Have you been doing strategic plans the same way since the beginning of your career?

How well have they worked for you?

Nicole Gagliardi has put together a list of common mistakes she sees in nonprofit strategic planning work. If you've been in the sector for a while, many of these will look familiar - I know I've seen many of them throughout my career.

Here are 3 additional problems with strategic planning I'd add to her list.

What's the legacy you've been given and the one you'll leave behind?

In her closing remarks during Leadership Triangle's THRiVE Leadership Summit earlier this month, Kristine Sloan shared the concept of the 200-year present.

Coined by sociologist, poet, mother, and influential peace researcher Elise Boulding, the concept of the 200-year present is a useful tool for those of us working in social good spaces and a powerful exercise for leaders from any sector in establishing strategic clarity.

Here's a quick summary of the concept and how leaders can use it to create more strategic clarity for themselves and their teams.

Where do breakthrough ideas come from?

And how can we harness them to drive more impact for our communities?

I recently joined Julia C. Patrick on The Nonprofit Show to talk about how breakthrough ideas build community, grow engagement, and even create new markets and opportunity for corporate partnerships.

The people who power your organization - your staff and close volunteers - are one of your most important assets.

If you’re a nonprofit leader, here are 3 big staff-related risks you need to be thinking about - and planning for - and how you can start addressing them right now.

Nonprofit leaders spend a lot of time developing strategic plans. But there isn’t always the same kind of effort spent to figure out how the plan will be executed - and what risks are involved with that.

I recently joined risk management expert Sabrina M. Segal JD MIP CFE on her podcast Tolerable Risk: Opportunities and Threats in the 3rd Sector to chat about managing risk during strategy formation and implementation. Some key questions and discussion points we cover:

• What is the modern expression of your organization's mission?

• Consensus v. buy-in - what's the right way to frame decision-making?

• The 85/15 approach - why planning for 100% is never a good idea

• One of the main reasons strategies fail is because they are un-executable. How can we avoid this threat?

Culture is a big buzzword, but what does it take to create a culture that improves employee well-being and performance?

Heather Burright and I had a candid conversation on her podcast - Learning For Good - about how culture influences employee performance and what leaders can do to establish strong culture.

We talk about:

• Four essential habits for improving culture: clarity, internal communication, training, and accountability

• How organizational culture influences performance and success

• The main elements of organizational culture and how defining your organization’s identity, clarity, process, and vibe fosters a healthy work culture

• The one element of organizational culture that impacts performance the most

Does it ever feel like your executive team keeps having the same debates over and over again?

There can be lots of reasons for this, but there's an important one hardly anyone talks about.

It’s not clear, well-established priorities - though it's critical to be on the same page about what the organization is focusing on, and what that means when you need to make tradeoffs.

It’s not improved team dynamics - though this is an essential investment because a dysfunctional leadership team has tremendous ripple effects.

It’s not even clear, documented decision-making processes - though, as I've written before, these can really help your organization go from stressed to strategic.

It’s that you aren’t aligned on your organization’s role.

What if I told you I could predict how successful your next organizational change will be?

I'm not a fortune teller or time traveler.

But as an experienced nonprofit executive, strategic advisor, and change management practitioner, here's what I know:

When it comes to change, most organizations run into the same challenges over and over (and over) again.

I recently joined my friend Cindy Wagman on her podcast to talk about how leaders can take intentional steps to increase the chances their next organizational change is successful.

How did you get really great at what you do?

There are many paths to success, but they all have one thing in common.

Practice.

If you’re a Gen X or Elder Millennial nonprofit leader, chances are you started out sitting in a cube outside your boss's office:

• answering phones and responding to mail, email, and fax (!) messages

• setting up the room and taking notes in key meetings

• getting your work sent back to you with a ton of tracked changes (and hopefully some helpful comments)

• listening to, observing, and emulating the more senior people in your department

When everyone was in the office, it was easy for our supervisors - or the department leader - to pull us into on-the-job learning moments.

Now that you’re a department head leading a remote team, how are you intentionally creating opportunities for your team to learn, practice, and grow?

If you lead a department at a nonprofit organization, here's a metric you probably aren't tracking, but it's having a huge impact on your work.

It’s not your leading indicators - though you should definitely know the behaviors that drive the most value on your team and how often they're happening.

It’s not your outputs - though you should definitely know the short-term results your work is achieving.

It’s not even your impact - which is critical, but can be messy, long-term, and sometimes difficult to measure.

It’s your vacancy rate.