How To Effectively Integrate Strategic and Tactical Planning

by Dr. Brian Higley

May 5th, 2007

I was recently asked to answer the following question (and thought it might be good to post the answer for others to have a look at): “How do you effectively integrate strategic and tactical planning?”

After researching this important question over the past 8 years now (and sifting through the myriad of answers that people, books, DVDs, etc. put forth), I think that the most successful leaders integrate strategy with their tactics in a very simple, but powerful way.  I’ve found that they perform the following steps on a regular basis to integrate their strategy with their tactics:

1. identify their most important strategies
2. create specific, measurable, realistic, agreed-upon and time-bound (”SMART”) goals (or tactics) that are aligned with getting those strategies completed
3. distribute those goals/tactics to people who are excited about (and capable of) achieving them consistently and at a high level of quality
4. track and consistently reward goal-achievement (tactics) that are related to your strategies - and train those who struggle to do so

It’s been my experience that any sort of intervention that puts these steps into play works well - and any intervention that moves leaders away from focusing on these steps is not helpful.

Article Filed under: Business Excellence