If you run a small business and you have never had a strategy workshop with your leadership team, you are behind. You might not feel behind, but you have missed an opportunity to set a strong foundation with your team.

This is a practical guide to having an initial strategy workshop with your leadership team. It is not a “Guide to Boondoggles” – those are easy. And it’s not a “Guide to Lecturing Your Team Again” – if you’re like me, you do that enough anyway.

It’s a practical guide to bonding your leadership team together and creating some clarity around what the heck you’re doing together. It’s based on Paul Lencioni’s excellent book The Advantage. We have facilitated this session in several companies, and it always helps move teams forward.

If you use this, let me know how it goes!

The Objectives

We are chasing the four disciplines of a healthy organization:

1. Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
2. Create Clarity
3. Overcommunicate Clarity
4. Reinforce Clarity

But for this specific session, we are only focusing on the first two: Cohesion and Clarity. If we get those right, the rest follows.

Planning the Session

Don’t wing it. Think through each of the following carefully:

When to Do It: You need to get your leadership team together at least once a year. You should also do it after big strategic moves (e.g. acquiring a new company) and any time your leadership team changes a lot (e.g. new COO).

Time Required: Plan for 4 to 5 hours. You want enough pressure to keep things moving, but enough space to let the important conversations breathe.

Who Should Be There: The leadership team. That’s it. If you have more than 8 people in the room, you aren’t doing strategy; you’re doing a presentation. Keep it tight.

Selecting the Setting: Pick a place and time where your team will not be distracted. Don’t do this at your office during work hours – you are sure to get interrupted. Even when offsite or off business hours, I highly recommend a phone basket or a strict ‘no checking your phone’ speech. If you’re on a budget, Saturday at the office is fine.

The Pre-Read: The basis of this workshop is Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. He argues that organizational health is the last competitive advantage. Before the meeting, send out the summary of his model and tell your team to read it.

The Facilitator: Don’t present this yourself. You need a third party—a mentor, a board member, or a professional facilitator—to run the session. If you are standing at the whiteboard teaching the framework, you are in “teacher mode,” not “leader mode.” It takes you out of the moment. You need to be sitting at the table, vulnerable and participating with your team, not standing above them.

The Agenda

Here is the run of show. It’s tight, but it works.

1. Intro & Context: The Four Disciplines (15 mins)
2. Cohesion Exercise 1: Personal Histories (60 mins)
3. Cohesion Exercise 2: Personal Scouting Report (60 mins)

BREAK

4. Clarity Question 1: Why do we exist? (5-10 mins)
5. Clarity Question 2: What do we do? (5-10 mins)
6. Clarity Question 3: How do we behave? (60 mins)
7. Clarity Question 4: How will we succeed? (60 mins)

Deep Dive: Facilitating the Session

Here’s how to run each section.

1. Introduction: Organizational Health

Start by framing the day. Your facilitator should briefly explain the concept of Organizational Health. Most companies focus on being “smart”—strategy, marketing, finance, technology. That stuff is important, but it’s a commodity. Everyone has access to it. The real advantage comes from being “healthy”—minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, and low turnover.

That’s the goal of the day. We are here to get healthy.

2. Building a Cohesive Leadership Team

Lencioni says the first step is getting the leaders to behave in a functional, cohesive way. We don’t do this by talking about “synergy.” We do it by being human.

Exercise 1: Personal Histories

This is the heavy lifting. Go around the room and have every person answer four questions:

1.       Where did you grow up?

2.       What did your parents do?

3.       Where do you fall in the birth order?

4.       What was a unique or interesting challenge you dealt with growing up?

When facilitating this section, the leader (e.g. CEO) must go first, and you must go deep. You are setting the depth for the entire room. If you give a surface-level answer, your team will follow you into the shallow end.

If you say, “I grew up in Kansas, my parents were teachers, I’m an only child, and I quit soccer because I wasn’t good at it,” you have wasted everyone’s time. That’s interesting, but it’s safe.

One CEO we worked with talked in depth about his autistic sister, the pressure he felt to defend and support her, the resentment that he built up for the sacrifices his family made for her, and the embarrassment he felt when his friends would come over.

That’s the depth you want. When you put that on the table, the energy in the room changes. You aren’t the CEO anymore; you’re a human who has dealt with stuff.

Give this up to 15 minutes per person. Let people ask follow-up questions. Don’t rush it.

Exercise 2: Work Tendencies

Once the trust is established, we get practical. This exercise takes another 15 minutes per person. You can use Paul Stansik’s excellent guide to writing a Personal Scouting Report. Have everyone answer these questions:

1.       The natural strengths I tend to lean on are…

2.       Sometimes I annoy people by…

3.       I love it when people I work with…

4.       It’s frustrating when people I work with…

Then have each person tape their answers to a white board and read out about themselves.

If you’re a real go-getter, you can organize a 360-degree feedback report for each participant before the session to better inform the answers here.

3. Creating Clarity

Now that you have built some trust, we trust each other, we pivot to the business. We need to answer six critical questions to align the team. In this session, we focus on the first four.

Question 1 (5-10 minutes): Why do we exist?

Don’t overthink this. It’s not a marketing slogan. It’s the truth.

For NWI Generator, the answer was: “Deliver reliable backup power to homes and businesses throughout Northwest Indiana.” Simple. True. Done.

Question 2 (5-10 minutes): What do we do?

Again, this is a quick one. But it’s important to align and set the scope of discussion for the next few sections.

For NWI Generator, the answer was: “We install and maintain backup generators for homes and small businesses in Northwest Indian, Southwest Michigan, and Southeast Chicagoland.” If you spend more than 5 minutes on this, you’re doing it wrong.

Question 3 (50 minutes): How do we behave?

Now it gets harder. This is your Core Values discussion. To get to the truth, we use the Rockstars and Misfits exercise.

1.       Ask each person to list three Rockstars (people who represent the organization at its best) and three Misfits (people who represent the organization at its worst).

2.       Use actual names of real people you have worked with.

3.       Write the Rockstars on the board. Ask: “What is true about these people?”

4.       Write the Misfits on the board. Ask: “What is true about them?”

You will see patterns. The Rockstars might all be “scrappy” or “humble.” The Misfits might all be “arrogant” or “slow.” From these lists, create three or four core values.

Note: Steer away from negative phrasing like “Don’t be a jerk.” (Even though that’s a good rule). Steer toward positive statements like “Do high-quality work.” This list becomes your code of conduct.

Question 4 (50 minutes): How will we succeed?

This is the hardest one to facilitate, but it’s very valuable. This is your competitive differentiation. You are looking for Strategic Anchors.

List everything that is true about your business. How do you work with customers? How are you different from the other guys? For NWI Generator, we realized we were Generator Specialists. Our competitors were HVAC companies or electricians who did generators on the side. We only did generators. In some ways, that was a weakness—we couldn’t fix your AC. But we turned it into an anchor. We were the experts.

Find your 3 or 4 anchors. These define your “Secret Sauce.” They should be on your website, in your sales scripts, and clear to everyone. If you can’t differentiate yourself from the competition, you don’t have a strategy.

Next Steps

By the end of these five hours, you will be exhausted. But you will have made huge strides toward organizational health. You’ll have more connected leadership team, practical core values, and a practical strategy.

The next steps are to over-communicate those answers and reinforce them through hiring and firing.

But for now? Go have a beer with your team. You earned it.