unless every Soldier knows how to go from the current location, to their next objective, not every Soldier will arrive ready to execute the mission. Things happen. Soldiers become separated from the main body, enemy action makes the main route unusable, a driver makes a wrong turn and everyone else follows. If everyone has some access to location finding information, maps, they can find their way using alternative routes to arrive at the objective and provide the commander with enough troops to accomplish the mission.

Likewise, when orders are issued, commanders brief their followers with the objectives of their higher headquarters and tell all their units all the expectations of each with the leaders from each of those units present at the same time. By understanding the whole operation, junior leaders rapidly adjust to changes. Strategic plans work the same way.

Strategic plans are an organization’s military operational order (OPORD). Leaders at every level understand the overall strategy. This helps them create effective plans for their teams to support the big picture. Each individual knows the part they play in helping the organization succeed.

Too often poor leaders justify holding such information from their followers with such arguments as, “they don’t need to know; it will only confuse them,” or “they just need to do what I tell them to do.” Those leaders then wonder why they fail to get results. Remember, few people come to work daily with a desire to fail. Most people want to be successful at their job. They want to know their work has meaning. Helping workers understand what work must be accomplished to make the organization successful, and what quality work looks like enables them to better prioritize the tasks and find ways to improve the execution of those tasks.

Because strategic planning is a cycle, there is no first step, just a next step. However, if your organization has never planned for the future, assessing where you are and where you want the organization to be in the future, is a good place to enter the cycle. SWOTAR is nothing but an assessment model.

Everything else in the strategic planning cycle, figuring out what to do to make your vision of the future a reality. The strategic planning cycle continues with creating a mission and vision for the future. Next you develop steps to enable action that begins to make the vision real. Along the way, measure the success of processes to ensure they are working correctly, and the effectiveness of those processes to move you toward the vision. Because strategic planning is time-bound, the last step before assessing for a new cycle is to evaluate your successes.

In this assessment, determine what you achieved? Ask if your achievements resulted in the end state you envisioned? If your organization made the progress desired, what does the next level look like? All these questions create the data you will need for the next SWOTAR process.

Strategic planning is a continuous process. Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, aspirations, and results desired. Next create actions plans to determine what actions you need to take to make your aspirations and desired results reality. Take action based on the action plans. Assess your processes and effectiveness. Finally, evaluate if you landed where you planned, then begin again.