Topic: Leadership Plan
Description:
Using the guidelines in Theme 1 and your Laws of Communication (text) readings this week, develop a mission and strategic intent for your new department.
Include goals that are measurable. Develop three to five objectives, each with two or three measurable goals.
Use your imagination as you anticipate the needs of a newly developed communication department.
Imagine the kind of leader you want to be as you lay the foundation for the culture of your department.
Theme 1: Developing a Leadership Plan
In order to develop leadership guidelines as well as a style that will work with the company for which you now work as VP of Communications, you realize you need to revisit the mission and vision of the company. Once you do that, you are ready to work on the first draft of your leadership plan.
Why is it that leadership must hinge so directly upon the mission and vision of the company? If you look closely, even if the mission and vision are written in brief statements, you can locate a philosophy or an approach to doing business. This approach might be focused on customer service, ethical integrity, being the best product or service, or any one of a number of important accomplishments. You decide that if you do a little research and review the vision and mission statements of well known companies, you can learn from them and craft your leadership plan so that it aligns with your present company’s vision, while adding something unique as well.
A leadership plan provides a way for other leaders as well as employees to understand how to interact with you as a leader and how to interact with your department. It is proactive, setting the foundation for future business transactions, rather than reactive and waiting for those in the company to decide what they want from you. The benefit in setting up a leadership plan is that you as a leader have the opportunity to establish ways that business in your department will be conducted, which sets up a cultural climate for your employees and provides them guidelines for those times when internal clients bring challenges to your department. You might be able to think of more benefits and add items that make it even more effective.
The Leadership Plan Document:
You decide to work on your plan the first week you are in your new position. You recall your leadership course at JIU and review the final project. You recall developing mission statements with goals and objectives. The first things that you must decide are how you will lead the department and how you will model the behavior you wish your employees and external clients to demonstrate.
For your communication department, you first decide to create a leadership mission statement and secondly a strategic intent, with goals and objectives:
Mission statement: Description of the department, its purpose and its values.
Strategic Intent: What your department hopes to accomplish, accompanied by at least three measurable goals with two measureable objectives for each goal.
Even though you have not had enough time to fully research the needs of the company, you think you can anticipate some that might have brought about the need for a new department such as yours. For example, you are quite sure that the company now needs regular press releases about each accomplishment or event, so you decide to add that as one of the objectives. For the objective you write: Develop all company press releases, ensuring that they have CEO approval before dissemination. For one measurable goal, you write: Develop press releases with professional look and feel for both external and internal clients. For another you write: Completing all press releases within 24 hours of the achievement or event, and earlier when company reputation is at stake.
For your personal leadership plan, you decide to do the same, describing your promise to lead the department with respect for your employees and requiring mutual respect from them. You also want to establish mutual respect among your employees in terms of diversity and ethics, and you decide to add statements to your leadership plan that describe guidelines you will abide by and expect your employees to abide by as well. Another statement you want to make concerns how others in the company will be expected to interact with the communication department. This type of statement will establish the behavioral expectations of those who interact with you and your employees.
You follow the same structure for your mission statement and strategic intent, but when you get to the goals, you decide to word them in terms of guidelines such as Speaking respectfully to one another without the use of foul language and deprecating remarks. You decide that if you model these behaviors yourself, you will be setting the standards for professional behavior from others.