Strategic Planning- Additional Thoughts on the Right People and the Right Seats

The last post discussed getting the right people in the right seats at your company in order to carry out your firm’s vision. In this post, we will look at a couple of additional items to consider at this point in the process.

One area of your firm to examine closely are the functions (areas of responsibility) in your firm. Typically, if you boil down the main functions of any firm, they are Marketing (Sales), Operations, and Finance. How is your firm structured to generate business (Marketing), how is the product or service created and provided to clients (Operations), and how do you manage the flow of money into and out of the firm (Finance)?  Each of these areas needs to be strong for the firm to be successful, and each area can only have one person in charge to maintain an organization of accountability.  What are the responsibilities for each of the roles (accountabilities) in your organization?

Create a chart to show each of the functions in your company and who they report to. Next list the five or so most important roles of that function.  This was also briefly mentioned in the previous post, but I felt it was important to mention again. Your completed chart of accountability clarifies who is accountable for each of the functions in your firm. Keep in mind that this chart is always evolving if you are growing. This chart will also become scalable for the positions where you have multiple people doing the same job.

Once the chart is set up around functions, names are later added, each of the names heading up the functions will be part of your leadership team.

An additional tool to help you put the right people in the right seats, in addition to some of the personality  tests listed in the previous blog post is GWC.  In his book Traction, Gino Wickman points out that GWC stands for Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it. People who “Get it” fully understand their role, the firm’s culture and systems. People who “Want it” truly want the job based on the role, responsibility, and compensation. People who have the “Capacity to do it” are those who have the mental, physical, and emotional capacity, as well as the time, to do their job well.

Not everyone will have GWC.  Use it as a way to see if your staff is in the right seats.

Now that you have a vision and have put the right people in the right seats of your firm, the next step is measuring and monitoring the progress of your business using data. In the next post we will talk about using data to measure firm progress and make necessary changes based upon this data.

Build your business wisely.