4 Strategic Planning Mistakes HR Leaders Make | Achieve

4 Strategic Planning Mistakes That Quietly Sink People Strategy (and How to Fix Them Before 2027)

By Zech Dahms, President of Achieve

October is strategic planning season. Budgets get drafted, priorities get debated, and HR teams start turning next year's business ambition into a people strategy. It's also the month when the most common strategic planning mistakes get locked in for another twelve months.

The timing matters more than usual. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, and that lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the decline. Manager engagement alone dropped from 27% to 22% in a single year. And Gartner is already preparing to release its top CHRO trends and priorities for 2027 in November, built on its annual survey of hundreds of CHROs.

I review a lot of strategic plans. Most are thoughtful, detailed, and polished. Many are genuinely impressive. And yet a lot of them still fall into the same four traps. They look strategic, but they don't change the trajectory of the system. Here's what those traps look like, why they hit people strategy so hard, and what we heard when members of the Achieve Leadership Network worked through them together at this month's First Tuesdays mastermind.

Why strategic planning mistakes hit people strategy hardest

Priority overload isn't new, and it isn't just an HR problem. In a Booz & Company survey published in strategy+business, 64% of executives said their company has too many conflicting priorities. The same research found that companies whose strategy, capabilities, and offerings are in sync consistently outperform the rest.

People strategy feels this pressure more than most functions, because it sits downstream of everything. HR is asked to strengthen culture, lift performance, cut attrition, support rapid growth, protect flexibility, and keep satisfaction high, all at once. Even Gartner's own 2026 CHRO research, drawn from 426 CHROs across 23 industries, narrowed the agenda to four priorities. Focus is the work.

Mistake #1: Avoiding goal setting altogether

Sometimes teams skip true goal setting. Not because they lack intelligence, but because setting a real goal introduces risk, and risk introduces vulnerability. Later in the year, there's an easier excuse: we're too busy to set goals, so let's just get work done.

The result is a people strategy that reads like a list of initiatives, a set of process improvements, or a handful of "focus areas" with no measurable transformation behind them. It feels safe. It isn't.

Here's the truth underneath it: we're constantly thinking about our future, and that future shapes how we behave today. Our goals influence what we notice, what we prioritize, and what we ignore. Psychologists call our ability to see the route forward pathway thinking, and the quality of that thinking depends on the clarity and ambition of the goal. Decades of research back this up. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's 35-year review of goal-setting research concluded that specific, difficult goals lead to higher performance than vague "do your best" goals.

achieveCPR forces that clarity. It asks you to define an ambitious future state for Culture, Performance, and Retention, not just refine the one you already have.

Mistake #2: Setting goals that are too small

Improve engagement by 3%. Reduce attrition by 2%. Increase leadership training participation by 10%. These goals are reasonable and attainable. They also don't transform anything.

The hidden cost is that small goals don't filter your work. A good goal should tell you which projects matter. When a goal is small, fifteen or twenty different activities could plausibly hit it, so the list of things you "could" work on gets longer, not shorter. You end up with more options and less focus. As I put it to the group at First Tuesdays, "When you set too small of goals, what happens is it creates a larger list of things that you could work on... it doesn't help you actually prioritize at all."

Goals aren't just targets. They're system shapers. Your goal determines how your processes are structured, where your resources go, and how urgent the work feels. Small goals don't eliminate distractions, simplify decisions, or force innovation. A bold one does. Say "we will build the most performance-aligned culture in our industry," and suddenly you have to redesign how culture, performance, and retention work together.

Mistake #3: Ignoring trade-offs

This is where most strategic plans quietly fail. We want strong culture, high performance, low attrition, rapid growth, full flexibility, and maximum satisfaction. Next thing you know, there are seven to ten goals on the list and very little impact on any of them.

The best organizations I work with tend to commit to two or three major goals for the year, or for a team within a quarter. Beyond that, people get spread thin, pulled in different directions, and traction disappears.

I'll be honest: this is the mistake I make most. I love starting new things, and I'm prone to shiny object syndrome. Two habits help. First, I allow myself one "golden project" a quarter, a single passion project outside the core goals, so the main priorities still get my real focus. Second, I keep a parking lot. Good ideas don't go in the trash. As I told the room, "We're just putting it in the parking lot." They stay visible, with a clear "not right now." That small mental shift makes it much easier for a whole team to buy in to staying focused.

Committing to one big direction simplifies everything. You stop optimizing things that shouldn't exist, and you get clear about what sits below the line. achieveCPR builds that discipline in with three questions:

• What must stop?
• What must start?
• What must continue?

Without trade-offs, there is no scale.

Mistake #4: Pursuing the wrong goal

This is the most dangerous one, because you can execute flawlessly and still scale in the wrong direction. In people strategy, it looks like optimizing engagement scores instead of execution capability, investing in perks instead of performance alignment, or publishing culture statements without leadership accountability. You hit the goal. The business doesn't move.

The right goal is outcome-based, emotionally compelling, and directly aligned to business ambition. It also has the right payoff window. A three-to-five-year transformation and a this-quarter project need very different expectations, so be clear about which one you're setting.

You won't always know at the start whether you picked the right goal. What you can do is decide in advance how you'll find out. Ask two questions when you set it: how will we know this is working, and by when will we decide whether to keep going? That protects you from quitting too early in the messy middle, when big work always feels like it's stalling, and from beating on the same approach long after it should have changed.

That requires real feedback loops. Gallup found that employees are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they're motivated to do outstanding work when their manager gives daily rather than annual feedback. The same principle applies to goals. A simple check-in works: what's working well, and what are we learning right now?

Getting the goal from the boardroom to the front line

A great goal still fails if nobody below the executive team can see how their work connects to it. One approach I've seen work: leadership sets the North Star, then each department is treated like its own business and decides how it will contribute. Leaders get enablement to facilitate that planning conversation, and the people closest to the work choose the initiatives.

From there, remember that goals don't achieve themselves. Reinforcement does. The two easiest levers to pull are performance management and rewards and recognition. If performance management is hard to change in your organization, recognition is often the lever you can move fastest.

It also helps to look at the four contexts that quietly reinforce how people behave every day:

• Self: individual thoughts, habits, and beliefs.
• Social: peers, relationships, and the pressure of the people around us.
• Spaces: the physical environment, visual cues, and how work is set up.
• Systems: performance management, rewards, and schedules.

Most change efforts pull only one or two of these. Train people on a new behavior (self) without changing how they're evaluated (systems), and the two contexts contradict each other. Alignment means getting all four pointed the same way.

What this looked like in the room

First Tuesdays is the Achieve Leadership Network's monthly kickoff mastermind, which I host. We open each month with a framework, then make room for members to coach each other on what they're working on right now. October's session centered on goal setting as many members begin 2027 planning.

The mistakes landed quickly. One leader, stepping into a brand-new function while their organization reunites separate divisions, saw their own situation in the trade-offs and wrong-goal traps. A healthcare HR leader described a three-year strategic plan that doesn't cascade clearly to departments or frontline teams. Another member admitted to carrying nine HR priorities and left committed to choosing two or three. Others pushed the conversation further: starting alignment from organizational values and the behaviors that bring them to life, and treating reduced ambiguity as a skill rather than something to simply tolerate.

That's the value of the room. In a world where information is a commodity, I want this community to be "less of a space of just providing new information" and "more of a space of wisdom." Peer wisdom, applied to the real plan on your desk.

The CPR shift: one question to keep 2027 on course

Most people strategies try to optimize pieces. achieveCPR integrates the system. Instead of asking "what people initiatives should we run?" it asks:

What Culture must exist to drive the Performance required to sustain the Retention needed to achieve the business vision?

That one question forces clarity, enforces trade-offs, and keeps you from scaling in the wrong direction. When Culture fuels Performance, and Performance reinforces Retention, you don't just hit goals. You scale with vitality.

Bring your 2027 plan to the room

Strategic planning is easier when you're not doing it alone. The Achieve Leadership Network brings people leaders together every month to share frameworks, pressure-test plans, and solve real problems alongside peers who get it. Solution circles, not therapy circles.

If you're building your 2027 people strategy right now, build it with us. Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network and join us at the next First Tuesdays.