What’s the biggest mistake made during a strategic planning day? That’s easy.

Lack of intentional congruence.  

In other words, there’s a whole bunch of stuff on the paper, but it doesn’t match.

I remember when I was a young mother, and my mother came to visit me. She was trying to make a meal and said: “You have a lot of food, but none of it matches. I don’t know how to make a meal out of this.”

That’s how most banks’ strategic plans look: Nothing matches; nothing comes together.

The target markets don’t match.

The BHAG doesn’t match.

The strategic initiatives don’t align with the strategic results.

Everything is out of coherence. As a result, your employees will put in a massive amount of work to achieve minimal results.

Intentional congruence is the hardest thing to get aligned in the strategic planning session. Throwing a list of goals onto a sheet of paper is pretty easy to do, but it’s not transformational for your bank.

That is the point of strategic planning.

Anything short of that is a waste of time.

Your entire executive team needs to know how to create intentional congruence when creating your strategic plan. More than that, they also need to know how to apply it in the execution of that plan.

Not understanding how things tie together and not knowing when to say no to the other things that come along is why so many banks never get to top-of-peers performance—even after working hard. And even if they do get up there, they don’t know how to stay there.

Your job as an executive is to get to top-of-peer performance and stay there. It’s the only way you are guaranteed to keep your independence.

That’s the game that matters in this business: Keeping your name on the door.

I hope to see you at my upcoming Profit-Rich™ Strategic Planning Masterclass, where I’ll show you how to successfully get your strategic plan done.

To your continued success,
Roxanne Emmerich