Michael Couch, President

It's that time of year again.  For many organizations, arrival of the fourth quarter means its time to review, update, or develop strategic plans. 

 Unfortunately, many companies are not pleased with their planning process and do not feel that it's worth the time invested.  This doesn't have to be the case. 

Here's some tips that can help make your process energizing and well worth the effort.

Protect the Plan 

For effective execution, the strategy and value drivers must be obvious to all key stakeholders. The best examples of this in action are in companies committed to Lean Manufacturing/Six Sigma. The Strategy Deployment techniques utilized by these firms assure a clear linkage from strategy to annual business plans to department/process objectives down to individual employee performance plans (What Toyota called the "catch ball" process). Key process and performance measures are prominent in all communications tools including company and process dashboards. Even the agendas for regular business review meetings are built around components of the strategy.

(Read more about Keys to a Successful Strategy)

"The nine-box category system is crude and clumsy." 

That's a quote from a professor in the UK on a system that is used by many companies to create a summary picture of their talent.  It is often called the Performance Potential Matrix (PPM) since performance and potential often make up the axes that form the box.

In general, I would agree with the learned professor.  For 90% of companies that us it, the 9 box is rude and crude.  However, its not the poor old 9 Box's fault! 

My experience is that the Box gets this reputation because not enough emphasis is placed on gathering data in an objective and reliable fashion.

We completed a study for a large retailer that compared the results of their executive assessments (full day of testing by third party), their internal 360 assessments, their performance reviews completed by managers, and the results of talent reviews that we designed and facilitated. (Click here to learn more about Talent Reviews) It just so happened that the results were summarized in a 9 Box that we call an Organization Capability Matrix. 

The results - The performance reviews and 360's were so skewed and truncated that the results were useless for decision-making. The executive assessments were rich but tough to interpret by managers and viewed as too costly.

In contrast, the talent review and the executive assessments were highly inter-correlated (those in the reviews were not privy to the assessment results) and both were the most predictive of future performance and advancement. From a "face validity" standpoint, the leaders preferred the facilitated talent reviews because the results were clear cut and the follow-up organization action plans were very specific. In addition, the process helped create a common language and leveled/calibrated the talent perceptions across the organization.

If you focus on the data gathering, the talent review with the simple 9 box summary can be a very effective, reliable tool. Even more, put the 9 box data in business intelligence software and you can answer almost any question about the capability of the organization through multi-dimensional slices'n'dices of the data.