Annual Planning Toolkit
Annual planning is a critical tool in your management toolchest. It should form the base of your operations for the year ahead and revisited throughout the year to help guide staff, check-in on progress or course correct as your context changes.
It is a chance to reflect with your team on your successes, to learn from what didn’t go well this year and to start fresh on an updated path towards your organizational objectives. It’s a space to innovate and realign with your colleagues – something that can be hard to do in the fast pace of our busy day-to-day activities.
Each part of your team (and your teams’ teams) has a role to play in annual planning. It’s so important to:
Involve the whole team – each perspective matters, leaders don’t always know what’s happening ‘on the ground’, PLUS annual planning is an excellent engagement activity.
Situate individual team goals into the broader organizational objectives – there should be a direct, obvious line as to why you are doing that project/process/function.
Be ambitious – planning is a time to go beyond the everyday duties of your job, you should be aiming for ways to improve, to change, to grow.
