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Issue #10: December 26, 2001
To our readers:
We wish you a happy, prosperous, and peaceful New Year! The approaching new year provides an excellent opportunity for managers and supervisors to have their employees use strategic planning techniques to evaluate themselves at year-end, and to plan for a prosperous 2002.
Tips for helping your employees assess the past year and plan ahead:
1. Have each employee do a personal SWOT analysis.
Illustrate the importance of the analysis by providing each person a day or several hours to accomplish it. A SWOT analysis is an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strategic planners use this technique to help organizations assess their external environments and their internal capacity, and to plan for the future. Employees can use the same technique to assess their job environment and their personal capabilities. See below for tips for doing a personal SWOT analysis.
2. Have employees go over their SWOT analyses together.
As employees share their evaluations and plans, they learn how they can support and help each other accomplish those plans. A good SWOT analysis will lay out specific objectives and how to attain those objectives. Attaining those objectives will invariably require some kind of action on the part of someone else in the organization. During the plan-sharing meeting, you will have the opportunity to assess the practicality of each person's plan.
3. Acknowledge the good in each plan.
Even if an employee's plan contains unattainable goals, recognize the reachable goals he or she has established. Commend the employee for establishing these goals that will, ultimately, help the organization. Suggest that the employee focus on these parts of the plan and drop the more difficult objectives for the time-being.
4. Revisit the plan monthly or quarterly.,
Reassess each person's progress in accomplishing the SWOT-identified goals frequently enough to keep them top-of-mind. This helps employees, and you, remain on track in spite of the interruptions that inevitably take attention away from all plans.
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Tips for performing a personal SWOT analysis:
1. Understand that performing a personal SWOT analysis means analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats within your job arena.
"Strengths" and "weaknesses" apply to your "internal" capacity -- they refer to your personal strengths and weaknesses. For example, one of your strengths might be that you can make decisions quickly. A weakness might be that you don't always do thorough research before making a decision. "Opportunities" and "threats" apply to the external environment, e.g. an opportunity might be that your organization has increased the number of managers it requires in your job area, making you eligible for promotion. A threat might be that your organization has begun hiring more people with graduate degrees and you have only a bachelor's degree.
2. Assess your strengths.
Where do you excel? What makes you particularly useful to your organization? What unusual skill(s) do you bring to your job? What experience provides you depth of understanding for the work you do? What particular needs of your organization do you meet? What standards do you adhere to that benefit your company?
3. Assess your weaknesses.
Where do you fall short? What types of tasks do you fail to get done on time? In what ways do you not work well with fellow staff? What skills do you lack that would help you do your job more effectively? In what areas have you failed to provide what your organization needs to serve its customers more efficiently and make more profit?
4. Assess your opportunities.
How does your job contribute to the bottom line of the organization? How might technology provide you a "leg up" in helping your organization? How can you help your organization capitalize on the economic downturn? How can you and your job benefit from the growing immigrant population? What is going on in your market, your city, your county, your state, that can benefit you and the job you do?
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5. Assess your threats.
How does the current economy affect your position? How is your organization changing, and will any of those changes make what you do less important? Do you need to change your function in the organization, take on new responsibilities to remain as useful as before? Do you offer the same level of skill that new employees bring to the organization? Do you perform a particular task that no one has realized is obsolete, but will?
6. Make a plan.
Make a plan that uses your strengths and addresses your weaknesses, that takes advantage of the opportunities you see, and neutralizes the threats. Get more education if you need it to compete with incoming employees; willingly assist fellow employees if you have failed to do that in the past; recommend to your manager that you drop an obsolete task and take on a new challenge!
Managers are not the only ones capable of managing employees. Employees are in a prime position to teach themselves to work more effectively, and they can use SWOT analysis to help them do it.
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