Learn how to assess and maintain strategic alignment.

Hello and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about how to assess and maintain strategic alignment. So let's start by talking about strategic alignment and the strategy gap. What is strategic alignment?

So strategic alignment is when our organizations work, our programs, our projects, our initiatives are at the intersection of our mission or purpose, our strategy and our resources or capacity. And so purpose is what we are trying to achieve as an organization, strategy is how we will achieve it. So our plans, whether a strategic plan or other organizational planning, these could be things like fundraising or technology plans

and our resources and capacity. So that's our people, our funding, our operations, our infrastructure. And so when organizations are strategically aligned, it's when the work we are doing as an organization is making the best use of our resources moving the organization forward strategically so that we can fulfill our purpose.

The strategy gap then exists when our strategy is not well aligned with our work, and so often when we're creating strategy, we're creating goals and objectives that support and connect to our purpose, but often the reality is that there's a disconnect between our strategy and the work that we are doing. So our programs, our projects, our initiatives and the resources that our work is using so that's what the strategy gap is. But why does it matter? What impact does it have on our organizations? And so for one without these connections between strategy work and resources, we sometimes lose sight of our shared purpose. And so a lot of work may be happening in our organizations, but our teams may not be able to even articulate how their work is contributing to that larger purpose. We may also find that as resources get pulled along toward newer strategies, some of our existing work may no longer have adequate support, or the reverse could be true, that we're supporting the work that we've been doing, but our new strategic initiatives are not being adequately supported. We may also see that silos are forming, or have formed in our organization. So we might see that those working on new strategic initiatives are separated from those working on existing programs or on operations.

Those are some of the impacts that we often see in organizations with a strategy gap. Obviously how the strategy got kind of impacts an organization varies, but one of the things that I see is that when our teams don't feel connected to the organization's purpose and the strategy where the organization is headed, when they don't see their work as part of the organization's future, or a clear path to how their role is going to change based on these strategies, and if they don't have the resources to do the work that they're being asked to do, they often get very frustrated and burned out. Another impact that I see is that it can be harder for organizations that have a strategy gap to articulate to funders and partners why their support is needed, because what we say we want to do is divorce from what we are actively doing and how we've been using our resources.

So that's what the strategy gap is and why it matters. But how do we assess our organization's strategic alignment? How do we know if we have this gap? So a simple approach is to list your work and your use of resources over, let's say, the last year, and once you've listed all of your programs, projects and initiatives that your organization has worked on over the last year, and the resources that it has used, then you can really consider whether your work was more.

Are well aligned with either your purpose, your strategy, or critical operations. And so once you've documented your programs, projects and initiatives, your work over the last year, and how much of your resources were used to support that work, and then considered whether this work is more aligned with purpose strategy or operations, we can then ask some key questions. And so for work that is most closely aligned with strategy or operations, how well is that work aligning with purpose? And so what this can help us determine is whether our work is still supporting our organization's purpose. Often just sort of listing out all of the things that have been happening in our organization and really considering whether that work still supports our purpose can be very, very impactful.

We can also look at any work that is out of alignment. So when you're listing your work and you're thinking about alignment, if there is work that is out of alignment with purpose or strategy or your operations, what value does that work really bring? And so is this work we really need to be doing. Could the resources that that work is using be better put toward work that is well aligned with either purpose or strategy? So that's an assessment approach. Another really, kind of simple way to assess alignment is to talk with your staff and team, so the folks who are doing the work and the folks who are in your resources or operations areas, ask them how they see their work, whether it's a program, a project, an initiative, an operational activity, ask them how they see their work and their role in the organization, connecting to purpose and strategy. So are they able to articulate how their work connects to either or both purpose and strategy? If not, you may have an alignment problem. If they can't tell you what your organization's purpose and strategies are, then you absolutely have a communication problem, but that could be creating an alignment problem. So that's some of the ways that we can assess alignment. But how can we maintain alignment if we do have alignment or close that strategy gap if we have identified one. So there are lots of ways to maintain alignment, and in the time we've got, can't go through all of them, but there are really three strategies that most organizations can apply and that I want to share with you today. And so the first strategy that can really help you create and ensure alignment is to make sure that your organizational purpose and strategies are clear and understandable and that they have been shared across the organization. And so we want that clear purpose and strategy, our organizational purpose is usually expressed in a mission statement, and ideally your mission statement includes a who, a why and a how, so who we are serving, why they need serving, and how we are serving them. Now sometimes the who is implied in the why, but our goal here is that anyone reading your mission statement can get a pretty good idea of your purpose. And so let's take for an example, an arts nonprofit. They may have a purpose of creating more equitable access to the performing arts by providing education and resources so our who is those artists lacking equitable access, which is also our why and the how is through education and resources. Now if you have a longer mission statement or one that's unclear, you may not need to change that statement, but you may want to have a sort of shorter tagline that you can use, particularly when you're talking internally about purpose and strategy

for our strategies, they are most often expressed in a strategic plan, which ideally should have clear goals and objectives that are actionable. We might also have other plans, say, a marketing strategy, a fundraising plan, a technology growth strategy for these it's great if you can sum those up in a sentence or two, right? And so you may have a very detailed plan, but is it something that you can clearly say in a staff meeting in one or two sentences, you know, put in a newsletter? And so, for example.

So we might say our 2025 fundraising plan aims to increase recurring donations and major gifts by adding donor engagement points and updating our CRM and so our goal here is that our purpose and key strategies can be easily shared and understood across our organization. It's really this clarity that can help create and maintain connections between our teams and our purpose and strategy and the work they're doing. So we want our teams to really clearly understand those connections. Another alignment approach is to make sure your planning processes, especially your strategic or organizational planning process, includes implementation planning.

If we've developed a strategy, we want to determine the actions we need to take as an organization to implement that strategy, the work that we need to do, and the resources that we will use to do that work. And so I have a bit of an example here. If we have a strategic goal as part of our strategic plan to improve employee retention for that goal, we might identify two actions that we are going to work on to achieve that goal or objective. And so for each action, we can set a due date, name, who is responsible. We could also include a key metric or measure of success that helps us plan our resources or capacity. And so implementation planning can really close that strategy gap, because for our teams, especially,

it ties those big picture strategies very clearly to the work that is going to happen and the resources that are going to support that work. Another way to maintain alignment is to use a strategic approach to budgeting. And so the work we do, supporting our purpose as well as supporting any strategic initiatives, takes resources, and one of the best ways for us to see how we are using our resources is through our budget. And so looking at our budget is really a great way to assess and ensure alignment. When developed and managed strategically, your budget should reflect what your organization does or plans to do, and really can be used to show why the organization and the work has value. And so a key element of strategic budgeting is to make sure that your budget line items have justifications or explanations that connect them to your purpose or strategy. And so a simple approach at the organizational level is to label each expense or expense category in our budget with some sort of justification. And so this is a very simple example here, but our initiative a and its cost is supporting an employee development goal from our strategic plan, while Program B supports both our purpose of providing services to a key population of our users or clients and also a strategic goal to increase program offerings. And so we're making these connections between the resources and our purpose and strategies.

So that was a few ideas around ensuring strategic alignment. So you do want to start with an assessment to understand how well aligned your purpose and strategy is with your work and resources. You want to create clarity around your purpose and any plans you want to engage in implementation planning and you want to adopt a strategic approach to budgeting. Now, before I take questions, you might be interested in downloading our strategic alignment assessment worksheet. This free resource can be used to help you assess your approach, and is available at YazdaniConsulting.com resources. If you need more hands on support to assess and ensure alignment, visit our planning solutions page at YazdaniConsulting.com you planning, all right, so I'm happy to take any questions that you have about strategic alignment, so please add them in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions. If I'm not able to answer your question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments, and so you can find all of the ways to contact me at YazdaniConsulting.com, contact please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about planning. So a question is, any recommendations for implementing these strategies? What challenges do organizations face?

And so you know the best practices for implementing the strategies I shared and really creating strategic alignment, I would say, boil down to transparency and embedding purpose and strategy throughout the organization. And so your leadership may not be used to or excited about transparency, and these new processes and assessments may feel like added bureaucracy for the transparency challenge.

Those negative impacts of having a strategy gap may be enough to push for that increased transparency, but we can also start really small, and so even if we can take some of our strategies, you know, a fundraising plan, and turn it into one or two sentences and share them at a staff meeting, that's one way to help close that gap. Same with kind of embedding purpose and strategy throughout our organization. Our processes don't have to be overly formal. We just want to make sure we are considering alignment. So in a small organization, it may be just asking a few questions when we make decisions or develop a budget, and that can really go a long way. So we're a time. Feel free to comment or reach out with any additional questions, and thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. You can visit YazdaniConsulting.com/IPP to view all of the sessions in the series. Thank you. Thank.