"Was there a time in your career when you were on the receiving end of a marketing plan or business strategy change in which you had no input?"

For junior or middle managers this situation is not unusual, but for those in more senior positions this can raise questions around exclusion and self worth, and often results in a resistance to buy-in.

In many organisational cultures leaders are conditioned to operate from an ego-centric orientation. People who are promoted to the top tend to be those who are best at making themselves (and their opinions) heard in meetings, which is seen as a mark of authority.

Leadership behaviour focuses on the leader being the prime driver of creating strategy, making decisions and dictating action. Vital success factors, such as effective business planning and strategy, become the domain of a smaller, closed group of senior team members. In this instance, it’s not unusual for well-intentioned manager egos to compete, resulting in delays, redirections or even sabotage of the strategy.

One process that’s proven to successfully support leadership engagement is ‘facilitated visual planning’. It stands in stark contrast to a directive top-down leadership style. This method encourages equality in contribution, either among peers or to a wider multi- level staff group, and involves people in a structured and visually intuitive way to engage and align thinking.

In facilitated visual planning, leaders adopt an approach of humility, and accept that they do not hold the answers to the universe. In more hierarchical business cultures this wider, more creative style may initially be viewed as being ‘weak’. It takes courage to adopt a facilitative leadership style. It requires a leader who can think about ‘we’ rather than ‘me’.

A leader who really wants to harness the best from their team will create an environment of trust and respect that allows for a mature depth of dialogue in meetings. A facilitative approach in leading a meeting can enable managers to hold the tension of not making decisions immediately. By encouraging participation from diverse quarters this inevitably leads to better decisions with broader reaching, actionable commitments to which the group involved develops an immediate ownership.

Working visually in business meetings is an effective way to establish equality of understanding and serves to focus alignment on business challenges and strategies. This is especially true across the Asia-Pacific region where English is so often an executive’s second language.

A good facilitator needs to be prepared to ‘go slow to go fast’, rather than seek the quick fix philosophy adopted in many organisations. By involving others to uncover diversity of thinking and by opening up quality conversations, business planning develops in an inclusive way and people feel connected and responsible.

Facilitated visual philosophy interrupts the unhelpful patterns that can occur in traditional approaches to planning. Clarity emerges from visual planning and makes processes, assumptions and decisions explicit, dramatically improving the chances of alignment. The visual nature of the outputs from visual planning makes them clear, engaging and safe for others to contribute to.

The results from adopting a facilitated visual approach to business planning are more likely to lead to sustainable business changes in ways that are relevant, interesting and, importantly, owned by the people who will be responsible for making them a reality.

meetingmagic.co.uk