Align your team with short and long-term goals through SWOT analysis and SMART goals

Key Takeaways:

• Your vision serves as a roadmap, crucial for directing strategic efforts and aligning teams toward achieving long-term goals.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis to understand the current position and plan effectively for the future.
• Gather a diverse team to get different perspectives and create an environment that turns vision into reality.
• Implement changes and set milestones, timelines, and responsibilities to foster accountability.
• Leverage support services like `The Profit Recipe` to develop leadership skills, embrace self-awareness, and learn effective delegation to realize the vision for 2025.

Evolution is the name of the game in business. Having a clear vision is essential. This vision serves as a roadmap, directing your business toward achieving long-term goals and ensuring all strategic efforts and those of your people align with these objectives. As we tread into 2025, understanding and defining this roadmap is more critical than ever to thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Business leaders must have a clear roadmap for crafting a compelling and actionable vision for 2025, and this vision must permeate your entire business. Following the steps, you’ll learn to align your team with your long-term goals, foster a collaborative environment, and build a practical strategy for sustained growth. 

What’s Your Current Position?

As we set our sights on the future, we must understand where we stand now. This is best achieved through a SWOT analysis—a strategic method used to identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

• Strengths are internal factors that give you a competitive advantage.
• Weaknesses are internal limitations that hurt performance.
• Opportunities are just that – opportunities from external factors that help you grow.
• Threats also come from external factors that negatively impact your business. 

When performing a SWOT analysis, involving your team is vital. Input from various team members enhances the accuracy of the assessment, providing a realistic baseline.

The key steps to conduct a SWOT analysis include:

1. Gather a diverse team so you get a holistic view of your business. Include representatives from every department. This ensures that you hear and consider differing perspectives. It’s the only way you’ll comprehensively understand your SWOTs.
2. Hold a brainstorming session and list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Have an open discussion and ensure all relevant factors are included.
3. Prioritize. After a list of factors has been compiled, rank them by which will have the most impact.
4. Examine the internal factors first. Look at things like processes, capabilities, resources, and culture.
5. Then, analyze external factors. Market research will help you identify these. They can include economic and industry trends, regulatory changes, and your competition.
6. Use the insights to take action. Develop strategic actions that leverage strengths, tackle weaknesses, maximize opportunities, and reduce threats.

Next, you’ll implement changes and continuously monitor progress. Set timelines and milestones, and assign responsibilities, creating an atmosphere of accountability. 

A Successful SWOT Analysis Begins with Defining Your Vision

It’s likely that each one of your employees’ visions is completely different from yours. It’s important to align everyone to prevent them from each pulling their own way. When aligned and focused, the company can gain traction and achieve its vision. As Gino Wickman says: “Vision without traction is hallucination.” It’s the only way you’re going to gain traction.

Write a compelling vision statement that resonates with your team. The goal is to visualize and articulate the intended future state of your organization. If you’ve got a leadership team in place because your business is further along in its evolution, they need to agree with the interpretation of that intended future state. 

Remember: vision and mission are not the same thing. Your mission statement defines your business objectives and the path to get there – the how. Your vision statement is aspirational – it describes what your organization wants to achieve – what you want to become.

The goal, of course, is to get your vision out of your head. Eight questions can help you get to a place where everyone can see and agree on where your organization is going and how you will get there. The EOS Method provides this as a tool called the V/TO, the Vision/Traction Organizer. 

1. What are our core values? Core values define your culture and how you do things. Pick three to five core values you would use to surround yourselves with the right people who are the right fit to get things done the way you want them done. Core values should be brought to life and lived day to day in the company.
2. What is our core focus? Once you agree on the core values that define how you do things, it’s time to get your people moving down the same path, focused and undistracted from this shared purpose or cause. Your leadership team will make all its decisions with this core focus.
3. What is our 10-year target? Jim Collins called this the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). It’s where you want to be in 10 years. If you maintain your focus and keep yourself from being distracted, what will be the big goal that you accomplish 10 years from now?
4. What is our marketing strategy? Now that you know how you do things, why you do it, and you have a 10-year target, it’s time to define how you’re going to get there by focusing your marketing and sales efforts. You’ll define your target audience and determine the compelling message you’ll deliver to them.
5. What is our 3-year picture? What should it look like when you’re three years into your 10-year target? Use bullet points after selecting some measurable indicators so your team knows you are getting closer. Use a measure different from revenue or profit with five to 15 quantifiable points. This will give you a clear sense of what the business looks like 36 months from now.
6. What is our 1-year plan? Here, you will define three to seven goals for this year that will move you toward achieving the bullet points in your 3-year picture.
7. What are our rocks? If you’ve been thinking that it feels as if this exercise is bringing you in for a landing, here’s where you touch ground. The 1-year plan now is telescoped to just 13 weeks. What are your highest priorities for the next 13 weeks to move you a quarter toward accomplishing everything in your 1-year plan?
8. What are our issues? You’ve been specific during this exercise, but issues will be left on the table to discuss and solve in future quarters. List them so they’re quickly available when it is right to address them.

Then, Involve Your Team

Building a shared vision requires using collaborative tools. Once you’ve defined your vision:

• Outline your Core Values, and shout out team members who exemplify them. Use the art of storytelling to provide context. Ensure each leader picks team members outside the leadership team to involve everyone in the process. 
• Explain the Core Focus. Share why you started the company, why it does what it does, and why everyone is here. Again, storytelling is used to prove that this is the everyday focus of the business and to align it with its purpose. 
• Announce the Core Target (5/10-Year Target) as a rallying cry to pursue the big ambitious goal we can only attain if everyone is aligned in achieving it.
• Read the 3-Year Picture, asking the team to close their eyes and consider whether they want to be part of it and how they see themselves in that picture.

Then, every owner of a 1-Year Goal should detail the objective and explain why it’s essential for the organization to focus on that over the next year. Share the Rocks, with each owner explaining its importance for the quarter and ask the teams how they could contribute to achieving that Rock for the company.     

Now, Translate Your Vision into Actionable Goals

Regardless of how compelling, a vision is futile without a concrete plan to realize it. This is where the art of translating vision into actionable, tangible goals comes into play. Setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) is imperative. For immediate direction, develop a 12-month action plan with clear milestones that align with the overarching vision for 2025. Such planned, incremental steps ensure your vision is always in sight and achievable.

Helping You Throughout Your Entrepreneurial Journey

Turn your 2025 vision into reality with the help of The Profit Recipe. We’ve taught leaders of all stripes to be more self-aware, embrace their vulnerability, and learn to delegate effectively to lead by design, not by accident. We understand the leadership skills entrepreneurs need for success, and we can show you how to elevate your company and your team.

New and experienced leaders can become the kind of coaches and managers who direct valuable teams that create traction and drive growth. Let us support your entrepreneurial journey –schedule a call with one of our experts today or send us a message.