Why should your strategic plan be written by a team?

There are just two key concepts that make the team the best way to create a strategic plan: input and commitment. The people who create the plan should be the people whose functions in the credit union give them the best perspective to give quality input to the strategic planning process - and they should be the people whose commitment to the resulting plan will be most critical to its success.

What this means, in simple terms, is that you want to involve people who have day-to-day management responsibilities in three areas of your credit union: sales/marketing, operations, and finance. Specifically, I'd suggest considering the following people for your strategic planning team:

-CEO (always)
-Business Development
-CFO/controller
-IT
-Human resources
-Member relations

While this is not an exhaustive list, it's a pretty good starting point. For reasons of creating good group dynamics, we've found that the ideal strategic planning team is made up of 5-10 people, so you will probably choose to have one or two more or less than the suggested titles above.

You probably have also noted that we did NOT list the board members. The board should have a strategic planning meeting - but its purpose should be to digest the plan created by the management staff and make suggestions to the CEO on how best to implement the strategic. In my experience, board-generated strategic plans inevitably flounder because they lack the two key elements - input and commitment - that should be required of every participant in your planning team.

-Robert