Strategy meetings are pretty awesome, and while many things can be achieved during them you may be asking “Who should attend a strategy meeting?”
The answer, in short: anyone and everyone who has a stake in the outcome of your strategy… well, to a degree.
This could mean CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, VP of Sales and Marketing, product managers, business development leads — basically any of the major players.
However, simple answer aside, strategy meetings – and who should attend them – can be a bit more nuanced and more involved than just individuals who have a job title that is also an acronym. O.K?
What is a strategy meeting?
Let’s start super simple. A strategy meeting is a strategic planning session that gathers many stakeholders, decision-makers, and influencers from within an organization to discuss the company strategy or a project strategy.
This typically includes senior management, operational staff, and representatives from various departments.
The purpose of the meeting is to generate ideas, brainstorm solutions for organizational challenges, discuss tactics for implementing strategies, and create plans.
While most organizations will have regular meetings, sync-ups, debriefs and more, a strategy meeting is a planning and pathway meeting to plan out projects. It can even be used to help create an abstract or roadmap for the entire company’s future.
They are useful and allow different people from many areas of the business to come together and share ideas.
These can be long events or even a series of short ones. The ultimate goal is to come out with one thing – a strategy!
What can you achieve with a strategy meeting?
At a strategy meeting, you can discuss the company’s current objectives and develop an action plan that will help the organization reach its goals. You can also identify potential risks and opportunities, decide how to allocate resources, create performance metrics, review progress against plans, and more. All of this contributes to creating an effective strategy that helps your organization succeed in the long term.
A strategy meeting can be conceptual. They can be used for coming up with ideas and spitballing overall strategies.
Alternatively, if you have a clear vision of where you are at, and where you want to go, a strategy meeting can be more granular – looking at the nuts and bolts of achieving those goals. It’s great for goal setting on a bigger-picture company level.
Who should I include in a strategy meeting?
The attendees should be carefully chosen with careful consideration given to who will best contribute to the discussion.
Here are some examples of people that could attend:
Senior Management Team
The senior managers in the organization should be present to provide direction, insight, and feedback. They will be instrumental in making sure the meeting stays on track and that all goals are met, while their attendance also allows that the ideas and concepts are not too “out there” or inconceivable as part of the overall business goals.
Senior managers may be tempted to come in and direct the whole meeting, but a strategy meeting should ultimately be about listening and transparent communication rather than dictating what is going to happen according to one person.
Department Heads
Department Heads are needed to ensure that departments are represented and that their unique perspectives are included in the discussion.
While there is an opportunity for all department heads to be involved, it’s typically a good idea to be strategic with invites. Consider which departments have the most impact on the organization and prioritize those departments.
Operational staff
Operational staff can offer valuable insights into current processes and operations, as well as potential opportunities for improvement.
They can keep the whole meeting, and overall strategy, grounded – not necessarily by money and brass tax itself, but deliverability and logistics as a whole.
Consider them your sensible friend who pulls you back to reality when you start making outlandish ideas about trekking across the Sahara next month.
External consultants & experts
External consultants can provide invaluable advice and expertise that would be difficult to acquire internally. They can also help to provide a broader perspective, as some of their experiences will come from outside the organization.
They are particularly insightful for staying up-to-date with the latest trends and research in the industry, as well as for providing insight into competitors.
While you may have to pay for these individuals to attend and at expert rates it may not be cheap, the investment of an outside consultant can save money, time, and energy (probably even employee tears!) in the long run.
Employee advocates
It’s all very well and good creating these incredible strategies and targets, but you need to be in touch with what your staff and employees can actually manage and do.
Keeping morale up is a big part of any business, and all employees should be allowed to share their thoughts, feelings and concerns.
While having all employees there could cause friction – both in time and resources – by inviting a representative from those who are doing the work and not just their department head, you’ll be able to gauge whether timelines are feasible and what the roadblocks that may occur could be.
Remember, there’s a fine line between negativity and constructive criticism, so the choice of the employee should be carefully considered. Equally don’t just bring the office “Yes” person. Someone who is eager to please may not be the best representative for all employees.
Voice of the customer
While it may not be feasible to invite an actual customer into your strategy meeting, if only for the fact they aren’t a paid member of the team, it’s great to bring someone in that can speak for your customer, clients, audience, and prospective clients in some way, shape or form.
This experience needs to be based on more than just “feelings” but with someone who has experience in either quantitative, qualitative, or both types of data, on your end-users. Having someone on board who can back up their opinions with hard data can be invaluable in identifying what the customer needs and wants.
Having everyone in one place to discuss strategy might sound overwhelming, but these main players can help ensure that your organization is headed in the right direction. Equally, they don’t all need to be involved at the same time. As long as there is input, and a chance to weigh in on different parts of what’s being planned, it can be achieved both in real-time or asynchronously.
How to run a planning meeting
Now that we have more of an idea of who we are inviting to the meeting, how are we going to run and execute this?
Running a successful strategy meeting requires careful preparation and planning. The actual meeting is probably the easy bit!
Make sure you plan well in advance by setting objectives for the meeting, creating an agenda and timeline, deciding who needs to be invited, ensuring that everyone is prepared and on the same page before attending, assigning tasks to participants, and finalizing decisions at the end of the session.
Should I invite everybody to a strategy meeting at the same time?
Quite simply, no!
While the list we offered above of who to invite is pretty in-depth, not everyone needs to be invited to a strategy meeting at the same time.
It is important to ensure that the people who attend represent different areas of expertise, provide meaningful input, and can make decisions with long-term implications.
However, inviting too many people may lead to confusion and bog down the process. Try to invite only those whose knowledge and experience are necessary for making strategic decisions.
By ensuring that you have the right balance of stakeholders in attendance so that everyone’s perspectives are heard and decisions can be made collaboratively.
It is also important to keep the number of attendees manageable—too many people can lead to confusion and derail the process.
Ultimately, by making sure that you have the right people in the room for your strategy meeting, you can ensure that the right decisions are made and save yourself a lot of hassle (not to mention, time, energy (and possibly even more of those employee tears!)
Is there a way to involve everybody though?
Absolutely! The increase in remote work has meant that strategy meetings can be held virtually and online meeting recorders can solve the issue of having ALL the voices in the meeting… without there actually being too many people.
tl;dv can also help you nail that overall strategy meeting, with minimal people involved in the real-time video meeting, but everybody still gets their say.
The tool means that everybody in the business can download Zoom recordings, or download Google Meet recorded videos, and view them at their leisure.
You can even trim the boring bits out (or the sensitive parts!)
Simply set it up to record and your strategy meeting is automatically transcribed as well (into 20+ languages, no less!)
Edit Google Meet recordings with ease, edit Zoom recordings with no fuss, highlights key moments by timestamping and clipping them to just the important bits.
You can even tag individuals or entire departments with push notifications to Slack. alerting them only when their input is required.
It also works as an excellent follow up tool, allowing full transparency and record-keeping of everything discussed, planned and even timetabled.
How can I share the follow-ups of a strategy meeting?
Another beauty of tl;dv, and implementing an overall async collaborative strategy, is that expert record keeping is needed, but the tool does this for all for you and makes sure that is can be used effectively.
No more lost notes.
No misinterpreted action plans.
No more miscommunication!
It’s all there in both video AND written transcription.
What has been decided, when it needs to be done, and who is going to do it?
Because of this, you have an excellent checklist for following up and tracking the achievements of the plans overall.
Even better is that you can feed this directly into CRM systems and push out the plans to the entire company.
That way everybody can get involved in the company goals, not just those present in the original meeting!
Strategy meetings are great... but not everybody needs to be there!
While having huge stakeholder meetings was definitely a thing in the past, it was also at great cost of time, resources, and money.
I mean can you imagine the cost of catering and coffee for these sorts of things!?!
These expensive, time-consuming events that required incredible planning, simply aren’t needed in this remote working world.
Strategy meetings, held over video conferencing and utilizing clever tools such as tl;dv, have changed the way companies work, and will work, forevermore.
By reducing the number of people attending a meeting, but still maintaining full transparency and engagement with everybody in the business, you can run an efficient and effective confident strategy meeting that can actually help drive projects forward.
You can get everybody involved, without them being there! In fact, they could even be on vacation!
It’s democratic for everyone: no more awkward time scheduling, no more time wasted traveling!
It’s strategy meetings done better and smarter. Now… if we could just get that buffet catering delivered to our home office, that would be great.
Who do we need to speak to about that?
