Developing a strategic plan is a critical effort both for corporations and for individuals or families. Developing the plan, however, will not achieve the goals outlined in the plan without certain essential actions and activities by the people who created it. Far too often, strategic plans are written so they can be put away and ignored. This approach is almost never successful in achieving goals.

Whether your strategic plan is intended to guide a corporation, a small business, a family or your personal life, successful goal achievement is directly proportionate to the steps taken to ensure systematic implementation of the plan. There are, thus, several essentials for successfully implementing your strategic plan. The steps outlined below are the most critical for success.

The first step in implementing your strategic plan is to communicate the contents of the plan to the people who are subjected by it. Although this is also a place for involvement, effective communication must occur first. The communication piece is critical because supervisors need to understand first what the strategic plan contains ' what is the intent of the strategic plan ' before they can communicate it to others.

Once the supervisors understand the plan and its intent, they should communicate their understanding to frontline employees. Research has shown that frontline employees prefer to get the information about corporate goals and strategic planning from their frontline supervisor. This is the person they know best and the person they choose to trust.

It is very easy to assume that a personal strategic plan needs to be known only to the person who wrote it. This is a mistake. It is important to identify the people who need to know what is in your plan. Who are the people who can support you in trying to reach your goals? Who are the people who are likely to encourage you as you strive to reach those goals? These are the people with whom you want to sit down, spend some time, and just share what you put together as your goals for the year.

In a corporate setting it is even more important that everyone get on board and know the goals of the organization. In this context you simply cannot over-communicate your strategic plan. Doing a session with smaller teams and groups within the company gives individuals an opportunity to look at the strategic plan in detail. They can ask questions, they can pick it apart (not in order to edit into something different) and ask all they questions they want to ask about it. It is vital to have someone in the session who was involved in creating the strategic plan. This person can explain what was intended by specific words.

My experience is that we spend a large amount of time finding just the right words to put in a plan. Too often, however, we do not spend enough time communicating what we meant by those words.

The second step in implementing your strategic plan is to get people involved as you communicate. Get workgroups and/or individuals involved so they actually do something with the strategic plan. In many organizations getting people involved in doing something with the plan means there is a performance plan. Creating the individual or team performance plan is a matter of asking, "Given that these are the goals of the organization, how does my job fit into these goals? How do I make a difference? How do I help the company reach toward achieving the goals set out in the strategic plan?"

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