There has much been written about strategic planning from a business perspective. Strategy is at the core of every business, its success or its failure. Many companies hire consultants to help craft or guide strategy in hopes of explosive growth. However, what tends to be overlooked is that strategy, no matter how masterfully developed or thought out, must ultimately be carried out by people.

Thus, as a strategic thinker and having the job responsibility of both working to develop and ultimately implement strategy, I have been challenged to include team development into the strategic framework. This has been a tremendous dynamic shift! I now see organizational development through people development. Previously, organizational development was the key to strategic success and people development was separate. Sometimes it would be its own strategic element, sometimes just something to be done because what is a good performance review without goals. Typically it was pulling in an independent direction from the organizational development path, but no longer.

It may sound difficult, but it really looks like assigning individuals to lead or contribute to strategic initiatives, then reflecting on how they may need to grow personally to better achieve the objective. That becomes their skill development goal, which they work to improve upon while executing the project.

For example, we set out as an organization to become more efficient and effective in the execution of engineering projects, especially around product development. A team was assigned to this initiative and crafted a plan to improve our project execution through the creation of an engineering department schedule, project planning tools and checklists. At the same time, the engineering manager set a personal development goal to improve his abilities around project management. As the initiative proceeded, the schedule and checklists were developed giving the engineering manager more tools to manage projects while he worked on his abilities to plan projects and manage their implementation. Therefore, the initiative made him more effective and simultaneously he made the initiative more effective.

The light bulb really came on for me when I reflected on organizational progress and found myself thinking first of the personal development progress of the management staff, then realizing how it aligned exactly with our overall strategic plan.