You’ve likely gotten through your initial response to COVID-19 – the team are working from home or furloughed, and you’ve worked out necessary cost-cutting measures. So now you need to figure out: where to from here for the business?
So, it’s time to bring the team together for a strategy or planning meeting, in order to set direction, and map out the key initiatives. But how to do this with the team working from home, and distracted? The good news is that it’s possible to plan and strategise just as effectively remotely as in-person, in fact it has distinct advantages, and I’m going to share with you how.
If you’re not in the habit of regular strategy and planning meetings in your business, then now is the time to start. In many ways it’s easier (and certainly more cost effective) to start remotely, and this is a crucial time to set strategy and direction.
I am a strategy and planning expert. I have been helping high-growth companies to align their leadership team around strategies for growth for years. More recently, a particular experience of mine has become very valuable – how to do it remotely.
Here I am sharing highlights to help you:
You may be surprised to learn that, in some ways, running strategy and planning sessions virtually has some advantages over doing it person:
I have pulled together key best practises to overcome these challenges, and develop and deliver a great remote strategy & planning session for your business:
Assign new roles
There are 2 roles that are key to making such a session a success. I suggest that the CEO should take neither role:
Master the tools.
Technology is of course both the solution and the challenge to making it all work. There are 3 types of tool that the Moderator needs to get support the team to master:
Clear Agenda and Objectives
It’s important to understand what you must come away with from such a session. It has failed if you do not have the following in place when you’re done:
So, the Facilitator must put together an agenda, based on the needs of the business, to get you there. There are many tools available – a SWOT analysis is a simple and effective one, the ‘Strategy’ section from Verne Harnish’s ‘Scaling Up’ provides many more. It’s also important to reference your key metrics and targets when setting your Priorities.
Digital meeting hygiene
The dynamics of meetings are different on-line, and so you need to tweak how you manage them, in order to ensure engagement:
If you are interested in learning how you and your team can become experts on how to lead planning and strategy virtually please get in touch.
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