Developing strategies is something that almost everyone does daily. Whether it is about your career, business, or personal life, strategic planning and thinking is something you normally do - consciously or not. There is great value in having a plan and in coming up with strategies to help you along the way with any endeavor or task that you may have. But we’ll let you in on a little secret - creating strategies is only the first step towards success. Have you ever heard of the strategic management concept? If not, you have come to the right place. In this article, we will introduce you to strategic management and its importance for your business or career.
What is Strategic Management?
Strategic management is a process used by successful and growing businesses. It is a process that systematically and strategically creates a plan to achieve goals and objectives that considers internal and external factors. Strategic management involves many different steps, and each step varies depending on the business you are running. This process helps you properly define your goals, how you can accomplish them, and most importantly, how you can sustain them and their effectiveness.
Importance of Strategic Management
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As we’ve mentioned, strategies play an essential role in our lives. It follows that there is also great value in the strategic management concept. It has significant benefits, especially in business, and offers you the help and opportunity to rise above every challenge and define your success. Here are some of what you can reap if you sow good seeds of strategic management:
• Continuous Sustainable Growth
Success is usually defined by achieving goals. And these goals are more often than not all about improvement and growth. Thus, each step towards that growth means a great deal for any business or career you started because this indicates that strategies you have formulated and come up with actually bear fruit. However, some of these strategies will get harder to execute in the long run, or some of their effectiveness might run out. This is where strategic management comes in. You can better control and safeguard your growth and success by ensuring good strategic management practices.
• Improved Decision-Making Skills
Strategic management puts you in a position where you can always look ahead and act accordingly. This means that you always have a clear sight of your end goal, what you already have in place to achieve them, and what could possibly go wrong. The strategic management concept allows you to think better on your feet because it gives you all the information you need perfectly laid out for you already. This does not only help you to make better decisions as you go along, but it also helps you make decisions in a much more efficient time and manner.
• Better Organization and Communication Model
Your business, no matter how small, involves more than just you. This means that there is always teamwork and collaboration involved. You can significantly improve your business or organization’s model with a good strategic management process. By incorporating and letting everyone understand the strategic management concept, you allow each of your team members and colleagues to always be in the loop of the strategies, its progress and/or its changes. Not only do you ensure that you are all on the same page and all working towards the same goals, but you also maintain a good relationship with your team and a good communication flow of information throughout the organization.
• Competitive Advantage
Strategic management, as we previously discussed, is a holistic process that encompasses the whole organization. This involves always being aware of your competition and the market or industry you are involved in. Thus, good strategic management practices in your company can help you be proactive - which means being ready to act and actually doing the necessary things even before the unforeseen unfortunate events happen. Being proactive gives you a competitive edge because it allows you to act better and quickly whenever there is a significant change in the market you are a part of. By being so, you can significantly gain traction against your competitors.
• Increased Credibility.
Another great importance of strategic management is that it helps you present your plan in a more organized manner. This allows not only your own team to modify or add to your plans, but you also have a better chance of impressing investors and/or potential investors. Incorporating the strategic management concept into your business allows you to have a more well-formulated and organized plan and/or portfolio that gives your investors or potential investors all the information they need to fully trust your business. Having the strategic management process well established in your business gives you better credibility because it makes your plan much more easily understood and interesting.
Strategic Management Process
The strategic management concept comes with a general three-step process. While some multiple steps and stages come with these three steps, you must first understand their basic essence. Let’s look at them one by one, shall we?
1. Plan
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The first step in the strategic management process is making your plans. This involves two main concepts: defining your goals and finding ways to achieve them. The goal-setting phase of the strategic management concept is all about knowing your company and what it aims to accomplish. You must ensure that your goals align with your organization’s mission, vision, and core values. You also have to take note of SWOT: your business strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats in the market that you are a part of. This is a necessary step before developing the strategies because your strategies must be aligned with your goals, work with your strengths, and maximize the opportunities you encounter while still helping to improve your weaknesses and to avoid threats.
2. Manage
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The next step in the strategic management process is to execute your strategies and manage their execution. The implementation of strategies is where most businesses and organizations fail, so there is great importance in this step. You have to be very careful in executing your strategies - from the corporate or overall strategies to the departmental or team level. You have to all be in sync with what you are doing and what goals you are working towards. The strategic management concept introduces different principles that can help you ensure the success of your strategic implementation. For instance, it tells us that meetings and reports about the strategic plan, communicating and demonstrating them to everyone in the organization, and highly incorporating the business’ core values and a healthy work culture into your strategic implementation are essential to its success. In addition, the performances of each colleague or employee, department, and whole organization must be monitored and connectedly analyzed. And a good reward system helps a lot in this regard.
3. Track
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Lastly, the strategic management process finished off with the concept of keeping track and monitoring the progress of each of the strategies you come with. Take note that in their formulation, you also have to include how you will be tracking them because once implemented, it should also be tracked immediately. Tracking is one of the factors that gives the importance of strategic management more sense because tracking your strategies’ progress allows you to evaluate their effectiveness and to modify, maintain or change it completely. You see, tracking does not only involve looking at analytics and/or statistics. It also includes analyzing what they mean and applying it to your actual strategies. By doing so, you allow your organization to improve your strategies and/or to come up with new ones completely.
Strategic Management Concept with Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder offering various tools and features. You can easily log in and access all that it offers (and more if you upgrade your account to Pro or higher!) Not only can it help you in achieving your objectives and goals for your very own website, but it can also help you in executing and handling your strategies to improve your business. The photos you saw in each strategic management process are all part of the Strikingly community - proving that Strikingly can be a reliable partner for your strategic management process.
Here at Strikingly, we give you hundreds of templates to help you plan how your website will execute your strategies. Our platform also allows you to further manage your content and creation (even helping you collaborate with your teammates in the process). We provide you with the necessary tools to track your progress and movement as you go along. Like with the whole strategic management concept, don’t settle for less, don’t stop at just step one, and ensure that each step leads you to success. Sign up with Strikingly now and start planning for your business today!
