I've worked with CEOs long enough to know that nearly all of them believe strategic planning matters. Ask a CEO whether an annual planning process is worth doing, and the answer is almost always yes.
In recent research we conducted*, we asked CEOs to rate their planning process. Here’s what we found:
- Belief that strategic planning is important: 7.8 out of 10
- Team's enthusiasm to participate: 6.9 out of 10
- Effectiveness of their current plan: 5.7 out of 10
- Satisfaction with the planning process itself: 5.5 out of 10
Looking at these numbers, you see that CEOs believe strategic planning matters, and their teams show up ready to engage. But ask whether the plan itself works, or whether they have confidence in the process behind it, and the numbers drop. Why the gap?
A Harvard Business School paper on how CEOs make strategy** gets at part of the answer. The researchers found that where organizations struggle most is in what comes after the plan is set: executing it and sustaining the momentum long enough for it to matter. Planning is hard, but execution is even harder.
In my experience running these processes with leadership teams, the breakdown tends to show up in one of three places.
Collaboration. In some cases, a CEO comes in with the plan already set. It's more of a presentation of where the company is going, and the team's role becomes figuring out how to get there. In this case, the team shows up as spectators, not co-owners of the plan. What you get is compliance, not commitment, and compliance doesn't survive the first hard quarter.
Or it swings the other way, where the CEO shows up with markers and giant Post-it notes, going overboard to make the process feel collaborative. The team doesn't have much confidence in the effectiveness of this approach, so they participate without fully engaging. I've heard CEOs admit as much themselves: "my team will roll their eyes at another one of these exercises."
In both cases, the team sees it as the CEO's pet project, not something they own.
Alignment. Some leadership teams can get to a decision on a set of strategic goals. Fewer decide on goals that everyone truly believes in and is aligned on. A two-day offsite can end looking like alignment, maybe everyone says yes to the goals, but if that's just “going along to get along”, the strategic plan built will never make it down into the organization, because the team driving it was never truly aligned in the first place.
Accountability. Creating the plan is only the first part of the work. Perhaps the team was able to align around their goals, and maybe there's commitment to execute them. But within six months, operational urgency has taken over and the plan stops driving decisions. It becomes the binder on the shelf, collecting dust. And that’s not a metaphor. I’ve actually had a CEO point to the giant binder sitting on a shelf and say, “That’s our strategic plan.”
I don't think these three tensions are unique to a company’s industry or size. I've seen them in businesses doing $20 million and businesses doing $1 billion. Additionally, most planning processes don’t identify them, let alone build anything to address them. The first step in solving a problem is being aware that there is one. The next is being thoughtful about how you'll address it. Here's what we see as the solution.
Shared Ownership Solves for Collaboration. Building a real sense of ownership on your team starts well before your offsite, not during it. You engage them in advance, asking them to think like a CEO (see our recent article on asking your team to think like a CEO) and put down in writing what they believe the goals should be, and why. As you create a proposed plan, you have access to their input, and they've been invited into the process early. They come to the table having already invested real thought in the plan and knowing their input is valuable. That's a different team than one coming in cold.
A Rigorous Process Solves for Alignment. It's easy for leadership teams to talk for two days and leave the room without deciding anything real. That's a very expensive scenario when you think of what you're paying the people in the room. Getting to true alignment isn't about giving people more time to discuss. It's about committing to and following a clear, tight process, one that gives space for healthy debate but also forces the hard calls. This level of alignment doesn't happen without a proven system to get there.
Execution Discipline Solves for Accountability. There's a question every team needs to ask before they leave the room: how are we going to accomplish these goals? The day after the offsite, everyone's back to running the business. No matter how aligned around and inspired by the plan your team is, without a cadence behind it, the offsite was just a good conversation, an event that felt powerful at the time but had little to no impact on the business.
An agreed-upon rhythm is what keeps the plan alive and progressing. That means regular strategy days on the calendar, a person whose job it is to own each goal, a team supporting that person to get the work done, and someone dedicated to making sure the strategic plan train is running all year long. That's how you get to experience the outcomes available when you work the plan consistently.
You probably already know which of these three is your team's weak spot. Before your next strategic planning offsite, ask yourself these questions:
1. Do you have real ownership before you get into the room, or are you hoping people arrive engaged?
2. Is your process disciplined enough to force actual decisions, or does it lean on people going along to keep things moving?
3. Is there a rhythm in place to hold the plan accountable all year, or does it live and die on the two days of the offsite?
Like anything in this world, belief in something only takes you so far, and in the case of strategic planning, it definitely doesn't get you where you want to go on its own. I've seen so many teams go from mediocre planning that has little impact on the business to successfully driving strategic goals, sometimes multi-year, that allow them to do things they didn’t think were possible. Maybe that's why CEOs believe strategic planning is important: they can sense what it's capable of doing for the business. Follow this approach, and you can experience what's truly possible.
*Source: Golden Dome Associates, Strategic Ascent Program Growth Phase Survey.
**Yang, Christensen, Bloom, Sadun, and Rivkin, "How Do CEOs Make Strategy?" Harvard Business School Working Paper 21-063.
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These insights are drawn from the Strategic Ascent system, which helps CEOs and leadership teams build alignment through a structured planning process that leads to action.
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