What Are Strategic Planning Goals?
Once you've established a vision, mission and role, and done internal and external scans, you should have enough information to set goals for the period that your strategic plan covers. What's the nature of these goals?
Obviously, the goals you define as part of your strategic plan should describe what the company as a whole need to achieve to be successful over the life of the strategic plan. These goals should be IMPORTANT, apply to the entire organization, and the links between the goals and company success should be clear and obvious. The goals should be measurable -- specific enough so that it's possible to determine whether you are progessing satisfactorily towards the achievement of the goals, and/or so you can examine whether they have been achieved.
Goals in your strategic planning can be either result oriented, or process oriented, although it's probably better to have results oriented goals. Here are examples of results oriented goals:
- increase market share by 10%
- increase share price by 5%
- increase return on capital investments by 10%
Here are some samples / examples of more process oriented goals"
- reduce employee turnover by 10%
- bring three new products to market
- register 3 new patents
Notice that in both cases the goals are measurable, but the first set focuses more on results or the bottom line, while the second set focuses more on important things that need to be achieved so as to indirectly affect the bottom line (presumably).
Here's some examples and samples of bad goals in a strategic plan:
- Become the most regarded company in our field (too vague, hard to measure - could be part of a role statement, though)
- Improve our customer service (way too vague)
- Hire and retain more talented staff (again, way too vague