Investing time in a thoughtfully crafted, professionally facilitated strategy workshop can provide you with some practical and interactive techniques to reenergize your business, jump-start morale, and develop managers’ strategic communication and thinking skills. What’s more, by having a thorough discussion around the four key areas of the business — market, customers, competitors, and company — you can ensure that people in different functional areas and at different levels are all pulling in the same direction.

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To help you realize these many benefits as you develop your 2009 strategic marketing communication plan, Rich Horwath, president of the Strategic Thinking Institute (strategyskills.com), offers the following action steps:

• Determine the intent of the strategy workshop. What are your goals? Is the workshop part of an overall strategy development process? Not only can the strategy workshop build a strong foundation for the future success of the business, but it can also serve to increase the confidence and commitment of your team.

• Identify the participants. Are you limiting the meeting to only senior executives or are you including some highly strategic middle managers as well? Research has shown that more than half (56 percent) of strategy workshops don’t include any middle managers, potentially excluding the views of those closer to customers.

• Be sure participants do the up-front work. Research has found that 45 percent of workshop participants spend less than half a day preparing for the session. This lack of preparation and planning drains valuable face-to-face meeting time. It’s critical to have participants think through and capture relevant business intelligence beforehand.

• Focus the group with prereading. Providing the group with one or two reasonable reading assignments (articles, book chapters, etc.) before the workshop educates the team on important concepts, tools, and frameworks.

• Design the meeting framework. Nothing can destroy a team’s confidence in its leader faster than a meeting with a vague agenda, rambling off-point discussions, and a weak facilitator. A good facilitator has expertise in the strategy process and can skillfully lead the group through the complex path of strategic thinking.

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