Is Your Strategy Planning Top-Down Or Bottom-Up?

 

Strategy planning is an area where companies often struggle to find the right approach. While developing effective strategy is essential for the ongoing success of your company, it is equally important for businesses to have the right processes behind drafting these plans.

In many companies, strategy planning is a top-down exercise. Plans are drawn up by senior executives and then passed down to managers who oversee this execution among staff members.

While this an incredibly common approach, there are risks involved. Management is not immune from making the wrong decisions, while a top-down approach will also ignore a lot of the valuable information that members of your staff will be able to add to the strategic planning process.

As a result, many companies are looking for ways to introduce a bottom-up approach to their strategic planning. This requires including staff within the strategy process, specifically in areas where specialized knowledge is required to achieve a strong outcome.

The advantage of a bottom-up strategy is that it enables companies to access a broader range of perspectives and also gives employers a greater personal investment in the future development of a business.

While there are certainly advantages to both bottom-up and top-down corporate strategy, it would be wrong to assume these are the only two routes for strategic planning. In fact, for many organizations the best solution is going to come from combining these two approaches and developing a hybrid planning process.

One of the best ways to achieve this mix is to integrate strategy planning software like StrategyBlocks. This makes it easy for individuals within a company to contribute towards a strategic plan, while also allowing senior management to set clear goals for the organization as a whole.

This combined approach is likely to give businesses the flexibility and support they need to operate more efficiently in the long run.