If you’re like many staffing leaders, you’re probably planning your end of year leadership team meeting. 
You know, the one where everyone sits around a conference room table and you do a presentation on the hits and misses of the year then unveil next year’s budget and watch the faces fall?
Then you have lunch brought in and spend the afternoon presenting next year’s strategic plan?
And by 3:00 everyone is yawning and thinking about happy hour…
It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with that kind of meeting. It’s just an old, predictable all-business model that stifles the creativity that gets a leadership team excited about what’s ahead.
This is the year to throw that model out and launch a new and improved strategy meeting.
After all, so much is different now. For starters, you may be meeting virtually and not in person. If that’s the case, you’ll need to work even harder to keep the team excited about participating and contributing.
And with people feeling discouraged as the pandemic persists, never has it been more important to energize the troops for the accelerated GROWTH predicted for the Staffing Industry in 2021.
Here are 3 ways to mix things up to make your meeting productive and motivating.
1. Consider leaving 2020 financial results where they will soon be – in the rear view mirror.
Do you really need to call attention to the fact that the company lost 35% of its revenue in March? They know what an extraordinarily hard year this has been, on many fronts. Why start your meeting off with that traditional recap of 2020. Unless your business has had an extraordinarily fruitful year you want to celebrate, leave the past in the past and focus on a bright future!
2. Give your team some developmental leadership soft skills “pre-work” to complete before the meeting.
For example, you could have everyone complete an assessment and kick your meeting off with a subject matter expert doing a group debrief. I use the DiSC Work of Leaders Work of Leaders in my leadership coaching practice; there are many others.
Another option is to have them listen to a short podcast and open the meeting with a discussion about it. Along the same soft skills lines, HERE is a psychologist discussing in less than :15 how to cultivate a “wise mind” blending the rational and emotional parts of the brain.
3. Make your meeting interactive and collaborative.
In truth, your 2021 priorities probably won’t surprise your management team, so the discussion should focus on prioritizing them in order of what will produce the highest ROI and assigning people to own project-managing each key initiative (suggestion: try to have no more than 3 key initiatives to avoid overwhelming everyone and to increase the likelihood they will be accomplished).
Interactive activities in a virtual environment could include polls and whiteboarding ideas. Divide the group up to take on a specific challenge by putting them in breakout rooms – virtual or live – and ask them to present their collective approach to the larger group. Have everyone rate the approaches and give the highest-rated team a prize.
Lastly, make sure to end the meeting with something fun. Replace the usual steakhouse dinner you can’t have with something you can do either in person or virtually if needed.
How about a happy hour naming a “2021 success cocktail” you send everyone the recipe for in advance?
Consider entertaining the group by hiring a musician or a magician.
It’s hard to leave a meeting like this feeling anything but good.
About you, about the company, about its future direction, and about themselves.
reprinted with permission
With more than twenty years’ staffing industry leadership expertise, Amy Bingham is a sales effectiveness consultant who works with owners and executives to increase the value of their staffing firms. It is Amy’s broad exposure to the best practices of high-growth staffing firms that equip her to help her clients grow their businesses by providing advisory services, operational consulting, sales and recruiter training, and leadership coaching.