Focus
Competency Area:
Focus
Focus plays many roles in integrated planning. There’s the focus necessary for making the tough decisions needed to move toward an envisioned future. Then there’s the focus required to see those decisions through—the discipline of aligning up, down, and sideways. These competencies relate to establishing priorities and enacting them.
Competencies for Focus
Vertical Alignment
The ability to make sure your work contributes to institutional priorities
- Understand the institution’s goals and priorities.
- Adapt actions and day-to-day work so they align with institutional priorities and values.
- Translate institutional priorities to others to make the plan relevant to their day-to-day work.
- Assess unit plans and priorities for alignment with institutional priorities, and adjust as necessary.
Related Resources
Horizontal Alignment Unit Leader Role Only
The ability to orchestrate work across boundaries to meet the institution’s priorities
- Work with other units to identify and pursue opportunities to collaborate.
- Adapt the nature or timing of your unit’s tasks so they align with initiatives in other units, and describe how other units can adapt their tasks to align with your unit’s work.
- Align your unit’s plan with plans in other units.
Related Resources
Strategy
The ability to set a future direction and use it to make decisions
- Act on new opportunities in a strategic way that aligns with the plan.
- Identify how the institution can serve its users and differentiate itself.
- Collaborate to establish a vision that describes the future.
- Outline a decision-making process—how different needs, requests, ideas, and initiatives will be considered, prioritized, and implemented.
- Establish the plan’s guardrails, and ensure the plan stays within those guardrails.
- Make tough choices.
Related Resources
