It’s Not Your Strategic Plan — Your Meetings Are Derailing Your Efforts

We are in the weeds all the time. I think we need a new strategic plan. 

There’s an irresistible pull toward doing all of these great things to advance the mission and make the world a better place. Repeatedly, organizations make new strategic plans and wonder why they’re not working. Leaders blame themselves and staff leave in search of greener pastures where they feel more connected to the plan. 

Your strategic plan could have the sharpest-looking graphs and pictures. You could have spoken to every stakeholder to get their input and buy-in. Your plan could even be up for the Richard Goodman Strategic Planning Award (I didn’t know there was such a thing until now). But it will still fail if you’re doing this one key thing — having meetings with an agenda. 

We set out believing that our strategic plan will be the well-oiled train engine that will effectively and efficiently get us from here to a much better future for our constituents but two leadership team meetings into the execution, we’ve gone off the rails, blazing through the weeds, and into the soft beach sand like a Jeep Wrangler. 

It happened to me. Believe me — I own a Jeep. In my 22 years in the nonprofit sector, I’ve only seen two organizations do tactical leadership team meetings where everyone genuinely seemed to have clarity and alignment and it was one that didn't have an agenda. 

Here’s why: When we have an agenda it’s always someone’s agenda. Who wants to go to a meeting where someone else has already decided what you’re going to talk about? In addition to having the wrong things on the agenda, there’s either too much or too little on it. Here’s what to do instead

Build a Playbook

A team playbook is a very clear description of how your team organizes its work while explaining where you're going next and how it is specifically going to get there. For example, a playbook focuses on what the most important venture your team is focused on and who must do what to see it succeed. 

Here’s a step by step on how to build and run a meeting around it. 

1. Define the Core

Align on your mission. Develop three to five ways your team is going to behave with each other all of the time. These are more meaningful values like respect (most teams likely have that) but they may not have empathy. 

2. Narrow the Focus

As a team, define and align on three boundaries of how you’re going to spend time and energy toward being successful with your mission. For example, so many nonprofits have something about “creating awareness” in their mission statements. Every organization in the cause is doing awareness but by “increasing access to clean water” or “improving quality of life for patients”, your organization sets itself apart. 

3. Chart the Course

Ask your team to fill in the blank: If we don’t do X in the next nine months, it will be a failure. This is meant to become your top priority and everyone has to buy into the urgency that comes with it. For example, many nonprofits are seeing merger opportunities in a post-pandemic world so the top priority might be “Execute a successful and smooth merger.” 

4. Roles and Responsibilities

Determine the half dozen or so objectives that will define a successful outcome. In using our merger example, one objective might be “consolidating operations.” In addition, several standard objectives that will always be needed with any nonprofit. For example, we need to keep the lights on so “fundraising” might be one of these objectives. Lastly, delegate who on the team will lead each of these objectives and align in a simple way (like a number system or a color code) everyone will use to communicate progress or problems. I use green, yellow and red to signify importance.

5. The Tool

There are any number of software companies that have playbook meeting software. I made my own spreadsheet template. It’s used as a dashboard from which the team works every week. The dashboard includes short and concise answers like: 

• Mission.
• How will we behave with another or values?
• The boundaries.
• Top priority for the next six to nine months.
• The objectives that will show progress toward the priority and the standard objectives, as well as who the leader is for each objective.
• An issues list (empty to start the meeting).

Facilitating the Non-Agenda Meeting

Give five minutes to segue way into the meeting. It’s a rapid-fire (30 seconds per person) announcement. For example: Marci is having a baby. There’s cake in the conference room. Jamal’s birthday is Friday.

Read aloud through the mission statement, values, boundaries and top priority. It always felt strange to do this but it creates clarity and gives the opportunity to challenge if one of the answers should be changed.

Have each person report out on the objective they’re leading. For example, if I’m reporting  out on fundraising, I might say something like, “Fundraising: The color is red. Our campaign last month underperformed by 50%.” 

All urgent items that are red, maybe some yellow items go on the issues list to create an agenda in real time. All objectives that are green do not.

Decide as a group the order that you’ll cover issues in the meeting and be sure to capture the outcome of the discussion and the decision and how and who will cascade communications about the decision to the rest of the staff.

Hosting a playbook meeting is an exceptionally easy and efficient way to tie day-to-day tactics to the strategic plan. This format keeps everyone aligned on what's most important, and engaged about the progress and problems (as well as the plans to fix them). 

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.