Annual strategy meetings are a necessary part of every organisation. And they can be very expensive, with decisions made affecting the organisation for a year or more.

Ensuring you maximise the value from these meetings and avoid mistakes to set the company up to win next year and into the future.

This week we share seven mistakes we’ve found leaders make at annual strategy meetings, and what you can do to avoid these mistakes. 

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

 

00:13
Kevin Lawrence
Welcome to the Growth Whisperers podcast, where everything we talk about is related to building enduring great companies. The bigger the better, the longer, the happier we seem to be or feel about it. I’m Kevin Lawrence here in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Here with my awesome co host, Brad Giles down in Perth, Australia. Brad, hello and welcome to the show. I guess you’re already here, so welcome you is kind of weird, but hey, congratulations on making the show today.

00:43
Brad Giles
It was a struggle, I tell you. Wake up, and I had to click on buttons on my computer. It was a struggle.

00:52
Kevin Lawrence
Button clicking can be hard sometimes.

00:53
Brad Giles
It is good to be here with you today, talking about mistakes that leaders make.

01:02
Kevin Lawrence
We make lots of mistakes, so I think we could probably there’s probably some good titles and we work with a lot of leaders who do a lot of things right, but we all make a lot of mistakes and they hurt sometimes, sometimes we can prevent them by learning about them.

01:18
Brad Giles
We like to start with a word or phrase of the day. Kev, what might be on your mind?

01:23
Kevin Lawrence
Greatness is the word was just down in Boulder, Colorado, with a group of CEOs that went to spend a couple of days with Jim Collins in his lab and seeing them at that event and come out having experienced greatness in terms of time with Jim Collins and their brains full of greatness and great ideas. Yeah, which was pretty cool outside of it being a great city. So, yeah, today is about greatness. We’re all, in our own ways, inspired for greatness. How about you? What’s your word?

01:59
Brad Giles
Very good mind would be prepare. Just preparing makes the difference. We know that. Right. Just working with the team last week, and they weren’t really preparing after the workshop for a successful quarter. They were just kind of letting things drift along. I suppose that’s a bit of a bonus for this episode today. But yeah.

02:25
Kevin Lawrence
Wow.

02:27
Brad Giles
You go to one of the most expensive days of the quarter, you spend all of that time together, and then you just kind of let it drift. You don’t do any further work to prepare. To prepare.

02:39
Kevin Lawrence
That would be unfortunate.

02:40
Brad Giles
Yeah.

02:40
Kevin Lawrence
So it’s great preparation. That was the easiest one to think I’ve had to sew together in a long time. So our theme is great preparation. Well, speaking of great preparation, Brad, that’s what we’re talking about today is how do you prepare or how do you mess it up and misprepare and not be prepared to have a great annual strategy meeting and the annual strategy meetings. Most companies and most that we work with, and most generally have a meeting once a year where they come together, work on strategy, which is this big, exciting word, and they put a lot of time and energy. They often go to an interesting place. I’ve got one of my clients that if business is really good, they go to a better place and if they miss budget, they go to just an okay place. The point of it is it’s time to really think about the longer term of the business and set the business up to win, ideally for the next few years.

03:39
Kevin Lawrence
A lot of people mess them up and they are very easy to mess up. Like, we’re not here to judge people. We’ve just been a part of some amazing ones and some really challenging ones that just don’t get the job done.

03:55
Brad Giles
Yeah, I guess I’ve kind of seen over the years it tends to fall into three buckets or three camps. First are the people who are quite structured and they know when their annual planning is going to be. Maybe they’ve even got an agenda and maybe they’ve even got a coach or a facilitator that works with them. In the middle are the people and they kind of drift along and eventually they get to a point where it’s like, yeah, we probably need to kind of go offside again and spend some time together. Right. At the other end, other people who just do nothing and they don’t have any kind of rhythm or any kind of planning. Specifically, we’re talking about the first two.

04:32
Kevin Lawrence
Here because the people who already do it and have an intent to do an effective job and have discipline and have rigor, but they might not be getting the results from it. Or we’ll just tell you where we see people mess up and not get the value out of them that they could and or should and we want to call it like, look, it’s hard. We all have day jobs, we’ve all got a lot going on and unfortunately, sometimes it’s like the week before, oh, we got this strategy thing scheduled, we got to get on it.

05:02
Brad Giles
What’s important here is that for the leaders, they’re doing it maybe once a year, whereas we’re doing it once every couple of weeks and we’ve been doing it for a very long time. So, yeah, this is where I guess we are coming from is the experience of doing so many of these things and seeing so many of them. So let’s jump into it, shall we? Number one. Number one, and we have seven just.

05:27
Kevin Lawrence
To go through and we’re going to go through them and give you some examples and some things that we have seen. Go ahead, Brad, kick us off with number one. Here how the number one way, and it is the number one way, I believe the absolute number one way that people mess up or underuse or create an undervalue or underperforming annual strap meeting.

05:50
Brad Giles
Number one mistake is a quicker way to say it.

05:54
Kevin Lawrence
Thank you for that.

05:55
Brad Giles
Yeah. Not enough preparation so there’s no homework and delegates turn up on the day and what? We got smart people. We’ll figure it out, or we kind of know what we got to talk about. No one’s done any homework or preparation or deep thoughts or thinking and they’re just turning up.

06:19
Kevin Lawrence
They may be super present and they may be super smart, but you can only get so much done when you’re starting from ground zero without the right base of information and preparation. Basically, the meeting starts when they step in the room versus starting a few weeks or even a couple of months in advance if it’s annual.

06:38
Brad Giles
Yeah, but what’s important here is that this is not only for the whole company. Okay? I have one client that comes to mind, and there was one person in particular in that team. It was as clear as day to everyone that this person did no homework and no pre reading and no preparation whatsoever and turned up and just kind of went on the fly. Right. Then, funnily enough, this same person kept on saying at the end of the day, yeah, I think the big thing is that the strategy doesn’t make any sense. Everyone else is looking around saying, well, it makes perfect sense to me. He’s like, I don’t think we’ve really got a plan for the quarter. And everyone else is looking. In the end, the CEO had to go to this person and say, look, if you’re not going to do the preparation, even though you’re an executive, you can’t come to these meetings.

07:28
Kevin Lawrence
And I like that. One of the companies I work with, it’s meant to be what they call a two page review. Every executive is giving a set of questions at six or seven questions to answer, to prepare, to report out on how they did on their area historically, and then to look forward to what they think is most important for the year, for their part of the business, and for the company overall. Not only have they done a lot of thinking and by the way, there’s no option to not do it in that company. If you don’t do it, you don’t have a job and there’s not a threat. It’s just they have a culture of you do what you say you’re going to do, but everyone, it gets them prepared and then we all get them in advance. On my flight over, I get to read all of their deep thoughts about their parts of the business.

08:17
Kevin Lawrence
We’re getting lots of that preparation in our mind before we even step in the room.

08:24
Brad Giles
Yeah, and that’s really important because there’s a theory that I have, which is many decisions are actually made from the subconscious, not the conscious. The conscious is just the dumb slave to the subconscious. We have the time to deep think about this and prepared, the opinions that we bring to the table are much more valuable rather than otherwise. We sit there on the spot, the question is posed and we look to the sky as if there’ll be some divine intervention that will pop in and say, oh, this is the correct answer. Because if you don’t do that, then you get four or five weeks down the track and you go, well, that wasn’t a very good idea.

09:09
Kevin Lawrence
Why are we been able to sleep on it and cycle on it for a few weeks or a week even? Things can crystallize before you again and there’s nothing a live in the moment conversation can be valuable for big strategic decisions. It’s really helpful to have this stuff rolling in advance. That’s why, again, part of the prep that we often spend a lot of time I just had a client where they did some of them without enough of my input, didn’t go as well. But basically it’s the agenda. We spend hours, especially when we’re first getting a rhythm going with a company to build that right agenda. It’s not uncommon to spend with our clients sometimes two, three, 4 hours to nail the agenda. We already have Master templates that we could pull from that we’ve used in different scenarios, but getting the agenda right and then because if you start out far enough in advance, assigning people pre work to do so that they can be not just the agenda and structure, but then people to prepare their parts.

10:16
Kevin Lawrence
We have the right information and we’re set up to have a meaningful conversation and in many cases, ideally, make a decision.

10:24
Brad Giles
Yeah. All right, well, let’s move on to number two.

10:26
Kevin Lawrence
Clarify that was number one. Not enough preparation. We win before we get in the room. Just to clarify, we shared a lot there. Go ahead, Brad. Number two.

10:34
Brad Giles
Number two not making time for connection and relationship building. Oftentimes we would go into full day or two day meetings and there’s so many things that people need to talk about because they just don’t ever have the time to catch up. It’s just like yeah, I remember were at a coaching conference many years ago and someone said that to me and it just resonated. Well, I just thought across all of the teams and it’s like, yeah, there is just no other chance where they get to have unstructured conversations that kind of float and drift over a long period of time. E-G-A day or two days. We’ve got to have the time for connection and relationship building across that team. Yeah.

11:27
Kevin Lawrence
I can be really guilty of this myself, even with our own team, because our team is together once a year when we do this in person. The only time that we’re all face to face and we’ve had, historically too much on the agenda and we got a lot of stuff covered, and we did have a lot of fun. That unstructured break time where things naturally kind of happen is super valuable. Just think about conferences. Some of the best things that happen at conferences is on the breaks. Lunch, dinner in the lounge, late at night, having conversations. I remember early in my career I worked in a media company and I had someone on the team that he and I almost hated each other, or at least I hated him, and were both kind of competing against each other. Long story short, I remember we’re in Whistler at the Delta Hotel.

12:22
Kevin Lawrence
We’ve been out having a good time, and we come back and we wanted to play pool. Neither of us had any money, and we started flipping cushions in the lounge looking for change so we could put change in the pool machine to play pool or billiards, for those of you that go by the official name. Anyway, we’re bonding at 02:00 A.m.. We found change, we played a game, and we’ve been best friends for very good friends ever since. I still communicate with them occasionally 30 something years later. It was unstructured time where relationships just kind of come together and you make bonds and it’s got to be taken into account.

13:00
Brad Giles
For many teams, it might be if it’s a two day annual meeting, they might have dinner on the intervening night, on the night between the two. There’s one of the teams that I work with and we’re based in Australia, and we’re heading over to France for the two day annual. We’re going to do some other stuff around that. France might not be on your agenda, but finding a way for connection and relationship building within this team.

13:34
Kevin Lawrence
Yes, I’ve got my clients india, and when they hit their budget so this year we’re going to Istanbul, which there’s some challenging things happening in that country. Where we’re going is again, they’ll probably be good for them. Still have our business coming there, but the whole team goes, and then they even bring spouses when the year is good, when they really hit targets, then spouses come, and then they can build. There’s bonds with the team and then there’s bonds with the other partners. People are just building strong connections and it’s a bit of an incentive too, that we hit our numbers. We go to in a more interesting place, by the way, just a sidekicker there. Yeah, some companies also that when they go for those meetings, also go to another business or learn about another company and what they’re doing to even expand and open their mind more, which will take us into number three.

14:28
Kevin Lawrence
Number two, not making enough time for connection. Number three is too short term and tactical not focused enough on division or strategic pieces. Generally, sometimes people get caught up in short term issues. When we do these strategic meetings, we say, look, whatever issues happening in the business today tactically that’s over there and out of the room. We’re not talking about that for the next few days. We structure the agenda to zoom out to long term. I try in a three day meeting even to get so the mistake is, people are so short term. You start to go and actually spend the first day on ten years, on thinking about the flywheel and the bhag and the big moves of what could be possible in ten years and really think about now, whether it’s an hour or a day, that’s up to you. You need time in the longer term and then dropping into the medium term of three to five years.

15:30
Kevin Lawrence
People in some of the best strategy meetings we’ve done, we would spend a couple of days between ten years and three years and then drop into the tactical one year and a quarter. It’s just it’s, zooming out because there’s a lot of rich out of the box thinking that happens there that you won’t even get close to. When you zoom in and start getting tactical.

15:53
Brad Giles
Well, your plan should be like a jigsaw puzzle. All of the pieces have got to click together. Just saying, if you just say in ten years that we’re going to be the leader in our industry or something like that’s just not enough. You’ve got to do so much more work around it, like you said, those different time periods. It’s got to connect to all of the other bits that you’re doing, like the hedgehog or whatever other tools that you use, because that gives you more clarity in the direction and more confidence in the direction that you’re heading.

16:26
Kevin Lawrence
It gets your brain out of the short term tactical right, because people get buried in it, but you have to force it out, otherwise it’ll keep dropping in there.

16:35
Brad Giles
There’s a friend of ours called Cayenne Krippendorf, and he’s got an excellent question for those who can struggle with this or they’re so deep in the area, and he asks the question, so in three years, what’s the undesirable but possible future if we do nothing? If we just coast and don’t make any changes, where will we go? What will happen? It can be a really valuable tool. I know that Kevin’s writing that down.

17:11
Kevin Lawrence
I just wrote it down. I know Cayenne. He’s an awesome guy. He’s got some great questions. I haven’t heard that one. I love it.

17:18
Brad Giles
Yeah. You get people say, we’ll be broke, we’ll be in other jobs, or whatever. Okay. That creates the momentum to say, all right, we need a strategy. We need to be able to solve these problems that we’re facing now and proactively work on the business. That generates the mandate to create long term plans.

17:39
Kevin Lawrence
Two more I’ll throw in there real quick. One that we use, which is similar, Brad, which is if were our competitor, how would you take us out? Boy, does that get the thoughts going, because that fear based negative. It opens up our brains. Boy, some of us can be pretty devious. The other one is, hey, if we really want to accelerate our growth, what would the biggest moves be? Like, the really big moves that would accelerate it. One used leveraging scarcity, the other leveraging abundance. Yeah. Awesome thinking. Cool. So that was number three. Two, short term and tactical, which is review number one, not enough prep. Two, not make enough time for relationship building and connection. Three, too short term and tactical. Tactical. Little tactical. Brad, you want to take number four?

18:35
Brad Giles
Indeed. Too conceptual. So there’s no smart and no owners. What do we mean by that? Having going away and coming out with things that aren’t defined or things that don’t have owners. We need to improve our sales process. For example, okay, how in one year? What does that mean? I’ve been with teams who’ve done this, and then one year later we’re at the annual and we’re saying, okay, did we achieve that goal of making this sales process better? Is it red or green? Did we achieve it green or is it red? We didn’t achieve it. They’re like, well, we don’t really know. We don’t really know. That’s the kind of problem that you can have if it’s too conceptual and you don’t do the work to distill it. Down to smart goals with owners. Yeah.

19:30
Kevin Lawrence
That’s easy to fall into that trap because it’s hard work to boil it down. Of course, it’s easy to say, let’s improve our sales process, but to get really clear on, well, we’re going to take our conversion rate from X to Y, or we’re going to go and train whatever it happens to be to get into the specifics. It’s a lot harder and it kind of hurts our brains. Especially after you’ve been doing a couple of days of thinking. Too conceptual versus boiling down into really smart goals with a specific owner so we can measure it because that measuring creates tension, and that tension creates creativity and rallies people to do stuff. Number five, too opinion based. Even in bigger smart companies, as they get going, it still happens, is that they don’t have enough data for context and have enough data to back up what they believe their brutal facts are.

20:27
Kevin Lawrence
We talk about not confronting brutal facts. That’s episode 59 and episode 147. We talk about that, but basically there’s too much opinions and feelings. In most of the companies I love the private equity backed companies I’ve worked with because private equity forces higher levels of data and granular understanding. In our companies, that scale and are really thriving, the amount of data we have going in is incredible. Like, it’s hours of reading. It’s those two pages reviews we talked about it’s, the financial reporting, the KPI reporting, the competitor reporting, the customer feedback, the employee feedback. It’s like preparing for a board meeting, and it’ll be 100 and 5200 pages sometimes. You may say, yes, that’s too much, but it’s an incredible amount of data. I’ll tell you why it’s so critical. One company, we’re down in Florida doing annual planning, remember, having a great time. As the CFO is going through and reviewing the deck that they sent out in advance, and as we’re going through it, the room finally got we had massive margin growth and profit growth, like record the best we had ever had.

21:45
Kevin Lawrence
But there was no unit growth. It means the business actually wasn’t growing. We just had some really juicy projects that were juicing the margin and juice into profit. But the business actually wasn’t growing. We weren’t near as healthy as we thought were. The home was a slam on the brakes, hard rate turn. We need to do something about this. Were able to dig in and get to the core of it, but we didn’t have a clue. We were riding this wave and didn’t realize the underlying issues.

22:19
Brad Giles
Yeah, you can go into these meetings and people will obviously come with opinions. It’s a given. We need to understand that building priorities and strategies off opinions can create a second class plan. Instead, we need to come back to facts. An example of that, there’s one team that comes to mind and we would always be saying, okay, so that’s your opinion, but what are the facts to support that? Because someone with an opinion, which is essentially a belief, will defend that belief all day long and there may not be this. So we’d always say, so what’s? The facts that support that, then we can dig into that.

23:16
Kevin Lawrence
Yes, because people are held tight in their opinions and facts move them off their opinions.

23:21
Brad Giles
Yes.

23:22
Kevin Lawrence
Awesome. So that’s number five. Two, opinion based. So again, number one, not enough prep. Two, not enough time for connection and team building. Three, too short term and tactical. Four, to conceptual and not smart goals with owners. Five, too opinion based. Number six is just too much. People just come out with too many things. The idea of strategic planning is to channel resources where you have the biggest impact and biggest ability to win. People end up generally coming out with too many things. There’s an element of people pleasing and wanting to include people. At the end of the day, if you just want to do what everyone says, it’s going to be too much. It’s almost like an amazing chef. An amazing chef will have a spectacular dish with three or four ingredients, not 427. You start putting too many ingredients in and it becomes too complex.

24:24
Kevin Lawrence
And there’s always exceptions. Generally few things done really well is what good strategy is requires a lot of saying no and a lot of focus. One of our clients, we had to start putting dollar signs or dollar impacts beside all of our priorities because people were so excited about things they wanted to do and they would debate and how it’s important. We added up the numbers when on a company that was doing about $80 million of revenue, they were passionate about something that impacted the business by 100 grand. So that’s just an example. How do you prioritize and get the most important things on to those priorities and try and get a lot of the noise out of the system to simplify it?

25:08
Brad Giles
Yeah, bigger or more isn’t better. Better is better. Okay, so we want to make sure that we always like to say three to five priorities is a broad best practice for the company and for the individual department. Okay, so let’s move on to number seven. Try to do it all themselves. This is one that’s quite dear to our hearts, I suppose, versus using an expert facilitator that does this all the time and gets your business. The mistake here is that people think, look, we can do it ourselves. Like, we’re a tight knit team, we’re good to go. We don’t really need that. But, yeah, it’s hard to facilitate a great meeting when you’re the CEO or owner of the business. It’s hard to really engender that debate outside of the day to day and to push and challenge and to ask different perspectives than you otherwise would.

26:20
Brad Giles
That’s the job of the coach or facilitator is to be that outside party who can, a, use many years of experience understanding what works and what doesn’t, and B be that person in the room.

26:37
Kevin Lawrence
Well, there’s probably a whole bunch of other things going on there, like you can either facilitate or participate. It’s very hard to do both. Secondly, as a CEO, you’re going to bring a lot of bias to the meeting a lot of times because your biases show up. CEOs are most effective, I’ve seen, when they can sit and listen and take it in and think, and then they jump in now and again. Also that there’s the power dynamic of having the CEO on it. There’s a worse power dynamic sometimes having an executive run it because it almost elevates the executives. Again, if you got something different that works, that’s great. We’re not saying it, but it’s a lot of work to run these well. It’s also sometimes less effective to do it yourself. Never mind the energy that it takes or the expertise someone has. It can kind of change the dynamics of the meeting.

27:33
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, the key word you said is expert. Like, look, we are expert facilitators. I’ve got people on my team that are expert facilitators, as do you. We hold people to a very high standard and expectation are we perfect? No, but we do it often and have some very good ideas of what works. One of the guys on my team, Dean. I learn from him constantly because he creates an environment that creates a safe space, which is, as do I, and I know you do, too. A space to have the right debates and get the right issues on the table so we can evolve our thinking and improve what we’re doing. Versus one of my clients had a facilitator before that was just creating toxic debate and shutting down the room again. Not only is there organizing it and being able to think clearly, but there’s effectively running a meeting in a way that gets great debate and great output.

28:30
Brad Giles
Well, it’s like you were going to remodel your house. If you’re the CEO, you’ve got another job and you probably do a pretty good job of that job, but get the house, remodel it to come in to do it. Don’t think that you’re going to do a good job and do justice and add value to the house. There’s one CEO that comes to mind when you’re saying that’s Kev. He’d been running his own for several years. Right. The thing is that the execs knew how to play him. They knew exactly what to do. There was this monotony or this plateau that they’d hit because they knew exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to push his buttons in the right way. When we moved in, one of our team went in there and started working with him. He sent me an email and he said, Why didn’t I do this years ago?

29:28
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, there’s lots of reasons why people do or don’t do it, but it’s just easier when someone else owns it so you can participate. So there we have it. At the end of the day, strap planning meetings are critical and people often get less value than they should. And there’s seven key mistakes. Not enough prep, not enough connection time, not enough strategic time, or too short term, too conceptual, versus boiling it down to smart goals. Too much opinion, not enough facts, too many projects or priorities coming out of it and then trying to do it themselves and having the CEO run it, which is just a lot of extra work. That should be outsourced, unless that’s their passion, their joy in their sweet spot, which it often is. All right, very good. Well, that was a great episode. If you have other ideas or questions, please let us know and see other episodes.

30:21
Kevin Lawrence
We’ve covered off every topic you can imagine. This was episode 154. Thanks for listening. Kevin Lawrence here in Vancouver. Brad in Perth, Australia. To subscribe and ideally give it a good rating, please do it. It wherever you listen to your podcast. Video is@youtube.com just search the growth whispers and to connect with us and our newsletters. That we both put a lot of energy into sharing what we learn along the way. Beyond this Brad is evolutionpartners.com.au. You can also get a hold of him there. And same with myself. My newsletter as well is Lawrenceandco.com. Hope you have an awesome week. If you haven’t already had a great strategy meeting when you prepare yours, I hope you have a better one than you did last time. Have a great week.