Your business can hit its targets through people management and strategy.
As you plan for the progress and success of your small business, traditional strategic planning can help you evaluate your resources as you set goals. While this process contributes essential information to your planning, you must also consider the capacities of your personnel. Humanistic management can help you consider the competitive advantages you get from the people who work for you.
Values vs. Assets
When you use strategic planning, you must examine your assets, such as cash, machinery, vehicles and facilities, to determine how best to use them to reach your financial goals. Humanistic management approaches encourage you to start your planning from your values. You must create goals that are in line with those values. This approach includes considerations of your employees and your customers. For example, you could set a strategic goal of shipping 5,000 units per day, or you could use the humanistic approach of asking yourself if your workers are physically capable of packing that many products. In addition, if you set a strategic goal of selling 10,000 products, you could ask how those products solve your customers’ problems or satisfy their needs.
Purpose vs. Objectives
When you engage in strategic planning, you set short-term objectives that will lead to your goals. For example, you could set an objective of increasing salespeople’s cold calls by 20 percent. When using humanistic management, you would instruct your salespeople to inform customers about how your product or service contributes positively to their lives. The nature of those improvements would reflect the purpose you have set for your business.
Influence vs. Control
Strategic planning requires control so that you can ensure the strategy is being implemented properly and that employees are reaching objectives and goals. This