According to a past cover story in Fortune magazine, ninety percent of business owners never implement a strategic plan for their business – an amazing statistic that can be explained by another one: almost ninety percent of business owners spend less than an hour per month meeting about business strategies. In most cases, the problem is not an unwillingness to discuss strategy, but a lack of facilitation for the discussion. Non-facilitated meetings tend to be informative and not innovative; and when a meeting’s focus is innovating strategies, that can be tragic for team morale, and therefore team performance. The solution—it may be as simple as hiring the right meeting facilitator.

Five Reasons to Use a Strategic Meeting Facilitator

Business consultants recommend having a short strategic planning meeting every month, and a longer one every quarter. Whereas the former should focus on reporting, the latter should use the reporting to fuel innovative ideas. To accomplish this, hiring a facilitator is important for at least five reasons:

Encourages Teamwork

The observation that familiarity breeds contempt often applies to co-workers, whose knowledge of each other’s mistakes can make mutual respect difficult. A facilitator can eliminate this dynamic by fostering a team environment where team members contribute equally to the end result, and counterproductive arguments are prohibited.

Builds Consensus

By encouraging teamwork that generates results, facilitators can help teams build consensus, which can carry over to monthly strategic planning meetings. If your team lacks consensus, and spends more time arguing than it does in agreement, strategic meeting facilitation can help create a newfound consensus.

Challenges Assumptions

Every business believes that certain practices are keys to its success. What if those practices hinder a business more than they help it? If they do, meeting facilitators can help reveal the truth by challenging team members’ basic assumptions about how they will achieve business goals.

Encourages Risk Taking

When you view them with the myopia of a company insider, knowing which risks to take and which ones to avoid can be difficult. When a facilitator is experienced in a business’ line of work, he or she can help team members take educated risks that get positive results. Because true innovation always involves risk, this aspect of meeting facilitation can be invaluable.

Keeps Discussion Realistic

As business leaders will discover over time, there is fine line between creative thinking and brainstorming concepts that, while impressive, will never work. When dialogue strays from realistic goals, a team can end up pursuing ideas that waste valuable time and money. When placed in the hands of an experienced facilitator, strategic meeting facilitation can prevent this from happening.

FindaFacilitator has the Facilitator You Need

FindaFacilitator specializes in supplying meeting facilitators for all types of meetings and business needs. If your strategic planning sessions are not generating the results you need, the solution could be as simple as having future meetings facilitated by a professional facilitator.