Supercharging your leadership forums

Supercharging your leadership forums.

Just recently I was meeting with a senior leader in Organizational Development in a very successful American led global organization.  He was telling me how they had introduced Director forums for the 75 directors in his region, who were the vital engine room of their business. They were well attended, and they were led and organized by the directors themselves and he was keen to explore how they could get more value from these events given employment costs of tying up 70 plus leaders for a couple of hours as well as the opportunity cost for the business.

I shared with him some of our top advice based on over 40 years of helping organizations make their leadership meetings and conferences and town hall meetings more impactful and value creating.

1. From Topics to Current Challenges

The senior leader shared how the directors chose the topics and agenda items for the next forum.  I suggested he changed the language and instead of discussing possible topics, he asked the working group of directors, what were the top collective challenges that this group could collectively impact.

2. Focus on challenges that can be only dealt with by this group of people.

We then explored what were the challenges that this collection of middle leaders were best placed to address, rather than waiting for senior leaders to decide, or dealing with them in their separate silos. Most of these were challenges concerning horizontal partnering and learning across the business.  Barry Oshry points out that the top leaders need to focus on the external and the future, while the middle leaders take responsibility for joining up and integrating the organization.  We teach how this middle cadre of leaders are key to creating a team of teams that is more than the sum of its parts (Hawkins and Carr forthcoming).

3. Facilitate real time strategizing

A good leadership forum should engage all the brains and creativity in the room, and the best way to do this is to focus on real collective challenges for the organization that require new collaborative thinking.  Senior leadership need to articulate why these challenges are important for the future of the organization and ask for help from everybody in finding a new original response.

4. From breakouts as discussions groups to task groups with well-defined outcomes.

It can be useful to split a large leadership forum into small working groups, but it is important that each group is not just given a topic to explore but is commissioned with a clear outcome that they are asked to bring back to the main plenary.

5. Ensure all breakout groups have a well briefed facilitator

Each workgroup needs an appointed facilitator with clear process guidelines.  Their job is to:

1. Reiterate the outcome the group need to achieve
2. Get everyone’s voice into the room within the first 3-4 minutes
3. Use techniques like brainstorming, collective build, people stepping into the shoes of different stakeholder groups, etc., to maximize creative thinking
4. Manage time
5. Return the group to core focus if they get stuck or wander off track.
6. Ensure the group comes to a collective output which is summarized.

If necessary, they could delegate one or more of these roles.

6. Ban reporting back from breakouts on their conversation

For many years I sat through large leadership gatherings where each small group would have one member feedback to the main plenary, and it became increasingly boring.  I called it ‘death by serial feedback!’  I changed the process, which now included all members standing and jointly presenting their output, in a way that was starting a new live engagement and dialogue with all the other small groups.  This included being clear about what they were asking other participants to commit to, in order to take this proposal into action.  This inter-group dialogue needs skillful facilitating to ensure the groups are co-creating better thinking and more energized commitment that the small groups did by themselves.

7. End with commitments not vague intentions.

Agreement to a good idea is made with the cognitive brain, but real change is always embodied. If the change does not start in the room, it is very unlikely to happen when people are back at work, bombarded with e-mails, meetings and demands, and falling back into their past engrooved habits.

What does this look like in practice.

At a recent annual gathering of the top 120 leaders of a large global organization, we redesigned the format.  We said there would be no platform, podium or presentations! Instead, the large room was set up with 12 tables of ten leaders. Each table was facilitated by one member of the top team who has been given brief training and guidance on how to facilitate their table team. Each table was selected to have a maximum diversity of countries and roles.  In the middle of the circles of tables, was a large theatre in the round, for real-time interchange between groups and the whole gathering.

The 3 day gathering started with the song ‘Surfing USA’ (we were hosted in Huntingdon Beach California!).  The music got louder and louder till everyone had taken their seats, and then suddenly stopped and the room went dark.  Onto the screen came two important clients saying what they appreciated about the work of this organization, but also what they were going to need different from the organization over the next three years. This signaled that the conference was not going to be inward looking, but instead, starting ‘outside-in’ and ‘future-back’.

Many of the attendees were anxious as they had not been given the usual timetable agenda for the three days.  So, we followed the client presentations by telling them the agenda was:

Day One: discovering how the organization could double the beneficial value they created in the world, within the next three years.

Day Two: to collectively workout the roadmap to achieve the 2027 vision and outcome.

Day Three: to start the transformation process live in the room and create clear joint commitments across the organization before everyone returned to their own countries and functions.

Despite much pre-skepticism of how this would work, the event was extremely engaging and high energy from start to finish.  Transformation happened in the room, at personal, inter-personal, inter team and function levels.  It also created a lasting legacy of new ways of doing events both internally and externally.

If you are going to bring your best brains and key leaders together either virtually or in person, start by working out what the cost is to your organization, and how you are going to get a measurable high return on that investment. Once you have been through that exercise, I hope the above guidance and examples helps you design how to make this happen.

If you want to know more and explore this further, we help many organizations around the world; plan, design, and facilitate their major leadership and engagement events.

Contact us at www.renewalassociates.co.uk.

This material will also appear in our next book “Coaching the Team of Teams” by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.  Kogan Page 2025

Peter Hawkins September 2024