Podcast Ep 154 | The 7 mistakes leaders make at annual strategy meetings

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. 

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 evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au. You can also get a hold of him there. And same with myself. My newslet­ter as well is Lawrence​and​co​.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.