Develop communication points

Suppose a colleague not at the meeting asks an attendee, “What happened?” they should know what to say. So before you wrap up, put the question to the group. “What are the most important things we accomplished in our time here together?” As the group responds, capture the key points on a flip chart or whiteboard and briefly summarize them. Once you have alignment on what should be communicated to others, ask everyone if there are any parts of the discussion that they wouldn’t want to be shared. Some information might be confidential; perhaps some ideas aren’t quite ready for dissemination. Be as specific as possible here, so everyone clearly understands what is off limits. Then, as soon as possible after the meeting, send your agreed-upon talking points to everyone in an email. The goal of this exercise is not to give people a script to read from. It’s to guide the key messages they should convey and what they should keep to themselves if asked, so the rest of the organization gets a consistent picture of what went on. After a recent strategy meeting of the top 30 executives at a major technology company, for example, the group decided on these communication points:

• This was not a one-time event but the beginning of this group coming together as a senior leadership team.
• We talked about our strategy, which is to build a collection of great businesses in strong categories.
• We agreed that each business should focus on driving its own growth, but where it makes sense, units and functions should leverage each other’s best practices and capabilities. We captured some ideas for starting this and talked about opportunities for leaders to grow and take on new boundary-spanning roles.