The Idea in Brief
If your management team is like most, you spend up to a week each year at a strategy off-site meeting. Such meetings cost U.S. businesses hundreds of millions annually in participants’ salaries alone. Yet despite the high price tag, most off-sites don’t generate strategic priorities that galvanize corporate performance.
The reason? Many executives neglect to prepare adequately for off-sites. Instead, they assume that if they schedule a meeting, invite top leaders, and add an outside expert, the meeting will automatically produce the right set of priorities. But it’s the steps taken before a meeting that make or break an off-site’s success.
How to design off-sites that make a real difference to your company’s future? Frisch and Chandler recommend first clarifying each meeting’s purpose: do you need an expansive conversation about broad strategic options—or must you make concrete decisions about a specific priority, such as improving customer loyalty? Then, identify the right number of participants. (An expansive conversation requires a larger group.) And give them a “fact book”—a compilation of just enough relevant data about your company and its external environment—and insist they read it ahead of time.
With disciplined preparation, off-sites morph from meaningless junkets into genuine turning points for your business—enabling your executive team to make smart and speedy strategic decisions.
The Idea in Practice
You’ve prepared carefully for your upcoming off-site. Now build on that foundation during and after the meeting. The authors provide these suggestions:
During the Meeting
To induce genuine engagement, not ritualistic agreement:
- Downplay your authority. Avoid expressing strong opinions early in the discussion. If your team expects you to wrap up every conversation with a final decision, members will merely tee up critical issues and await your answers.
- Neutralize politics. Present data in ways that enable participants to evaluate data objectively—without being overly influenced by political considerations.
Example:
A financial services company identified 23 potential initiatives to support its strategic goals, adding them to 19 existing initiatives. To cull the overly long list, executives placed Post-it notes on an archery graphic, indicating the impact they thought each initiative would have on each goal. (A “bull’s eye” signaled high impact.) The exercise separated the conversation about individual initiatives from specific executives’ political ties—helping participants axe low-impact initiatives without offending those who originated the ideas.
- Move the conversation toward the meeting’s objectives. Use structured decision points, breakout sessions, and exercises to keep the conversation on course.
Example:
At an off-site designed to generate ideas for trumping new competitors, online jobs bank Monster.com used war-gaming to plot rivals’ likely moves and countermoves given specific changes in the strategic environment. Participants constructed credible but not obvious scenarios featuring complex sequences of events and radical discontinuities in markets. Result? A more sophisticated understanding of the competitive landscape.
After the Meeting
To ensure that strategic decisions get executed:
- Agree on an action plan. The best plans specify roles, responsibilities, and milestones, and define metrics and reporting frequencies. One company assigned an executive sponsor to each strategic initiative its off-site generated and used “RACI” charting to identify who should be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each deliverable.
- Document the meeting’s outcome. In one page of clear, easily digested prose, record topics discussed during the meeting, decisions reached, and required next steps.
- Establish follow-up mechanisms. Develop ways to keep initiatives on course once implementation begins. One executive team reviewed each of its strategic initiatives at its regular monthly meetings. As other issues arose, members examined them to ensure they were in concert with decisions made at the off-site. They also regularly reevaluated each initiative’s relevance as strategic conditions changed.
Whether convening at a resort, at a Marriott around the corner, or in a conference room down the hall, almost all management teams spend a day to a week every year away from their regular responsibilities to plan for the future. Off-sites collectively cost U.S. companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually in salaries alone. But too often, planners and participants assume that the off-site, other than featuring a golf outing, is just another meeting. It’s not. It differs in critical respects from every other meeting that top leaders attend.
