Strategic Planning - who should be on my team?

In a credit union, it's an excellent idea to have a planning team with 5 to 8 members. The strategic planning team should be made up of people with operational responsibilities within the credit union, as their primary responsibilities will include understanding the information that is most critical to strategic decision making and the implementation of the strategies. This specifically means the board should not do the primary strategic planning process. It's fine for a board to give input to the process, and review the outcomes, but we want to optimize the quality of input and the effectiveness of commitment to the plan - and the board can't bring either of these to the table as well as the hands-on executive team. I'm sure this position will not sit well with everyone (in fact, I'm not even sure Russell agrees!), so we'd love to hear from you if you either agree or disagree.

I usually recommend a good mix of people with responsibilities in 3 areas: operations, marketing/sales, and finance. This assumes, also, that the CEO is involved, since he or she will be responsible for the effectiveness of the overall strategy, and can best bring resources to bear on any issues that arise. A typical credit union team, then, will include the following people:

CEO/president
Head of Finance
Head of IT
Head of HR
Head of Business Development
Head of Member Services

There is room for 1 or 2 more people, and who those people are will definitely flavor the nature of your analysis, strategies, and ultimately your implementation, so it's worth some thought.