Simply Stated:
Understanding your own preferences toward business planning can ensure you get to highlight your natural strengths.
As a “logic oriented” workplace personality, pursuit of excellence and your broad knowledge base are your greatest contributions to the team.
Stretching your skills in other areas may be necessary to ensure the team is cohesive and all aspects of a great plan are developed.
For logic oriented workplace personalities, the business planning process is a great opportunity to showcase your skills to challenge the status quo, to reflect on the year and really work through the root causes of issues and opportunities. The following post is intended to help clearly identify specific preferences, strengths and challenges for the logic oriented workplace personality, so the planning process can optimize your strengths and minimize challenges and allow you to full appreciate team mates with a different perspective.
For logic oriented workplace personalities the following are the key preferences:
Top relevant facts and logic based discussions.
Look for optimal ways not just “good enough” solutions.
Take complex challenges and break them down to manageable elements.
As you move through each of the stages of business planning keep the following strengths and challenges in mind:
1. Preparation for the business planning meeting.
Key strength: Business intelligence based on research and analysis conducted and documented in advance of the meeting.
Key challenge: Knowing when to stop researching and work with the information you have at hand.
2. The business planning meeting itself.
Key strength: Challenge the status quo and keep the discussion logical, filtering out subjective and emotional elements and focusing on the key issues and opportunities.
Key challenge: Brainstorming in the moment on ideas generated by the team, without having time to research and be fully versed before discussing.
3. Development of strategies and action plans.
Key strength: Ensuring the strategy is sound and breakdown the complexity to logical elements.
Key challenge: Wanting to continue to debate, challenge and research the determined strategies.
4. Ongoing management of the business plan.
Key strength: Keep the business plan focused on the long term strategic initiatives.
Key challenge: If asked to focus on smaller more administrative elements that are critical to the plan, they may get lost as your preference is to focus just on the major break through strategic elements.
Reflecting on your preferences, strengths and challenges can make you a more effective team member and help produce a comprehensive business plan. Read about your structure oriented team mate here and your action oriented here and watch for the last post on the people oriented workplace personality to see how they approach the process and things to watch for to ensure the group is as effective as possible.
Lynn