Strategic Planning Workshop

Strategic planning workshops led by an expert facilitator allow all members of a leadership team to work together to create a clear and concise strategy for an organization. Strategic planning workshops not only determine the direction but, more importantly, they bring the team together.   

Any company’s path to success must include a clearly stated plan that can be communicated to all stakeholders. Organizational landscape and business climate are affected by both internal and external pressures. A proactive, well-thought-out game plan is the greatest method to get a company ready for the upcoming challenges. Hence, organizations can get aid from a strategic planning workshop.    

Need for a Strategic Planning Workshop

A strategic planning workshop led by an expert facilitator allows all members of a leadership team to work together to create a clear strategy for an organization. The workshop focuses on guiding teams through sessions for developing and refining strategies. Most strategic planning workshops can be run virtually or in person. Workshops for strategic planning not only determine the direction but, more importantly, they bring the team together. We refer to strategic planning as a team sport because of this very reason. The “specific purpose” is the other element that is frequently ambiguous. Teams are frequently plagued by conflicting priorities and varying definitions of success. The unified objective and direction from these discussions are crystallized during a strategic planning workshop.   

Any company’s path to success must include a clearly stated plan that can be communicated to all personnel. Over the year, organizational landscape and business climate are affected by both internal and external pressures. A proactive, well-thought-out game plan is the greatest method to get a company ready for the upcoming year. An organization’s strategic planning process is aided by a strategic planning workshop. Workshops might include team strategic planning sessions, operating unit planning sessions, and business unit planning sessions.   

The goal of a strategic planning workshop is to inspire a group of important individuals, primarily the leadership team in your organization, to contribute to the strategic direction of the company in a motivating and creative setting.  

Since these workshops let the key members of your business participate in the formulation of the strategy, strategy workshops are a crucial part of the strategy creation process. Senior managers, decision-makers, and individuals with critical expertise in the process are a few examples of these individuals.   

The primary purpose of a strategic planning workshop is to obtain information that will be useful when developing a strategic plan for the organization. This information helps the employees and stakeholders to agree organizational goals and vision, as well as actions that need to be taken in order to move the organization from there it is to where you want it to be.    

What is the Purpose of a Strategic Planning Workshop?

Generally, a facilitator will use strategic planning workshops to:  

• Get detailed information and suggestions from the team, the executives, and the stakeholders
• Encourage team members to collaborate on problem-solving, strategic thinking, and innovation to advance the company
• Improve the decision-making process  

A strategic planning workshop differs from a standard meeting in that participants do not spend much time reporting. Planning a strategy is all about teamwork and idea generation. By doing so, you may control your team’s mood and strategic direction while also creating solutions to real challenges in your firm.    

Who Needs to be Included in a Strategic Planning Workshop?

Making an invite list is the greatest method to guarantee that the room is filled with the voices that are most important to you.  

• Involve as many individuals from each pertinent department as you can. You can cover a wider range of business processes and activities in this way
• Upper management should be included, but don’t stop there
• Participants from the sales team, investor relations, human resources, and any other pertinent departments or stakeholders should be invited
• You might also think about bringing individuals with fresh perspectives from outside the company

This is especially helpful for businesses that have started operating in a new market or launching new products/services.    

How Can a Strategic Planning Workshop Benefit Businesses?

• Drive Business Alignment: You will have the ideal opportunity to hear from your staff during a strategic planning session, appreciate their points of view, and promote communication with them. Additionally, it enables the free exchange of innovative concepts that might aid in problem-solving and the development of useful solutions  
• Create a Unified Vision: A strategic planning workshop results in a united vision for your company that incorporates ideas from all members of the management team. You’ll get more buy-in when your senior management team participates in developing the corporate vision, and it also promotes a more inclusive and collaborative work environment. You will accomplish this by developing a single, forward-looking vision that the entire team can support and share with their personnel in order to build a shared vision
• Define Goals and Priorities: The capacity to set objectives and quantifiable goals to support the execution of the vision is a crucial component of every successful strategic planning workshop. The group will assess and efficiently distribute the resources required to carry out the plan’s objectives. With your team, you will reassemble to discuss the priorities and short- and long-term objectives. By analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from all sides, you may develop a proactive plan  

Five Ways to Improve Your Strategic Planning Workshop

A strategic planning workshop offers leaders the chance to potentially make their biggest contribution and is vital to the future development of an organization. A good workshop must produce the objectives and results intended when the leadership team sets aside time to decide on a strategic pathway.  

But all too frequently, the strategic planning workshop results in a lot of discussion and a few concrete decisions that are never followed through on and never put into practice because the agenda didn’t go far enough or broadly enough outside of the norm.  

Given the more volatile and fast-paced operating environment organization’s now face, it’s imperative leadership teams do away with cookie-cutter planning templates and repeating past agendas, and instead look for ways to expand their thinking and decision-making procedure. For leaders wanting to ensure their strategic planning process will meet challenges with greater confidence, there are some specific ways to improve their next strategic planning workshop.    

• Engage the right facilitator 

A facilitator who has extensive knowledge of governance and the challenge of directorship is able to provide a workshop agenda that addresses the necessary outcomes and enables discussions to flow naturally. A good facilitator is in active conversations with the leadership team as well as other key stakeholders.  

A structure like this promotes correct thought growth, connects ideas or results, and makes it simpler for participants to stay on topic and engaged.  

A great facilitator will add a fresh viewpoint to conversations, be able to use a leader’s lens to help guide conversations toward fruitful conclusions, and make sure all participants have the chance to engage. Seek a facilitator who can support the leadership team and the process, including when determining the priorities and identifying pertinent stakeholders, through the use of a team of professional consultants.     

• Open the agenda to challenge 

‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ is one of the most important things a leader can keep in mind.  

Too frequently, agendas follow a template, are predetermined, and repeat the structure and substance of prior years without leaving any possibility for the strategic planning workshop participants to be confronted with fresh concepts or inquiries.  

As a result, we observe missed chances where other members of the leadership team may have pushed the board to consider several concepts or problems that they hadn’t considered, but which could have opened possibilities for innovation or reduced risk. A danger in and of itself, if you all know what you need to know may indicate that the board is not performance focused.  

Opening your agenda and allocating time for your facilitation team to include a challenge or suggest something not pre-determined by the leaders can be particularly important if an organization is undergoing or about to experience significant change or is facing new challenges. It is also equally valuable to inexperienced leaders or those leaders who may be very familiar with the business and want to be challenged with their insights.    

• Start with Why 

Opening a strategic planning workshop with a discussion on the organization’s ‘why’ may seem unusual to some but the impact can be powerful.  

This comes before the usual reflection on Vision, Mission, and Goals, but it underpins every agenda item as the North Star by which all strategic decisions should be guided.  

There are still many organizations where the board of directors is unable to properly articulate the organization’s “why,” which can ultimately serve as the organization’s point of differentiation in the marketplace. In an economy with many NFPs, superannuation funds, banks, education institutions – many versions of everything – an organization’s why can set it apart from the rest and serve as the mast by which decisions are made.   

Starting your strategic planning workshop with a discussion about why the organization exists can help set the mindset of attendees from the start and serve as a platform for the rest of the agenda. It serves as a powerful reminder to attendees of the reason they are meeting in the first place.     

• Include scenario planning 

This type of discussion is becoming increasingly popular among leadership teams looking to deepen and strengthen their strategic planning process, potentially revealing biases and assumptions, overconfidence, or knowledge gaps.  

Scenario planning allows a board of directors to put their thoughts and ideas to the test by putting them in a real-world context. Setting a risk appetite and comprehending an organization’s future risks should be part of the strategic planning process, and scenario planning can help extend that comprehension beyond the theoretical.  

It also allows leaders to see what they might be missing, especially if the facilitation team can bring a depth of expertise that includes risks outside of traditional governance risk frameworks, such as reputation, stakeholder engagement, and culture.  

Scenario planning can be included in a strategic planning workshop or done separately, and it is especially useful for a board to test their appetite for change when deciding between several strategic options.    

• Consider if once is enough 

It’s time for leaders to reconsider holding strategy meetings more frequently than once a year. While this is mostly an annual tradition, a high-performance leadership team would consider whether the process they are currently using is as effective as it could be or would like, and if not, consider doing two workshops a year, or more if the business is even more fluid.  

For example, quarterly deep dives into a specific area of the business can provide a far more profound opportunity for boards to become exceptionally clear on the opportunities, challenges, and risks than a single workshop once a year.     

Strengthscape’s Strategic Planning Workshop: Jamavaar

A strategy is a high-level plan for achieving goals and desirable outcomes using available resources. The process of developing a strategic plan, defining goals, ends, and objectives, and allocating resources and responsibilities is known as strategic planning. It is used to clarify the overall purpose of an organization’s existence, define the desired outcomes of that organization’s activities, and explain how those outcomes will be realized.   

A strategic planning workshop prepares you to set the direction of your training organization by developing and implementing a strategic plan. Develop strategic alignment competencies that will enable you to immediately demonstrate value by developing and implementing a plan to align training with business needs.  

Strengthscape’s Visioning & Strategic Planning Workshop, Jamavaar, is a transformational business workshop that brings together perspectives from diverse leaders in the organization and helps them to reflect, observe and discuss, and play around with different scenarios of what could be possible in the future. Delivered by expert facilitators, Jamavaar is a highly intensive and engaging workshop that helps leaders craft a compelling vision for their organization, align the team to the vision and fulfill significant leadership responsibilities.  

The objective of this strategic planning workshop is to help leaders distill the lessons of the past, re-evaluate the current ecosystem of the organization and consider the possibilities of the future. Jamavaar helps leaders craft an unclouded vision of the future, develop consensus on the path forward, and identify milestones along the way. Jamavaar uses the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team intervention to transform talented individuals into highly effective and cohesive teams inspired by a sense of mission.    

The Five Behaviors Model

• Trust One Another – Honesty forms a safe environment that builds vulnerability-based trust  
• Engage in Conflict – Trust allows team members to engage in unfiltered, constructive debate of ideas  
• Commit to Decisions – Offering opinions and ideas makes the team feel heard, driving commitment to decisions  
• Hold One Another Accountable – Once everyone is committed to a goal, they will begin holding one another accountable  
• Achieve Collective Results – Ultimately collective results are achieved through implementing trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability    

Pedagogy  

• Our time honed practices, backed by best-in-class assessments and facilitation methods ensure impactful personalized learning through our strategic planning workshop!  
• Supervisor engagement helps us relate to the organization’s context and business priorities  
• Psychometric assessments such as Everything DiSC Management profile help managers understand themselves and others  
• One-to-one and group coaching encourages first time managers to take responsibility for their own development  
• Structured learning makes use of spaced learning and engaging games to hone your skills and succeed in our program  
• Peer learning builds a sense of camaraderie and helps imbibe a common management culture
• Action learning ensures that participants apply the skills and methods learned during the program to real-life business situations    

Our Differentiators

• Contemporary spaced pedagogy gives enough time to absorb concepts, leading to better retention and more concrete learning  
• Personalized learning outcomes deliver transformational growth for both employees and organizations   
• Engaging facilitation grabs participants’ attention and enhances team effectiveness  
• Best-in-class assessments are tailored to suit most of your workplace requirements, from recruitment to development needs    

Learning Outcomes

What will be your takeaways from our strategic planning workshop?  

• Interpret the five-step model of teamwork and your scores on the Five Behaviors  
• Examine individual differences in behavioral priorities and work styles  
• Establish vulnerability-based trust in the team  
• Establish a common language with which to understand strategic planning as it relates to your learning organization
• Effectively communicate the value and steps of your plan to stakeholders
• Compare healthy-unhealthy behaviors in a conflict  
• Design everyday practices to enhance commitment to decisions  
• Improve team accountability and focus on collective results  
• An execution plan with owners and milestones    

Our strategic planning workshop can be customized to meet the specific needs of your organization. Visit Strengthscape to learn more about our approach and how we can help you with your strategic planning needs.    

Every successful company has a strategy in place and is aware of its future direction. Before starting a business, a strategy containing objectives, deadlines, and a purpose should be established. The company has a roadmap to pursue if it regularly takes the time to assess its previous success and forecast its future performance.