“Leading Strategic Planning Sessions for Your Team”

Strategic planning is a systematic process for making decisions to guide an organization toward achieving its desired outcomes. Are you prepared to lead your team in a strategic planning effort?

There are several components to any strategic plan. All of them need to be included in a retreat or planning session for a group. They are:
• Vision, a description of the ideal future
• Mission statement, how the group will structure itself to accomplish its preferred future state
• Core values and beliefs, statements of belief that describe what's important and guide individual action
• Strategic issues, issues to address that will close the gap between the ideal future and the current reality
• Critical success factors, broad measures indicating that the organization is making progress
• Department/Work area strategic plans, translating the larger organizational plan into action at the department, work unit and team levels
• Annual budgets/Operational plans, the specific decisions and actions that the organization and its departments will take annually and the budget to support these actions in line with the strategic agenda.

This session will help leaders to not only know the components of a successful strategic planning meeting, but be able to facilitate it for their own groups.

Christie Ward is principal of The Impact Institute. For seven years, she coached and managed 200 of the best professional trainers around the world for CareerTrack , Inc. As an entrepreneur and principal in The Impact Institute, she facilitates Communication topics that make the difference for performance, productive Teams, and effective Leadership. She personally coached the World Champion of Public Speaking for the year 2000! In 2004 she won the ASTD-RMC Best Practices award for a program that lowered union grievances at AT&T in Denver 66%.

Sample clients have included:
• The United States Air Force, Air Mobility Command
• Colorado Personalized Education for Physicians
• The US EPA, Social Security Administration, VA Administration, the Dept of Interior
• AT&T
• IHS
• Great West Life
• Various Colorado municipalities and counties: Aurora, Westminster, Greeley, Englewood, Greenwood Village, Aspen, Arvada, Thornton, City of Blackhawk, El Paso County.
• SUN Microsystems