4 Critical Steps for Your Strategic Planning Session
It is that time of year when planning for the next year is in full gear, or at least it should be! While this activity may seem routine, there are critical steps one should take when planning your strategic planning session. Yes, I said, planning for your planning session!
The most productive and focused meetings any one of us can be part of is a meeting that is well thought out and your strategic planning session is no exception.The 4 critical steps you should take to make your strategic planning session as productive as possible are:
- Be clear about what you want the session to produce and what you want the group to own when they leave the strategic planning session.
- Lay some ground work prior to the meeting, making sure that the group has some sort of creative alignment or agreement with regard to the direction of the session.
- Mentally prepare the session participants before they ever walk in the door. Provide them with an agenda and even “clear” participants by encouraging them to say what is on their mind before you jump into the strategic planning session. (So often when we go into a meeting we are still thinking about the meeting we just left. Therefore, making sure the participants are really present to what's going on in the meeting, will make for a much more productive and successful outcome.)
- Have a specified leader for the session. Someone has to be in charge – the session isn’t necessarily a democracy, and in order to be effective and efficient, the meeting has to have a leader who holds the participants accountable for staying in the game and for getting to the end that everybody agrees they should get to. That leader may be you or it could even be an outside facilitator.
When you keep your team on track and flowing in the same direction during your strategic planning session, the payoff is great! Not only do you get to an end point, but you can create ownership by your team not only in the direction of the company, but of how they are going to get there. In the end, this ownership of the plan by each team member is what will ultimately see the plan through to completion.