With the fiscal year ending for many in the higher education advancement world, the “season of annual planning,” soon will be fully upon us.
Creating agendas for sessions, retreats, and meetings to plan for the new fiscal year’s aspirations, goals, and objectives is critical to healthy and effective planning. In many instances, though, we program these discussions ineffectively.
If we want to review what happened last year as a planning starting point, let’s skip the SWOT analysis (i.e., strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). The questions focusing on weaknesses and threats drain the forward-looking energy from the discussion and encourage people to focus on what is lacking or what is scary.
Instead, review last year by asking what successes – large or small – were experienced in the past year? Make the list, it will most likely be lengthy. This helps people embrace the potential for future success.
If we want to begin thinking about what we should focus on in the upcoming year, let’s ditch the “gap analysis.” Instead let’s focus on our strengths as a team, a program, an institution, etc. When we build our plans from our strengths, our distinctives, our “special sauce,” we tend to find more success and we enjoy the work more.
The more positive the questions we ask about ourselves and about our plans for the future, the more encouraged, optimistic, creative, and open people will be during the planning. These attributes are the context for enthusiastic planning that leads to new possibilities.
But, when we ask ourselves questions focused on our weaknesses, external threats, our lack of resources, or our less than expected results, we tend to build plans that are too conservative, uninteresting, duplicative, and uncompelling.
Good leaders focus on the content of their plans.
Better leaders focus on the process of the planning.
