BAHRIA UNIVERSITY

Crafting a Strategy
Muhammad Zubair
32957

This document will tell you about how to craft a strategy, in order to achieve goals
and objectives in life.

CRAFTING A STRATEGY
Strategy is plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall objectives. Setting a career
plan or crafting a future strategy play an important role to achieve targets.
How To Achieve Performance Target?
Setting a target is not about guessing what you can achieve. It involves knowing where you are
now, what you are trying to achieve, and determining challenging but realistic amounts of
improvement needed to get there.
I believe in achieving my goals through hard work. I also believe that if you are intelligent and
know how to use your intelligence, you can reach your goals and targets.
Key factors in setting performance targets

The level of performance to be achieved

The competences needed to achieve this level of performance
The activities and resources needed to motivate and empower people
The monitoring and review mechanisms that measure performance and compare results

with targets
The measures taken to improve performance and attain best practice
The measures taken to ensure the planned targets and competences are the right ones for
the organization and its stakeholders
Targets should be expressed in a manner that establishes a clear focus for all actions and
decisions
Targets should be traceable to and consistent with organizational goals thus enabling the
degree of achievement to be measured relative to stakeholder satisfaction.
Targets should be agreed by those teams whose performance will be measured against
them
Targets should be set for process outputs rather than individual performance so as to
encourage team effort and avoid isolating individuals
Targets should always be focused on purpose rather than activity (as in the example
above;. growth in number of customers is an activity-focused target whereas, growth in
spending is a purpose-focused target)
How To Compete Rivals?
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Be Confident
Exuding confidence is an essential technique to impressing your colleagues and your bosses.
Those who advance in their jobs are often those who possess immense confidence in their lives
and in their careers. But remember not to confuse confidence with arrogance; the latter will
certainly inflict more harm than benefits.
Be Open To Challenges
Rather than shirking away your responsibilities when faced with a lengthy or demanding project,
consider it an opportunity for you to learn, grow and enhance your professional skills. Embracing
challenges is often an effectual mind-set to adopt in your career and can serve as a signal to your
bosses that you are one who takes the initiative to lead your peers to solve difficult tasks.
Take Failures As Opportunities To Learn
As Henry Ford famously said:
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Do not be afraid of failing, instead adopt an optimistic mind-set when dealing with failures and
recognize all the values and lessons that you learn just from taking a misstep. It is critical to
incorporate these lessons to your approach to future tasks and strive for success!
Be Open To Feedback
Instead of seeing feedback as criticism of your work, see it as constructive. People who move
ahead are often very accepting towards feedback; in fact, they yearn for it and recognize its
importance as a tool to improve their professional skills.
Remain Positive
No one enjoys the company of a pessimist, less so one who only identifies problems, rather than
contributing to the solutions. Having an optimistic, upbeat attitude towards work, no matter how
challenging and impossible the tasks that youre assigned to might seem, is imperative to
overcoming challenges.

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Be An Effective Team Player

Being a constructive and flexible team player truly is a fundamental characteristic that you need
to master to excel at your work. Rather than shirking responsibilities or reassigning duties, focus
on achieving results together with your teammates.
Be Hungry For Success
Above all, having a drive for success is a necessary to get ahead in your career. While having
high aspirations and being highly motivated to prove that youre a worthy candidate for a
promotion is vital, remember that it is unwise to achieve success at the expense of your peers.

Strategies To Make Your Vision A Reality

Vision, strategy, and goals are important but they are not enough. One of the greatest
challenges in businessand frankly, one of the greatest challenges in lifeis doing the things
necessary to make ones vision a reality.
To ensure the realization of your vision, you need to set up structures and processes that act as
guardrails to keep you from falling off the path.
Get Organized
Before you begin down the path of execution, spend some time getting yourself organized by
creating processes and checklists to help you stay on track. I use a daily planning agenda, a
weekly planning agenda, and a social media checklist. I also set up recurring emails, as well
software systems for tracking my progress and reminding myself of deadlines and tasks.
Meet with your key stakeholders to make sure they support not only your vision, but also the
specific efforts you will be making to achieve it.
Tracking & Measurement
Consistently tracking and measuring your progress will help maintain motivation and keep you
aware of how youre advancing toward your goal.
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There are many tools available to help you do this. From a simple checklist, a spreadsheet, mindmapping software, project management software, or software designed for goal tracking. I use
software called Goal Enforcer.
Whatever you decide to use, you need to configure it and set up specific processes for how you
will use it: when you will record your progress, and how you will measure the advancement
towards your goal.
Tracking is important because, as you measure your progress and gain greater insight into your
journey, you may have to adjust your course and alter your plans.
Accountability
Its too hard to do this alone. Set up a regular time to meet with a coach or a partner to help keep
you accountable. It can work well to make an agreement with a partner where it is mutual
where you help keep them accountable for their own plans and goals as well.
Choose someone who is genuinely concerned with the success of your vision, who will be
brutally honest with you, and who will not accept excuses. Make agreements on how they will
encourage you, keep you on track, and push you to do your best.

Rewards
While you may think the thrill of achievement will be enough motivation to keep you
progressing to the end; it is important to set up reward(s) for achievement of your vision, and/or
smaller rewards as you reach certain milestones.
For me, I chose a trip to northern areas of Pakistan, as my big reward for reaching my 2016
goals. Whatever your reward is, make sure it is big enough to keep you moving through the
tough times. Creating smaller rewards as you reach milestones is also beneficial. Rewarding
yourself for achievement is a much more effective alternative to beating yourself up for nonachievement.

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These four strategies: getting organized, tracking, accountability, and rewards will help keep you
on the path of execution to transform your vision into reality. The journey may not be easy, but
the reward will be worth it.

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