Probably, no more daunting a task faces small-community managers (SCMs) than managing day-to-day activities while still conducting such long-term projects as strategic planning. There are several reasons why this may be seen as a problem, and these reasons are somewhat different from circumstances in larger communities.

In smaller communities, the elected leaders are part-time, many of them holding down full-time jobs. Their constituents usually focus on direct-service issues like street maintenance, garbage pickup, tree trimming, and other fun things that all small-community managers love to address. To convince part-time elected officials that they should devote extra Saturdays or weekday evenings to strategic planning sessions when they must also divide this time among family, work, social requirements, and other local government requirements is quite challenging.

Hamburg, New York’s (population 10,442) council had been talking about developing a plan for several years and finally had committed itself to the time and process involved. (Do not be deterred if it takes quite some time before you can convince your community of the value of a strategic plan.) After all, strategic planning should be undertaken before a manager conducts any type of performance measurement. Until a community’s goals have been identified, a manager may be wasting valuable time in measuring things that might not be important. Performance measurement should be an outcome of strategic planning. Managers, however, should be prepared for a protracted task of getting the council or board members to agree to devote the necessary time to participating in strategic planning. Normal planning implementation times may be longer in smaller communities than in larger ones simply because of the time constraints imposed by having only part-time elected officials.

Getting Employees Behind the Plan
Department heads also can be a challenge to the process. The ideas of strategic planning and performance measurement will be met by some with such remarks as “It’s just a passing fad,” “The manager is just trying to make a good impression,” or “I don’t need any performance objectives. My job is to respond to the public when they call.”

To be fair to small-community department heads, these individuals wear many hats. They are the strategic planners, personnel directors, finance officers, and communications directors for their departments, in addition to being department leaders. The manager must find a way to convince these key personnel that a strategic plan will make their jobs easier by getting the council to focus on what is important and by properly funding and staffing these objectives.

Department heads faced with a councilmember (or SCM) saying, “This needs to be a priority,” can use the written objectives from the plan to remind others of what everyone had previously agreed would be the focal points for the year. Because of their closeness to their constituents, elected officials in smaller communities sometimes feel pressured to change direction rapidly in response to a few telephone calls that, to them, give the appearance of a community crisis. A well-designed strategic plan, properly communicated, can eliminate most of the time wasted by these pressures and the resulting inefficiencies.

Employees will have mixed reactions to strategic planning. Here, too, some people will feel that planning is a waste of time. Some will use the opportunity to unburden themselves of long-held frustrations about their supervisors. Some will provide the manager with the latest rumors. Many, however, will provide substantial information toward helping to develop the plan. Most likely, the number-one obstacle identified through employee surveys will be communication, or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

Don’t be alarmed; this is probably true of almost every organization, be it public, private, or not-for-profit. It is amazing how, even in small communities, the need for internal communication often is overlooked. Managers should remember this fact when surveying employees. Include a separate survey of mid-level managers, who usually are caught in the middle between council policies and employee frustration.

It is just as important for employees to receive feedback on how their managers perceive them as it is for the manager and councilmembers to get feedback on management. Hamburg received a 65 percent return of its employee surveys. Most employees do care about their local government and want to contribute to its success.

For smaller communities, this author/manager suggests that SCMs consider using an external consultant to administer the employee survey, to give employees the comfort of knowing that the manager will not see their responses. In Hamburg, we gave all employees a prestamped envelope to return their responses to the consultant, who then compiled the results. This kind of step also is more important for smaller communities, which may have only a few people in any department.

External Customer’s Role in the Process
Residents and businesses are the other key sources of input into the development of a strategic plan. These are obviously a locality’s main external customers. An external survey of this customer group, combined with the employee and manager surveys, can become the basis for the development of departmental and community objectives.

Elected leaders and department heads may be surprised at what the community members really see as their major concerns. The vocal minority, for example, may convince councilmembers that the most important issue is garbage collection, while a survey shows that the large majority of the community is perfectly satisfied with this issue but is concerned about the conditions of the sidewalks.

This is exactly what happened in our village. Some 78 percent of the Hamburg community rated garbage collection service favorably, while only 37 percent rated the conditions of sidewalks favorably. The village board, however, was spending a majority of its work-session time in discussing garbage services and had spent exactly no time in discussing sidewalks.

Many residents and business owners do not have time to attend council meetings or to call the manager’s office. The external survey gives elected leaders and staff members an accurate picture of community needs, concerns, and requirements. In a small town, elected officials (and some less-experienced appointed ones) will consider there is a community crisis once they have received five or six telephone calls regarding the same issue, when in fact there is no widespread concern.

While this is understandable, and any issue should of course be looked into, the entire focus of the government should not necessarily change direction. Hamburg’s officials now incorporate the community survey as a basis for the budgeting process and also for evaluating department heads’ performance.

Invariably, this question comes up: “Why do we need to go outside our organization to effect ‘change management’ within?” The answer to this question has been proven again and again. The consultant brings experience and an unbiased and unblemished approach to the organization, plus the ability to influence the participants positively.

There have been actual situations in which opposing members of an organization (opposing because of philosophy, politics, or another cause) have been brought together peaceably in a workshop environment that lent itself, not just to a chance to work together but also to a desire to socialize in the “forming, storming, norming, and performing” process of group dynamics. In most cases, without an outside consultant, this would not have occurred. If this is a fringe benefit of “the outside factor,” then its intrinsic value must indeed be great.

Timetable for Developing a Plan
A typical strategic planning process for a small community would involve the following steps and would require the minimum time period shown here. (This timetable is similar to the one used by Hamburg and assumes that an external consultant has been hired to assist in developing the plan.) Depending on the personnel who can be assigned to planning development in a small community, in the authors’ opinion, the timetable should be doubled if the plan will be developed using internal assets.
 
Months 1 to 3. Employee and citizen surveys are administered. Manager begins the educational process with department heads and councilmembers.

Months 4 to 7. Strategic planning work group is formed consisting of councilmembers, department heads, and union leaders, if applicable.

Discussion subjects for the initial meeting of the work group might include:

• Team Building
• Consensus Building
• Administering the Myers-Briggs
• Personality Type Indicator
• Expectations
• Introductions
• Use of the Strategic Planning Model
• The Strategic Planning Process and Terminology
• Customer and Market Identification, Segmentation, and Focus

• Analysis of Internal and External
• Surveys
• Use of the Strategic Planning Pyramid
• Vision, Mission, and Values
• Identification of Key Business Drivers (based on customer and market focus)
• Setting of Organizational Goals
• Setting of Objectives
• Identification of Metrics and
• Measurements/Business Results

• Overview of the Seven Categories and Alignment with the Strategic Plan
• Category 1: Leadership
• Category 2: Strategic Planning
• Category 3: Customer and Market Focus
• Category 4: Information and Analysis
• Category 5: Human Resource Focus
• Category 6: Process Management
• Category 7: Business Results

Through a tailored syllabus, the preceding objectives, methodologies, and topics can be deployed during the facilitation of the entire strategic planning process. Once the plan has been completed, a public hearing should be scheduled, after which the council should formally adopt the plan.

After the Plan Has Been Adopted
Once the plan has been adopted, there still is much to do. Several requirements arise simply from the accomplishment of putting a strategic plan in place within any organization. First, there is a need to identify metrics and measurements for the purpose of keeping the plan on track. Organizations measure a host of areas, but the question remains of whether they are measuring the right things.

Just because something is easy to measure does not mean that it should be measured. A measurement must be linked to the goals and objectives identified in the strategic plan. If the performance measurements are not linked, then localities will find it virtually impossible to identify whether progress is occurring in consonance with the plan. Careful attention must be paid to the task of training and orienting the right personnel within the organization on what to measure, how to measure, and how to track progress.

Without this fundamental step, the organization may quickly find that the time and effort put into the planning process was time wasted. Such is the importance of ensuring that the appropriate staff members set up a system of measurement and metrics that accomplishes their internal goal of tracking organizational progress. From this task arises the problem-solving or priority-adjustment phase of the strategic planning process. Skilled training and facilitation will assist any agency or organization in continuing its strategic forward movement.

Essential monthly reporting. After investing so much time and energy in the plan, it is essential to monitor progress and to keep the locality focused on its goals and objectives. Again, in smaller communities, everyone must share in the “ownership” of the plan and its progress.

In the village of Hamburg, each councilmember took responsibility for overseeing one of the village-wide goals. This ensured that elected officials maintained their awareness of these long-term objectives while handling the day-to-day issues of a part-time, small-community elected leader.

Department heads should provide a written monthly report, which will similarly force them to focus on their individual departmental goals. These written documents will give the elected body and the manager an early warning of any potential problem areas.

Mid-year review process. When an organization undertakes the task of change management by putting a strategic plan in place, the danger exists that members of this organization will return to what they always did before and that the old saying will come true: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got!”

So it is important to meet at mid-year in the fiscal cycle to assess whether the locality still is on course with its established goals and objectives and with its key business drivers. Variables that can change are organizational priorities, resourcing and funding, and perhaps leadership. Customer requirements also may change.

Accordingly, it is important to conduct an updated “environmental scan” and to ensure that measures of progress on the goals and objectives agreed to within the plan show progress toward accomplishment. Reassemble the members of the original planning group in order to make good use of their authorship of the plan and their familiarity with the participants in it. Some priorities, goals, and objectives may be delayed, accelerated, or eliminated, thanks to factors and considerations that were absent when the plan was formulated.

Plan review process. This cycle then should repeat itself annually, using the same core participants, thus becoming a process that can be conducted without the degree of training needed in its first phases. Workshops must be convened to renew and refresh all components of the strategic plan.

Be sure to coordinate the timing of the strategic planning cycle so it is synchronized with the budget process. Ideally, the first plan should be adopted just before the start of a budget planning cycle, so that the plan can be used to determine next year’s budget priorities.

The second iteration of the organization’s strategic plan can be conducted a little more speedily and will solidify both the plan and the process. Key business drivers will be validated, and goals and objectives will be adjusted and even tightened as the participants and the process meld and mature. Completion of the first cycle will mean that the organization has embedded strategic planning into its organizational culture.

Lessons Learned
Here is some advice that has arisen from the completion of Hamburg’s strategic plan:

Bring the council and staff closer together. Hamburg’s facilitator administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which allowed all participants to identify their individual strengths and weaknesses and to use this information in interacting with others. It is important to bring a degree of mutual appreciation and even levity to the process. According to Stephen Covey, in his First Things First; or, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, when people “don’t take themselves so seriously, and understand the differing personality types,” they will then “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

The survey process, both internal and external, can provide reliable input into your budget process and can help ensure that elected officials and staff are focused on community priorities and concerns.

Go slowly. Set realistic, obtainable goals. It is more important to achieve smaller, more immediate goals at first than to try to solve every problem in the community with the first strategic plan. Be realistic, given the available resources and staff expertise.

Stay focused and follow up. Once the plan has been published, it is easy to let dust collect on it. But remember that the manager plays the important role, in many small communities, of the top full-time official. Managers must keep vision and mission at the forefront of everything they do. List vision and mission on every memo and agenda published. Consider prominently displaying it in the council chambers.

Final Thoughts
It is critical to keep in mind that strategic planning is never completed. Clearly, a strategic plan does not belong in a binder on a shelf. It is a living document that requires constant attention if success is to be realized.

As managers, at some point in our careers, we have all seen the initiatives and brainchildren of elected leaders abandoned by our organizations as quickly as the leaders came and went. If, however, an organization takes the planning process seriously, and if the cycle becomes embedded in its culture, then success is on the horizon. If not, there may be a return to complacency and the “same old same old.” And, as they say, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there!

No one needs a strategic plan more than a small-community manager. Our resources and time are limited, and our elected officials have less time to devote to government management than do their full-time counterparts in larger places. A realistic, practical strategic plan that guides a community will conserve a manager’s resources and time and will give the community the services it truly desires.