What to do before your Strategic Planning Workshop

Whether your team is hosting a workshop or a strategic planning retreat, these meetings are an opportunity for your leadership team to focus on the future. In each instance, taking this time is an expensive investment for your organization, so it is important to prepare your team and build engagement before you hit the ground running.

The reality is, your team needs to understand the current state of your organization, have an opportunity to surface key challenges, and gather perspectives from the people closest to the work (who may not be at the meeting).

It also means aligning your leadership on the agenda and the planned outcomes before the meeting starts to build engagement and focus.

At X5, when we collaborate with a customer on their strategic planning meetings, we set the stage with the meeting planner and the team ahead of time through pre-work.

Here’s what effective pre-work often includes:

• Stakeholder input: Depending on the organization and how they are approaching their strategic planning session, we offer two approaches to getting stakeholder feedback:
  • Having their leadership do a short, focused survey focused on gathering what is working, what isn’t working, what they see as challenges and what they see as opportunities. This helps build engagement from the attendees (or those in middle management or emerging leadership roles support them), and provides data for discussion during the session.
  • Holding one-to-one interviews with team members and key stakeholders to gather insight on strengths, gaps, and priorities. This helps surface themes that might not come up in the room but are essential to shaping a meaningful plan.
• Goal clarity: We recommend aligning with the team ahead of the session on what you’re looking to accomplish. Are you looking to come out with a one-year plan? Three-year plan? Or are you starting from the beginning, building your vision and purpose? Do you have competing objectives that you need to nail down the priorities on? If your team doesn’t know what the goals for the session are, you are less likely to be successful.
• Preparation materials: Your team may not all have the same level of knowledge, so it can be helpful to provide preparation materials to provide context and prompt ideas. Whether it be a summary of stakeholder feedback, a copy of your previous strategic plan, an agenda, or high-level thoughts on the key agenda topics from the executive, providing framing aligned to your goals will improve effectiveness of your session.

When our team facilitates a strategic planning workshop or retreat, we set up pre-meetings to clarify structure, roles, and key outcomes for the meeting. This is then used to co-design the agenda that reflects the needs of your organization. We then build out our stakeholder feedback process to support the session to get the most out of it.

Walking into a planning session with an informal plan or skipping the pre-work can lead to a wasted meeting, which in turn can impact business performance and team engagement. Great strategic plans don’t come from a single session. They come from a thoughtful process. And that process starts well before the retreat begins.

Companies with written strategic plans grow 30% faster.
(Source: Journal of Management Studies)

If you’re ready to move from ideas to action, we can help. At X5 Management, we guide teams through strategic planning processes that are grounded in real insight and built to drive results. With the right preparation and facilitation, your next planning session can do more than set direction, it can create real momentum.

Let’s connect to talk about your upcoming strategic planning workshop or retreat.

Author: Kris Schinke 
Kris Schinke is Vice President of Integration at X5 Management, bringing extensive executive experience across retail, financial services, and the non-profit sector. She is passionate about coaching and leadership development, helping organizations foster positive workplace cultures. Read more about Kris Schinke.