Summertime. Most people think about summer as a different place, a chance to slow down, but for most leadership teams, the summer is the perfect time to refocus and align on critical outcomes for the rest of the calendar year. The summer provides the perfect opportunity to get the smaller group together while calls take a little longer to get returned and teammates are in and out of vacations, or, for many nonprofits, staffing immersion experiences or internship programs. The result of this... the September "State of the Business". It's when everyone is finally back and you, as the company's leader, needs to get everyone back on track and refocused for the next few months.

Often, in the fall, companies have the opportunity to do this in person at a company offsite. Other times, it's remote, but i'm here to say... please make it memorable and engaging. Your staff is tired of looking at a bunch of slides that they have to learn about, process, and respond to within 30 minutes.

Usually, when I say this, I get a variety of responses:

• People like this format. I always get good responses to it. Unsurprisingly, people don't want to tell the CEO, Executive Director, or someone likely multiple steps above them hierarchically that the information they conveyed wasn't done so in an optimal way.

• This is what people are used to. They would get confused if we did it a different way. This is a risk, and it definitely involves more time and planning to get it right but if it's planning effectively, then you minimize this risk. Plus, when was "we've always done it this way" the best reason to contunue doing anything the same?!

• But how can we do this differently? We have a lot of information to get through. It's hard to think about how to get through as much information but there are lots of interesting ideas. There's also sometimes a question of what information does everyone need to know and then beyond that, doing an optional session for folks who want to know more or get into the weeds on certain things.

• I don't have the time to think about a different way of facilitating this information. Hi. My name is Allison :-) But in all seriousness, this is where outside resources can be helpful. You can talk about what information you want to convey, how you've conveyed it in the past, and then work together to convey the information differently and have a better, deeper conversation (either structured with or facilitated by someone outside of the organization)

So, what does this look like in reality? Here are a few ideas (that probably won't exactly for your organization, but give a basis that you can make some small tweaks and changes to)

1. Pre-recording and pre-collecting questions - this enables individuals to actually process and think about the information in advance. My recommendation is to send this at least a week in advance so people can fit it into their schedules. And still keep the time tight... just because you're pre-recording, doesn't mean you should create 40 minutes of content instead of 20.
2. segments - do a segment and then breakout rooms with something to DO, not just a question to discuss. For example, this can be an open question where you want ideas from people, or writing down what work they know of that maps to these focus items, or have them outline the top 3 things they're excited for and where they think the risks are of the plan.
3. stations around a room (think about this like museum exhibits and everyone gets to walk around and learn at their own pace). This allows more of your leadership team to get involved as well. They could be presenting facts or information, graphs, short clips from customers, and individuals can ask questions focused in the areas they know less about and spend more time at those stations than the ones for their specific teams.
4. A more off-the-wall idea - Sending out the information in advance, then coming in and doing smaller group discussions, and having a couple of people volunteer to do slideshow karaoke (15 pre-determined slides, advancing automatically every 15 seconds) with their content based on the state of the company information. It's bound to be memorable.