By the end of the week, you will be better positioned to:

• Understand the principles of strategic thinking
• Develop strategic thinking competencies and apply them to your organization’s situation
• Become familiar with the major strategic thinking and planning models of the discipline
• Think through what your organization needs to do to focus on the right strategies for the right customers
• Design and facilitate a strategy session involving key stakeholder groups at various levels of your organizationn

a) Strategy and the effective organization

Strategy creation is of central importance in the quest for organization effectiveness. It is during the strategic planning process that the critical conversations are held on mission, vision, values, objectives, and plans to realize a competitive advantage. In this opening module, learn about the three phases of the strategic planning process:

• Discovery (scanning of the internal and external environment)
• Synthesis and Analysis (SWOT and business positioning)
• Strategy Development

What are the critical questions that need to be addressed in each phase? Who must be involved?

b) Harmon Health: A task force is struck

You and a select group of colleagues are summoned to the CEO's office. Your organization is buffeted by a series of challenges, some internal, others external. You know the CEO has been squirreled away with senior executives and external consultants, crunching numbers and blue-skying options. But you are uncertain how he is approaching the strategic planning process. It soon becomes clear. "I brought you all together on a very important project," the CEO says. "For the next few days, consider yourselves a task force of internal consultants with one goal: to critically assess the strategic options for our organization and to suggest the best course to ensure our viability."

To achieve its objective, your task force decides to follow a disciplined approach: first, gather facts and wide-angle information; second, synthesize and analyze the intelligence; third, craft a strategy.

c) Internal consultants go to work

Your task force discusses the case and learns more about trends and environmental factors that impact on the strategic direction of the organization. To delve deeper into the human dynamics of the organization, you as a task force member participate in a multimedia simulation that allows you to conduct interviews with up to 20 key employees. To organize your thinking, you review the Critical Questions template for the discovery phase.

d) Seeking wisdom from the intelligence

Armed with the fruits of the discovery phase, the task force now conducts a SWOT analysis, examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By the end of this phase you will be able to identify the strategic initiatives that Harmon must address in the next 12 to 18 months.

e) Positioning the business

The task force realizes that it now has to consider how Harmon should be positioned to compete in the future. They call in an experienced consultant to discuss Porter's view of industry attractiveness and to learn the right questions to ask relating to:

• buyers and distribution channels;
• new entrants;
• substitutes;
• suppliers; and
• competitors.

To explore the organization's position relative to the needs of its clients, the consultant also reviews Treacy and Wiersema's three value disciplines:

• operational excellence (best total cost)
• product leadership (state-of-the-art products and services)
• customer intimacy (best total solution; relationship marketing)

f) From vision to action

The task force acknowledges the central importance of well-articulated vision and mission statements and of focused objectives.

They set out to:

• create a vision statement that acts as a word picture of what the organization intends to become;
• develop a mission statement that acts as a yardstick for major strategic decisions, including purpose, key values, and stakeholder benefits;
• identify objectives—targets that the organization needs to achieve by a certain date; and
• map out the how-to and to-do lists of the process.

g) Crafting a strategy

You and your colleagues resume the simulation, conducting other key interviews and reviewing reports you hope will yield insights. With information in hand and discussions completed, your task force reports its recommendations to the CEO and learn how effective you were in ensuring organizational growth and success.

h) Aligning HR and Strategy

It's time to look at the big picture: How do you translate organizational strategy into HR strategy? Strategic HR involves aligning the HR function, HR systems, and employee behaviours with the organization's strategy.

Learn the five steps to alignment:

• Clarifying organizational strategy within the HR department
• Defining core competencies needed to realize the strategy
• Assessing HR enablers
• Setting HR strategy
• Implementing HR strategy by aligning enablers

To make the learnings stick, complete a diagnostic test that will reveal how well your employees are aligned with your organization's strategy.

Interactive learning

Experience an interactive multimedia simulation that allows you to make strategic decisions. The CEO has asked your task force to help choose the right strategy for Harmon Health, a company in the biosciences industry. Should you continue the course or strike out in a new direction?

Takeaways

• Strategic Planning Process Workbook

Organizational benefits

• Significant savings in bringing the strategy creation process in-house
• Well designed and coherent strategy
• Organization-wide ownership in a new or revised strategy
• Wide-scale alignment of goals and actions

This program has been designed for human resources and organization development professionals and internal consultants who want to develop varied competencies to contribute with confidence to the setting of an organization’s strategy.

Job titles and organizations of some recent attendees:

• Manager, OHS & Corporate Training, City of London
• Director Business Systems, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
• Commissioner of Sustainability, City of Kingston
• Managing Director, Human Resources, The Canadian Depository for Securities Limited
• AVP-Total Compensation, Winners Merchants International
• Director, Citizenship & Immigration Programs, Citizenship & Immigration
• Major Accounts Manager, Roxul Inc.
• Manager, Compensation, The Ottawa Hospital
• Senior Director, Global Human Resources, Percepta
• Commissioner, Human Resources, Region of Durham
• Director, Organizational & Employee Development, Assiniboine Credit Union

Carol Beatty

Carol Beatty was the director of the Industrial Relations Centre (IRC) at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, from 1996 to 2006 and concurrently an associate professor with Queen's School of Business.

An acknowledged expert on change management, Carol focuses her research on the areas of human and organizational issues resulting from the implementation of various types of change. She has recently completed a major study of the key success factors in the implementation of approximately 350 change initiatives and is currently completing case studies of successful change leaders in action. Previous research isolated the components of high-performance teams by studying over 180 functioning teams in Canadian organizations. Her writings have appeared in such prestigious journals as the Sloan Management Review, Human Relations, the California Management Review and the Business Quarterly. Her recent books include the Building Smart Teams (2004 with B. Barker); Employee Ownership: the New Source of Competitive Advantage (2001); and Facilitator Guide: Building High Performance Teams (1998 with B. Barker). Many of her discussion papers are available for download from IRC's Knowledge Centre. more...

There are no scheduled instances of this program at the time. Please check back later.