Create a Planning Team for Decision-Making

In a small or medium-sized business, it’s common to be the only one making decisions about every aspect of your company—thus the saying, “it’s lonely at the top.” No matter how large or small your business is, being the sole decision-maker for the company can be difficult and may impede your business success. It can become challenging for one person to constantly think of better ways to improve the business or make sure he or she has the most innovative ideas. Having the contributions of a planning team will provide additional business ideas, help your company grow and become more successful.

Planning teams are comprised of your company’s top executives from each of your functional departments. The goal of the planning team is to have candid discussion on all business planning and action items essential for business improvement, allowing your company to move forward—from resources to operations to company strategy.

Once you decide to implement a planning team, it is imperative to have established guidelines before the first meeting and to continue to follow these guidelines at each meeting. Reviewing them before meetings will help keep your planning team focused on the group goals.

Here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind when forming your planning team.

• Stay focused on the main issues
• Avoid solving/micro-managing
• Avoid interruption
• Inform the employees who are not on the planning team about plans and progress
• Never cancel your planning team meetings
• Schedule planning team meetings based on personal and business visions (if you’re looking for fast growth, you may want to schedule meeting once a week or once a month, but be sure to have at least one meeting scheduled each quarter)
• Occasionally invite other project managers to the meetings to update the planning team on various projects, as necessary

To ensure each planning team meeting is productive and time-efficient, revisit the rules and guidelines often. Also, spend time with individual planning team members to make sure they understand the value of a planning team and how their individual contributions help to foster a positive planning team experience. When done right, a planning team can be inspiring and liberating.