Reflections on Leading a Career Development Strategic Planning Cycle

If you asked me the top 3 things I learned during my Ph.D. program at William & Mary, how to lead and manage a strategic planning cycle would be on that shortlist. Strategic planning provides leaders (and teams) with a holistic view of organizational priorities, a roadmap to close gaps, and a way to protect the very team that will be executing the plan.

As Muhlenberg College's Career Center approaches the final stanza of our 3-year strategic planning cycle, I want to share some of my reflections and realizations from leading this process over the past 2-and-a-half years. I will introduce these reflections and recommendations in line with the narrative below to add situational context.

First, a bit of backstory. The team that I came to lead (in May of 2021) at Muhlenberg College had achieved remarkable success over the nearly 5 years that they had been together. The leader that I replaced had vacated the position about 8 months prior to my arrival, and he was both well-liked and adept at creating camaraderie among the team and with campus partners. The team was high-functioning, highly relational, and had achieved success largely on strength of character... but they were exhausted. This was persistently conveyed to me throughout conversations on my "listening tour" of the staff. The other thing that quickly came to my attention was that the only significant staffing change that this team had experienced in the past 5 years was me. I knew that if I was to be successful, I needed to catch up to speed, quickly. Luckily for me, two leaders Samantha Hof and Pat Fligge were supremely generous with their time, honesty, and willingness to help facilitate our team's leadership transition process.

1️⃣ To launch strategic planning as an outsider, you MUST elicit the support of well-connected, reflective insiders.

Strategic planning is as much about developing an understanding of where you are as it is about knowing where you are going. Due to the expectation of shared governance in higher education, the ability of a leader to develop diverse coalitions is essential to advancing initiatives across campus. That said, identifying thoughtful partners is the first priority when joining any new community. The right partners will possess a growth mindset and be well-connected and respected both among the team and external stakeholders. To identify partners with a growth mindset, propose questions that prompt reflective thought and critical evaluation.

• What are the top 3 areas you'd like to see improve in the next 3 months?

• If time, cost, and personnel were not factors, what type of program could we launch tomorrow to add maximum value to our students?

• Where do programs or initiatives tend to stall for us (internally and externally)?

• Who are our closest partners and what are the largest threats to new initiatives (both internally and externally)?

• Who on the team is excited by change and new ideas, and who is more comfortable with stability?

No team ever fully reaches its potential, and any partners you choose must share this awareness. If you sense that certain people do not see room for personal or team improvements, address, understand, and facilitate modification of this mindset quickly. If individuals cannot identify opportunities for growth, they will act as counter-agents of change and block strategic planning efforts.

Secondly, evaluate people's connectedness, prompt reflection about who they partner with on different programs, what stakeholders they enjoy partnering with, and which areas or units they tend to gravitate toward when they have new ideas. Variety can play a pivotal role in strategy, and if one teammate is well-connected with student affairs and one is well-connected with academic affairs, you can lean on them to provide insights as well as champion initiatives to these (sometimes seemingly divergent) groups. Partners who are not well-connected will often speak about isolating the team from other areas, rather than working to grow relationships and develop new systems of support for initiatives.

Once your key partners are on board, the team must be included (and share leadership) in the process. Although authority is top-down, powerful influence is built from the ground up. Engaging your team from the first moments to the final moments of the process, and leveraging their strengths and insights are critical to your strategic plan's success. If you do not spend the time to get the team on board, you will pay dearly in the longer term, and no one person can ever advance strategy without the support of a team.

2️⃣ Take the time to get to know your team and each individual. They are the primary drivers of your success.

It's true that relationships cannot be rushed. As a new leader, you can capitalize on your "newness," but there will be an expiration date on inaction. The next challenge is understanding that to move forward, you need to have buy-in from each person. This does not mean 100 percent (or dogmatic) buy-in. It is also important to note that this does not mean personal buy-in, to you, but buy-in to the process. The best way to get the most people engaged is by employing an inductive process. A new leader must resist jumping to a vision of where the team needs to go to reach success, but instead allow the team to select the destination, collectively. This can be challenging for new leaders, as it requires comfort with ambiguity and significant flexibility. Getting the team on the same page requires understanding the Greatest Common Denominator (GCD) in everyone's professional priorities and building from there. This can be as simple as asking people about their 'why,' or providing space for each member of the team to identify 'what the team's essence is.' In addition to self-identifying metrics with your team, you will also need to incorporate externally identified priorities. As long as the members of your team see a strong association between the GCD and those metrics you can make it work. Helping the team track this is as simple as checking in throughout the process with prompts like:

• Are we doing a good job of measuring what is really important?

• What areas of your work are not presently being measured, but should be?

• What metrics are the most and least connected to our team's GCD?

• What drives the external metrics that have been provided for us?

A team that feels seen, heard, and well-utilized will outperform any other team and exceed expectations. Conversely, the team that does not feel empowered, and/or whose strengths are not included centrally in the process or execution will feel disenfranchised and disconnected.

Once you have partners that will help facilitate the process and you've created rapport and a ground-swell of energetic support from the team, you are prepared to incorporate external voices, and expectations, and dive into robust assessment. The goal of this assessment is to identify overarching themes that will serve as your team's horizon line.

3️⃣ It is important to take the time (and gather all of the perspectives) needed to establish resilient "themes" that will hold relevance throughout the entirety of the strategic planning cycle.

Themes must be robust enough that they will have an impact on the institution, nuanced enough to have their success distilled down into measurable goals, and resilient enough that they will still be important throughout the whole strategic planning cycle (through staffing changes, the introduction of new technologies, or the emergence of crises).

When identifying themes, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• As staff members leave, will the themes be immediately relevant to the staff that replaces them?

• Will we care about this theme the day we close our strategic planning cycle, and will the metrics we plan to use to track our success still be relevant?

• Is this theme consequential to the institution, and how can we connect stakeholder expectations to each theme?

Themes are overarching. Programs and structures are mid-level. Interventions are ground-level. As you would expect, themes persist, programs and structures can change (albeit infrequently) to accommodate new information, technology, or best practices, and interventions will likely change frequently throughout a strategic planning cycle, based on data-informed feedback.

Finally, nothing is worth doing unless it can be measured, somehow. That doesn't mean with numbers, only, but some of the metrics that you implement in career services will need to be quantifiable. You will need to operationalize your metrics, meaning that the concepts you intend to demonstrate must be measurable in a logical way. Remember, data is just data, and although you may apply data as evidence of something, the data must be demonstrable and hold up to scrutiny. Resist the temptation to dismiss unimpressive data or data that does not confirm what you hope it confirms. Often, leaders are drawn to data points that show what they want to be shown, but reporting lopsided data will increase stakeholder scrutiny (and is unethical). Instead, as you participate in the assessment process, reflect on whether any confounding variables or influences may make your assessment less valid (measuring what it is purported to measure).

4️⃣ Assessment, reflection, or action must never take place in the absence of any of them.

Assessment, reflection, and suggested actions to take place as a response must occur concurrently. Honest reflection can help position assessment data more holistically, and taking data-driven action without considering context can lead to snap judgments, wrong turns, and the need to backtrack in the future. Forward motion is your friend when executing strategy!

I hope that this reflection encourages you to undertake strategic planning as a method of informing your leadership strategy, creating a systematic process to put vision into action, and supporting assessment and adaptation of interventions on your team. Of course, two-and-a-half years cannot be distilled down into 1,500 words without making some leaps and missing some key points - so if you have suggestions to add to the conversation or questions about what I've suggested, please comment below!