Whenever possible, we try to help clients select a mix of people to participate in group strategy exercises. We review the importance of including front-line decision makers, functional experts, and individuals with creative perspectives. We are also proponents for reaching beyond familiar people that are always involved strategic planning meetings and drive the outcomes of group strategy exercises. We recommend involving emerging leaders and individuals that will actively challenge a group in a constructive way on its recommended direction.

When you push for that varied of a group, what do you do with the team members so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the group’s work?

9 Ideas on How to Involve a Team in Group Strategy Exercises

You can try these nine ideas for how to involve team in group strategy exercises:

1. Place people in roles that accentuate their strengths and best characteristics.
2. Assign others to roles that stretch their strengths in new ways.
3. Spread people throughout the group via roles that capitalize on their strengths but are unfamiliar to them.
4. Turn strategy into a game and let the team assign roles to specific team members.
5. Create teaching opportunities for more expert participants so they can help others grow and develop in new ways through strategy planning.
6. Break up the big answers the group is trying to develop into simple, targeted questions so team members can share their perspectives in group strategy exercises.
7. Invite participants that want to help assemble the targeted answers from number 6 into the big answers to take on that challenge.
8. Have habitual naysayers play the challenger role to test how strong the ideas really are before the group decides to act on them.
9. Select naturally positive participants to work on a contingency plan if the strategy ends up being too successful.

Not all of those will work in every situation, obviously, but this is a checklist we’d use to actively and successfully involve a team in group strategy exercises. In the right roles, we’ll get more done faster, with strong input from the widest group of participants. - Mike Brown

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