Keeping Your Most Important Meetings on TrackFacilitating the Best Discussions and Decisions
When top level executives and managers sit down and discuss the quarter or year ahead, they are essentially shaping the company’s future. If you happen to be in one of these meetings, you need to understand that you are also shaping your career. The discussions and decisions that take place in these high-level gatherings are hugely important.
These meetings set the stage for the coming quarter or year and involve challenging strategic discussions. The participants represent the minds that will ultimately lead the organization; how well this meeting goes might very well determine the performance of the organization.
You need to involve the whole team in this annual/quarterly meeting, and get them to contribute their most intelligent, relevant ideas. This is easier said than done. From bad ideas to disagreements, you’ll have to overcome a lot of issues before you can claim that it was a fruitful assembly of the top minds in your organization.
Thinking Hard Before Working Hard
Before the meeting is concluded and executives leave to lead their respective departments, some hard thinking should have been done.
Since annual and quarterly meetings set the stage for the following periods, they are usually followed by a surge in motivation and renewed commitment to work hard to achieve the goals set forth.
What if the goals are not ideal? What if there are no definite goals at all? What if the executives leave the meeting disgruntled and/or in disagreement with each other? You would run the risk of letting the hard work go to waste.
That is why thinking hard before working hard is crucial.
Setting a Grand Plan
With my Planning Meeting Facilitation, I will help you set a grand plan for the organization, which is a challenging task to say the least. An Annual and quarterly planning meeting can be like a pressure cooker in which ideas, goals and egos collide. With professional meeting facilitation, you can keep this cooker from bursting, and serve a wonderful dish called “Success for Everyone”!
As a neutral facilitator I will help keep the executive team focused and on track. Whether it’s through transforming vague suggestions into specific actions or resolving conflicts, there are numerous ways in which I can help you conduct a very successful planning meeting.
The meeting facilitation will help you:
- Identify the meeting’s agenda and aims before the meeting commences
- Clearly communicate the agenda and aims
- Go through the process to achieve the aims and objectives of the meeting
- Ensure higher engagement than typical meetings
- Understand other participants’ perspectives
- Clarify priorities
- Make better decisions and relevant actionable plans
What Happens After a ‘Facilitated’ Meeting
Before I get into what happens after the meeting, I want to emphasize/reiterate the importance of what happens before it. I will work with you prior to the meeting to define its scope, goal and content.
The idea is that you should walk into the meeting fully aware of its goals, and know how to achieve them by working with the participants.
My meeting facilitation will ensure that:
- Decisions are made
- Corporate alignment is improved
- Commitment to action is increased
- Actionable plans are assigned
- A follow-up process is defined
Think you can use such a meeting? Contact me to learn more about my Planning Meeting Facilitation.
