Develop Your Team with SWOT Analysis

Chapter 5: Growing Your Business - Page 5.3

Develop Your Team with SWOT Analysis

Especially when you're growing an existing business, you want the planning process to pull your team together, to develop commitment and accountability. Managers have to believe in a plan to implement a plan. They also have to believe that results will be tracked and that managers will be held accountable for disappointing results and will be given credit for positive results. The planning process depends on everybody believing that results will make a difference. As an owner or operator of an existing business, recognize this team factor as a vital part of your planning process. Work on bringing the team into the planning at several levels.

SWOT Analysis (assessing internal Strengths and Weaknesses, and external Opportunities and Threats) is an excellent framework that everyone can understand. It is probably the best tool there is for taking a strategic look at a company. It's also a wonderful tool for gathering a team. I recommend the SWOT, as a group discussion leading to strategy, be part of every planning process, and that its summary be a page or two in the business plan. I can recommend some specific steps that will help make this work:

At least once a year, go through a strategy review process that begins with a SWOT meeting and SWOT review. Get your key people together and develop bullet points. Keep notes. Keep the discussion open.
Digest the results of the SWOT. Consider the responsibility you have as owner or manager of a business. Strategy is not done by committee or by popular vote. Work on a digestion system that combines ownership responsibility with participation and teamwork. Optimize the SWOT.
Share the digested, optimized SWOT with your team of key managers. Develop the strategy. Keep in mind that strategy is focus, and remember the principles of long-term consistency, displacement, and priorities.
Give the team time to develop detailed strategy, tactics, and programs. You can use the strategy pyramid framework, for example. Keep everybody involved focused on strategic priorities and look for concrete, measurable, detailed specifics. Make sure that everything important is measurable, and that the measure is embedded into the plan. If you can't track it, then you won't be able to manage it later.
Merge the team's contributions into a plan. Remember again that strategy isn't done by committee or popular vote. Somebody has to have the last word, and that somebody ought to be somebody who owns the business.
Schedule regular implementation and plan review meetings — give them dates and importance from the beginning — at the same time that you approve the plan. Make this schedule very specific, real dates and times, so that every manager knows ahead of time, like the third Thursday of every month. Review plan vs. actual results. Talk about why actual results are different from what was planned — and they always will be — and what should be done about it.
Make sure that those review meetings happen. They have to be important. If you're the owner, operator, or manager, make sure you attend and manage those meetings. If the review meetings fall apart, so will the plan.

During my 20+ years as a business plan consultant and 10+ more years running a company, I've seen many times how the SWOT is an icebreaker. It invites people to contribute. It gets people thinking strategically, talking, sharing, and it turns a group of people into a team.

The SWOT also offers a good forum for opening up discussion. I've seen a SWOT discussion bring up problems that needed upper management attention but might otherwise have remained hidden. Middle managers don't always like telling upper managers what's wrong. Even in a healthy company culture, that can be awkward. SWOT makes that easier.

For example, I once saw a 30-year-old software development manager suggest during a SWOT meeting that one company weakness was the 50-year-old president messing with the software code instead of leaving it to the full-time pros. I saw another SWOT meeting in which several managers said ownership was unwilling to hold managers accountable for underperforming.

It's not magic. It's just an easy-to-understand framework that invites anybody who cares about a business to contribute.

Of course you have to manage a SWOT meeting well. Like any other meeting subject, SWOT can degenerate into useless discussion. A SWOT meeting should focus on the SWOT agenda and avoid unrelated side discussions. It should invite contributions without reprisals for negative comments. It's a variation on brainstorming, so contributions — as in suggested bullet points, suggested items on the list — are all positive as long as they are well intentioned.

If you do that, you also get the benefit of bringing people into the discussion. Implementation is much more likely when managers contribute to the plan. They understand the background and they feel like the plan reflects their input. So use the SWOT both ways — use it to catalyze team commitment and to develop strategy.

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