SWOT up on the strategy of ‘you’

In the corporate world, they say if your business is not growing then it’s retracting. I’d add that this also applies to us as individuals.

I often talk about you being your own CEO. In that case, you should have a plan for where you’re heading and a strategy for getting there. How often you do you assess where you sit in the strategy of ‘you’ and how you are going to own your success?

The first thing you should consider (and it’s another principle I often repeat) is what got you here won’t get you there. That is, you can’t rest on your laurels, because things keep changing and so should you. The more you achieve, the more will be expected of you. Things people paid for five years ago may be free in the near future. You only need to look at the amount of free content online (which we might have had to buy books, magazines, papers and videos to access in the past) for an example of that in action. And skills and experience that are considered exceptional or sought after now may be run-of-the-mill in coming years.

I completely understand that mapping a course of improvement and change can be daunting. Not the least of your concerns might be the curve balls life tends to throw at us, or even the natural progressions through stages of our lives (such as having a baby) that force us to change our tack or priorities.

I often hear people say: “How can I plan that far in advance when anything could happen?” Or: “My plan turned on its head when I had my baby and life just completely took on a whole new meaning overnight.”

Planning for change

My advice for planning your course while expecting the unexpected is to run a dual strategy. This involves maintaining a BUA (business as usual) skill-set strategy, where you leverage the skills you have and plan to grow at a slower rate, and overlay this with a skill-acquisition strategy. This second layer is more of ‘stepped’ approach to change, where you undertake learning (such as courses or other training) in blocks of time that fit in with other things that are happening in your life.

The World Economic Forum says we need to undertake 101 days of learning each year if we care about our relevancy in a changing world. So this suggests skill acquisition should be an integral part of our individual strategies.

SWOTting up

One way to check in with your planning for change is to perform a personal SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis. Here are some of my tips for doing this:

Consider how open you are to critical analysis. Do you think you need to improve? This is an important question, since the whole exercise is futile if you’re completely satisfied with where you’re at.

Put yourself through a performance review. Ask colleagues and people you trust to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. Be honest and humble – hold up a mirror to yourself and take a long, hard, deep look.

Weigh up deep versus surface thinking. Think about the part you are seen to be playing in your arena and the things that really matter to you (whether they are obvious to others or not).

Think about your self-disruption. Can you transfer your skills to another role or take a new approach to the role you are in?

Create a revenue pyramid. Setting out a tiered approach to how you earn money either salary or revenue in a business. This will help you focus on best return for your time. Also bringing your attention to how you earn money helps to diversify your income streams. Meaning, you know where to best spend your time for cash now versus cash tomorrow, looking at once-off project income versus retainer or regular subscription income.

Review your positioning in your organisation or industry. How visible are you? How visible do you need to be and how can you achieve that visibility?

Leave nothing in the tank

Underpinning your strategy for change and improvement should be a willingness to be the best you can, no matter what is thrown at you. I’d love a dollar for every coach or athlete who has said they left nothing in the tank or left it all out there on the field. We should be doing the same.

To that end, perhaps I can refer you to a brilliant book that I’m planning to read – Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, by Todd Henry. Happy reading … and planning! The LBD Group provides the environment to challenge and push each other in order to achieve our goals, whatever they may be. This amazing group of female professionals in careers and owner business connect, share, learn and inspire each other. If you find yourself isolated, over whelmed or in need of a tribe that 'get's you' then LBD could be for you. In Australia and launching into London and Singapore, LBD is the global passport to your journey of success.

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