WHAT IS STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT?

Strategic management is the process of setting organizational goals, performing a

competitive analysis, reflecting on a company’s internal structure, and evaluating
current strategies.

Strategic management is planning, monitoring, assessing, and analysis of the necessary

activities that an organization needs to perform for accomplishing the pre decided goals
and objectives. On the lighter note, the strategy is to calculate the speed at which you
should drive for reaching a particular destination for a specific time. It also broadens to the
analysis of time taken and the cost incurred if other modes of transportation are
considered.

WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT?

1. IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES
Strategic management is necessary to identify opportunities. Tap into
opportunities and identify strengths and weaknesses by studying the internal
structure of your organization. Within every team, there’s unrealized potential that
needs your attention. You may even discover new ways to implement existing
strategies.

2. PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE

THE DYNAMIC NATURE OF
THE MARKET AND THE BUSINESS
3.
Strategic management helps you prepare for the future. Organizations can
benefit from understanding the importance of strategic management because it can
help you prepare for contingencies. A business environment is dynamic and
fast-paced. Evolve and adapt your strategies to keep abreast of vital changes in the
business sphere.

4. BE ACTION-ORIENTED
Don’t become complacent in your management style. If you’re driven by action and
purpose, you can easily alter policies and business plans to drive the organization
forward. A sound action plan is sustainable and important for the growth and survival
of your company.

5. STRENGTHEN ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Working in a team is important to achieve shared goals. Each member is dependent
on another for guidance, especially in a stressful situation. This gives rise to the need
for strategic management. You can reflect on your organization’s internal structure
and make changes wherever you feel necessary. Only a strong organizational
structure can endure testing times.
 6. SUSTAINED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE (Stiff Competition)
It’s necessary to have a sustained competitive advantage in today’s market. To do
well compared to other players in the market and avoid failure when faced with
setbacks, build a plan that’s viable and long-lasting.
The importance of strategic management lies at the intersection of your company’s
internal and external environments. Constructing a strategic vision with long-term
objectives in mind is useful for achieving organizational goals.

Every company needs a contingency plan to fall back on. If you have a sound strategic
plan ready and accessible to all the stakeholders, you can overcome any hurdle.
Team management doesn’t have to be a challenging task. You can turn it into an
opportunity for the greater good of your company. When you’re in a team, you get to
collaborate with motivated individuals who realign their personal goals to attain larger
organizational objectives.

5 Ways to Address a Performance Gap in Your Team

Skill and performance gaps crop up in every workplace. Jobs, technologies, and even
demand change over time. When this happens, recognizing and working to fill
performance gaps is crucial to maintaining results and productivity inside your team.
In most cases, performance gaps are the direct result of missing skills inside your team.
This could show up as lack of development for team members or missing team
members.
The best short-term strategy is to use direct intervention to bridge these gaps with
training and hiring, but long-term goals should involve using competency models and
frameworks to account for skills gaps before they occur, so that employees are hired,
developed, or directly trained to prevent them.
Identify Performance Gaps Correctly
Correctly identifying performance gaps and their source is one of the most important
elements of correcting them. Performance gaps can stem from numerous sources, but
common reasons include;
● Lack of job knowledge
● Changing job requirements
● Lack of understanding of the role due to improper hiring
● Ineffective management
● Physical or emotional conditions in the workplace
● Leadership and structural problems within the organization
Properly identifying performance gaps may mean bringing in a third-party depending on
your existing resources and ability to properly assess your organization.
It’s also a good idea to use multiple data sources such as KPIs, employee
assessments, and leadership assessments, which you can then use to cross-validate
results.
Train Employees in New Hard Skills
Changing technology often means that employees who were previously very good at
their job can no longer use their relevant skills, which often results in a performance
gap.
Using competency frameworks and clear job profiles will help you to identify which skills
are necessary for the role, which can help you in offering training and development to
those who need specific skills to perform.
Use Leadership Development to Prevent Performance Gaps
Leadership and management problems are often a direct cause of performance gaps,
especially when high performers are promoted from a technical to a leadership role.
Some high performers make the switch effectively, but many may continue to perform in
technical roles, micro-managing teams and doing work themselves instead of
empowering their team. This will result in a lack of motivation and a huge performance
gap.
Integrating leadership development to ensure that leaders and management know what
is expected of them and how they should perform in their roles will help prevent this.
Address Workplace Culture and Environment
Workplace and cultural problems often dramatically affect performance and productivity,
with issues stemming from a lack of emotional intelligence, poor communication, and
even the actual office layout.
These issues can be identified through assessments, and must often be fixed by taking
direct action on specific instances (such as offering communication and teamwork
workshops), giving training in emotional intelligence, or creating more flexible and agile
workplace solutions.
Integrate a Competency Framework
A good competency framework will help you to recognize and address performance
gaps more quickly by creating a foundation to assess and monitor individual role
productivity. Competency frameworks recognize what good performance looks like
(rather than simply skills), which can help you to review when performance is being
affected and how, so you can take steps to correct issues on an individual level.
Performance gaps are a major problem in many teams, but they are often related to
leadership, direct skills gaps, or lack of motivation. Integrating good HR tools will help
you to assess and solve these problems more quickly, while preventing them in the
future.

Management theories are concepts surrounding recommended

management strategies, which may include tools such as frameworks and
guidelines that can be implemented in modern organizations. Generally,
professionals will not rely solely on one management theory alone, but
instead, introduce several concepts from different management theories
that best suit their workforce and company culture.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and so a

SWOT analysis is a technique for assessing these four aspects of your business.
SWOT Analysis is a tool that can help you to analyze what your company does best
right now, and to devise a successful strategy for the future. SWOT can also uncover
areas of the business that are holding you back, or that your competitors could
exploit if you don't protect yourself.

A SWOT analysis examines both internal and external factors – that is, what's going
on inside and outside your organization. So some of these factors will be within your
control and some will not. In either case, the wisest action you can take in response
will become clearer once you've discovered, recorded and analyzed as many factors
as you can.

Cooperation like competition is one of the basic tools that influence the
development and create changes in the management of enterprises in today's
dynamic environment. Foundation for the correct operation and the networking in
such cooperation environment is their management by which it can plan, organize
and manage the activities of individual companies, not only inside the company
environment but also with external cooperating or competing enterprises. On the
other hand, cooperation is one of the tools for solving problems in the current
environment. Where the system as a whole of interacting elements is controlled by
reaching the target - cooperative management. Knowing the progression of creating
cooperation contributes to the management of cooperating enterprises (cooperation
management) in several important stages of development cooperation. The
proposed progression of cooperation shows important interactions, decisions and
activities since its creation up to its completion.

COLLUDE - cooperate in a secret or unlawful way in order to deceive or gain an advantage

over others.
"he accused his opponents of colluding with one another"

SWOT Analysis: An Overview. Each of the models seeks to define the company's
position in the market. Porter's 5 Forces are generally more of a micro tool, while
SWOT analysis is comparatively macro.

a primary difference is that SWOT focuses more on company-specific elements while

Five Forces involves a look at five important competitive factors when making a
strategic decision.