Keeping your leadership team informed, motivated and thriving is crucial to business success.
Traditionally leadership meetings tend to bring together larger regional senior management and leadership teams; usually recurring annually. They are primarily conducted to make important decisions, discuss metrics and to ensure that an organization’s operations are aligned with its strategy, targets and goals.
We’re seeing companies becoming more open to working differently; seizing the opportunity to grow stronger and be more successful. What’s working well are agile organizations redefining their operating models and moving from an annual planning cycle to a more frequent quarterly planning cycle, learning from what was accomplished in the previous cycle to swiftly reset priorities as needed. *
With many people working remotely, it’s vital to find effective ways to bring everyone together to agree on major initiatives.
Leadership meetings are predicted to make up some 14%** of all event meetings in the US and Europe in 2021.
But with travel restrictions still in place in many parts of the globe, how do you bring everyone together for one seamless, collaborative virtual or hybrid experience?
And how can you guarantee that the most commonly cited challenges of lacking virtual events management experience, platform technical issues and participant engagement concerns, don’t hamper your efforts?*
Maintaining visibility and influence with limited physical interaction is a key consideration. It’s not easy to make sure every participant is engaged, collaborates seamlessly with colleagues, digests the meeting content, and feels an integral part of the experience.
You’ve spent significant time developing your strategy and thinking about your meeting, so how can you ensure it lands?
Here are some tips to consider as you plan your next Leadership Meeting:
Use the Right Tech
With limits on travel in and across many regions, technology is a critical factor for successful and collaborative virtual and hybrid leadership meetings. Meeting owners have a multitude of event platforms and tech to choose from, but experienced planners and event companies are best placed to curate, as they understand attendee engagement and what makes for a successful virtual or hybrid meeting.
- Use an event platform that works for all your meeting needs, allowing for an equitable experience, dialogue, engagement, and interactivity, wherever your participants and presenters are in the world.
- Security is paramount when discussing confidential business decisions, so be certain your platform limits who can see the content and join the meeting.
- Make sure your presenters have rehearsed using the tech, so they understand how to respond if all does not go to plan.
Focus on Purpose
Every leadership meeting has a unique reason for existing, along with an exclusive set of goals and objectives: exploring new business updates, sharing of strategic goals, inspiring organisational change and potentially making tough decisions.
- Ensure a robust agenda has been planned with desired outcomes set, all personalised for each participating leader.
- Make it available to all participants in advance of the event, so they can plan their involvement and prepare their ideas.
Make it Personal
While virtual and hybrid leadership meetings have become common place, not all meetings are created equal and there are many ways to produce a more professional and productive outcome.
- Events are incredibly powerful when organised and delivered with the audience and key messages in mind.
- Consider individuality and shape virtual interactions for the various interpersonal needs and styles of the leadership team members.
Facilitate an Equitable Experience
Hybrid events are much more complex than meeting in-person or virtually. They are harder to manage well and benefit from a facilitator to keep the meeting on track.
- Designate a single person to be the meeting host, to monitor and guide the conversation.
- Despite robust planning, it is too easy for in-person participants to dominate discussions.
- A facilitator can provide an active role in keeping virtual attendees engaged and ensure their voices are heard.
Prioritise Interaction, Engagement and Collaboration
Avoid a passive experience and make the most of the heads ‘in the room’ by building in moments to exchange ideas and share opinions in the virtual, hybrid or live space.
- Create immersive opportunities through moderated polling, voting, Q&A and Upvoter so leaders can contribute their perspectives and help shape the event.
- Consider gamification to boost involvement and create a fun sense of competition.
- Think about adding more intimate environments than the main video stream. Include breakouts for workshopping and discussing key business topics, all personalised in participants’ agendas.
- Push out feedback forms and participant questions at scheduled moments during the event, to perform a real-time check on the meeting experience.
Perfect Planning
By their very nature, perfectly delivered live events are almost impossible to achieve, but if you plan perfectly, risks are minimized.
- Put sufficient focus on pre-production, not just the live show process.
- Set yourself up for success with plenty of rehearsals, cue-to-cues, run-throughs and robust contingency planning.
Cascade Learning and Knowledge
A fundamental role of a leadership meeting is ensuring content is absorbed and communicated back to the workforce.
- Consider the content you want to share before, during and after your event, and ensure your event platform can make information available to the right people, at the right time.
- Make sure leaders have access to the event platform post-meeting, so that learning and engagement can continue ‘outside of the room’ reinforcing key messages and extending the value beyond the event.
- Consider making specific parts of the live stream ‘On Demand’ post-event, for sharing with other parts of the organisation.
Measure Success
In addition to identifying your goals and objectives, it is also important to gauge how you’ve done, post event.
- Determine up front if your event platform allows you to capture and interrogate data from the meeting.
- Ensure you understand what to measure and how to show that your goals were achieved.
- Post-event follow-up with participants is essential both for feedback purposes and for health and safety requirements.
Why Concise?
Concise is highly skilled in at planning, choreographing and executing high profile virtual, hybrid and in-person meetings. We ensure participants, planners, and presenters are a vital part of the experience.
We offer a unique, fully branded and flexible event platform, Chime Live, and thrive on partnerships with companies looking to go the extra mile, who are passionate about creating truly engaging and productive experiences.
We project manage and support filming in clients’ offices or in our purpose-built, professionally equipped and fully-brandable studios. This provides the opportunity for more polished live or pre-recorded film content to be played as part of the leadership meeting.
“It should not be a question of “if” a meeting is going to happen, it’s “how.” **
Let us help you achieve business success, through effective events.
Talk to us today about how we can elevate and transform your leadership meeting.
*McKinsey and Company ‘Overcoming pandemic fatigue: How to re-energize organizations for the long run’
**Amex ‘2021 Global Meetings and Events Forecast’
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