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

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.