Strategic Planning | Teik Oh

Communicating Organisational Change

May 18 2015

Open and honest communication is essential in your business in order to keep staff engaged. When your business is about to implement some substantial change such as significant expansion, changing procedures, building a new team, changing business models like going from bricks and mortar to online, communication becomes even more critical.

When you want to open communications channels about organisational change, you need to send the right message to the right people at the right time. These messages need to be custom-built to the audience and the stage of progress, they need to address fear, they need to deal with natural resistance to change, and they need to use different media.

The key is – what is appropriate to the specific stakeholder?

The importance of communication in organisational change cannot be over-stated. Handled badly and you could end up with a vision that is misunderstood, as against all stakeholders involved attaining a common understanding of the goals and direction of change. It can be the difference between fear and resistance versus motivation and co-ordination.

However, the enormity of the task cannot be under-stated.

A management school study found that the total amount of information given to an employee in three months averaged 2.3 million words and numbers. A typical communication about change within those three months involved a 30 minute speech plus a one-hour meeting plus one memo and one internal news article that included 13,400 words and numbers. So the typical communication about change consisted of 0.58% of total communication!

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Be SMART in planning processes

May 15 2015

When you are preparing your plan, whether it is a Strategic Plan, Business Plan, Marketing Plan, Operational Plan, or any other plan, you will end up listing your Goals and Objectives, and probably your strategies or actions of one kind or other.

However, have you been in a position where, some time later, people who are implementing the plan disagree about how far you have got and how much you have achieved? Some will say you’ve got there, others will say that you are only partially successful – and yet they are reading off the same planing document! Have you come to re-read your document say a year later, and then wondered exactly what you meant when you wrote “open up new markets”? Did you mean in different towns, or with different products?

Perhaps you re-read your plan later and thought “how did we agree to do that? It was never achievable!”

SMART is a model that you should use whenever you are writing goals, objectives, strategies and actions. This video explains what is SMART and how to use it.

SMART means:-

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Why write an Executive Summary?

May 08 2015

An Executive Summary is a summary of the key items in your planning or other document that is full of facts and information.

The best planning documents, whether strategic plans, business plans, corporate plans, marketing plans, or implementation plans, contain compelling Executive Summaries.

Yet at first glance (or indeed in a badly written Executive Summary) it simply appears as if information has been duplicated. Why can’t the reader simply go into the body of the document to read the information there anyway? The answer is because these documents are meant to be read by busy people. Often, they are to attract investment or engagement from these busy people who would be a befit to your business. They may be investors, bank managers, or even your own busy managers or team members. I order to get past the gate of continuing interest, and to engage them, you need to first draw them in by creating excitement and interest.

The Executive Summary provides that tantalising glimpse into the document – it creates a sense of excitement and gets the document through the gate so that they continue reading the document or pass it on to people who will then go through the document in detail. Business plans written as enticements to invest rarely get past the first executive reading it to see if they will be interested – often because there is no quickly read Executive Summary to entice them in.

This video talks about why you should have an Executive Summary, and what it should contain.

If you want to know more about planning in your business, come on over to teikoh.com and get the planning templates, tools and resources available for free. While you are there sign up for our newsletter that will deliver more resources on developing strategy, providing leadership, and growing your business.

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Do you live up to your “Brand”?

Apr 24 2015

What is your “Brand”? Do you live up to it?

Branding is not about your logo, or corporate colours, it is about the way your team behaves in front of customers and other stakeholders. Your brand emanates from your Vision. Your Vision should provide a clear and distinctive picture about what you aspire to be, and it should have inherent in it the types of values you uphold – this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is who we are.

Instilling your brand culture into your people is as much about leadership as it is about marketing. If your people believe in the vision, and behave in a way as if they are already there, then they will display to the inside and outside world what kind of business you are. If you talk about the “quality” of your business but your people can’t deal with customers in a quality way, you are being hypocritical about your brand. If you talk about “customer service” but your people don’t return phone calls, who will believe what you say?

I was facilitating a planning session for a Not-For-Profit recently when it struck me how similar “branding” is with For-Profit companies. Are you doing what you do best? Do you do it as if you were living your Vision?

As usual, the best comes after the viewing – come to the website https://teikoh.com and tell me what your brand is. Tell me how you live it (or not!).

While you’re there, sign up with your name and email address and I’ll make sure that these tips on growing your business get sent to you. Oh and don’t worry, we value our subscribers and we will never provide your information to any spammy people!

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Are you ready for anything?

Apr 20 2015

If you have been running a business from before the GFC, you have hopefully recovered over the last couple of years as the global economy, while still cautious, has been picking up. For many, times are starting to look difficult again as the possibility of a double-dip looms.

The difficulty in this scenario is that like many others, you had probably implemented many disciplines at the GFC downturn which stood you in good stead, but since, have allowed some of these disciplines to slacken as business became easier in the last few years.

Once the pressure is off, it is easy to slip back into the old ways and gradually allow costs to rise once again. Making disciplines implemented during a difficult period into institutionalised procedures is not as easy as it seems when day to day survival is not such a big worry.

When the economy is good and sales are growing, it is easy to allow discretionary spending into initiatives like “change management”, but when the mood is in withdrawal, you instigate disciplines quickly. Without the proper processes of change management, some of these changes just don’t “stick” and as soon as the belt is loosened, old habits come back.

It is in this atmosphere that the business owner or leaders need to lead by example. People have to be shown what is the right thing to do, and why, and leaders need to make sure that their behaviour is sending the right message to their teams. Read More

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Category - Strategic Planning

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Communicating Organisational Change

Be SMART in planning processes

Why write an Executive Summary?

Do you live up to your “Brand”?

Are you ready for anything?