Matt Barrett, chief executive of Barclays Bank, was in a tough spot. He had just joined the venerable British bank after a stretch of shoddy leadership had battered its stock price and alienated employees. To draw employees back into the fold, Barrett hired Imagination Design & Communications, a London-based company that uses events to help companies achieve their strategic objectives.
To determine how to best tackle Barrett’s mission, Imagination’s event planners followed standard operating procedure. First, they surveyed employees and recorded their concerns. Then they studied the results and determined it would be best if employees could meet Barrett in person and hear his answers to their pressing questions. Barrett ended up going on a global tour that lasted several months, to meet groups of employees and answer questions they had submitted anonymously in advance. The meetings that Imagination organized were part of a larger communications campaign that was hailed by financial markets as a hugely successful turnaround.
“In a culture that didn’t feel connected to senior management, the sea change was instant,” said Eduardo Braniff, Imagination’s global insight director, pointing out that employees were reassured by hearing Barrett directly address their concerns.
The events succeeded in achieving Barclays' strategic objectives, largely because Imagination tailored the format to the occasion.
“You have to understand what you want to communicate first, and every one of your tactical decisions should stem from that,” he said.
Imagination is at the forefront of a growing event industry sector that focuses on providing planning services that help clients shape not just what an event looks like, but how it is used to fulfill far-reaching objectives. It’s a shift that reflects how events are increasingly being viewed as a strategic tool that directly affects the bottom line, all the way from customer loyalty to sales growth and employee retention.
But as this shift happens, a clear line is being drawn between the tactical planners who spend their time negotiating with hotels and choosing menus and those who “get it.” The latter are increasingly being invited to sit at the table with CEOs to offer their ideas on corporate strategy; the former are being left behind.
Changing Mindsets
It’s true that most event planners approach events with a tactical mindset. That’s not necessarily bad. Clients will always need experienced professionals to scout interesting venues, manage suppliers and make sure guests arrive at the right place at the right time.
But as technology simplifies some of these organizational tasks—just think of how online registration has streamlined the registration process—the market for logistical expertise is shrinking. At the same time, the rise of experiential marketing, with its emphasis on giving audiences an experience that will draw them to a brand, has raised awareness of how events directly contribute to the bottom line.
All of these trends are propelling event planners to a higher echelon of the corporate chain, where smart strategy is not only rewarded but expected. This spells good news for both companies and the event industry: Companies extract more value from their event planning dollars, while the industry grows in a new direction that will create jobs and income just as some traditional revenue streams dry up.
To keep up with the changes, however, traditional event planners focused on logistics will have to trade in their old mindset: If you want a seat at the C-table, you have to think and talk like a CEO.
“Event planners need to learn the language of the CEO and understand the goals he or she is trying to accomplish,” said Michael Hitt, a professor of management at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School. “They have to show how they can help create value for stakeholders and they need to be talking in those terms. Don’t have the CEO translate for you.”
For example, when the CEO tells a company-wide meeting that he or she wants to consolidate relationships with suppliers and cut shipping costs, you have to listen up and find ways to implement that strategy in your department, too.
In trying to determine how events contribute to a company’s bottom line, measuring ROI is very useful. However, it comes in many shapes and sizes. Tactical thinkers often take a straight and narrow path to proving ROI and are obsessed with finding measurable results: attendance figures, event cost compared to the previous year and the number of sales leads generated.
These are all important metrics, but a strategic thinker knows that an event is just one point in a long series of communications, and one must take into account how an event impacts the company’s long-term strategic goals.
“Right now, most meetings are evaluated almost immediately post meeting,” said Tom Connellan, author of Bringing Out the Best in Others, who suggests surveying participants months after a meeting has been held and asking how the meeting advanced their relationships with the meeting owners. “Meeting planners need additional meeting metrics if they want to be part of the company’s strategic team, because evaluations will be less about what the attendees think of the meeting and more about what the meeting owners think about how the meeting advanced strategic intent.”
To better understand a company’s strategic intent, Connellan suggests meeting with senior officers, such as chief technology officers, chief financial officers and chief marketing officers—or members of their staffs—explaining to them that you want your meetings to advance the company’s strategic interests and asking them detailed questions about their division.
“Meeting planners should conclude by saying, ‘Consider me part of your team and call me anytime—even if you’re not planning a meeting,’” Connellan said.
Thinking strategically also means redefining one’s role within an organization, not just measuring outcomes for specific events, according to Patrick Grady, managing partner at CMS Communications International, who describes a brainstorming session he was asked to run for a Fortune 500 client. When the 20 event planners attending were asked to describe their jobs, the vast majority gave a list of their day-to-day tasks, instead of explaining their strategic roles within the company.
“People are very connected to their to-do list,” he said. “You have to understand why you’re needed for the company to function and how you can contribute to the company’s bottom line.”
A strategic meeting planner, he says, always thinks about how to help the company make more money, whether by increasing sales, improving staff engagement or reducing employee turnover.
Who’s Your Boss?
It’s easy to talk about changing one’s mindset, but a different story altogether is actually doing it. One trick that helps is shifting one’s allegiance.
Often, meeting planners make the mistake of thinking that their customers are the corporate executives they are organizing meetings for and that to please them is to do a good job. However, it’s the meeting’s audience—or more broadly speaking, a company’s stakeholders—who are really the boss.
Say the CEO tells his events department he wants to present his new sales goals for the year ahead and reward the sales force for the previous year’s work. An old-school planner might invite the sales force to a weekend in the Bahamas and have them spend their mornings meeting with the executive team. A more innovative planner surveys the sales force first, and likely discovers that the last thing they want to do, after traveling all year round, is spend another weekend away from home.
“You have to understand your clients’ goals and objectives, and help educate them to engage their stakeholders,” said Cindy Wilson, president of San Francisco-based Wilson West. “You have to interview the stakeholders in order to uncover the strategy.”
In realigning their allegiance, event planners will find it necessary to seek confrontation and call out their bosses when the events they ask for don’t serve the audience best. This search for confrontation and debate should also extend to the corporate strategy events that planners organize, if they want to be seen as strategic members of the company, says Stephen Billing, director of Exponential Consulting in Wellington, New Zealand.
“Most corporate strategy meetings amount to road shows where presentations are made to large audiences by the most powerful people. The impressive-looking PowerPoint slides and formality of the setting preclude people from expressing contrary opinion,” Billing said. “Meeting planners can help by ensuring the program allows plenty of opportunities for small group discussion and also for informal conversation where the senior people mingle extensively with the managers and employees.”
Innovative event planners get even more creative with format by identifying very specific problems that a company must solve and then tailoring a format that will help solve that problem.
That’s how Lisa DiTullio, founder of Lisa DiTullio & Assoc., helped one client achieve a corporate turnaround. Partly due to DiTullio’s efforts, Boston-based Harvard Pilgrim Health Care went from the brink of bankruptcy to being named one of the top health programs by US News & World Report.
DiTullio’s consultancy focuses on helping clients with problems—such as high turnover or wasteful spending—identify the work that needs to be done in order to solve those problems, and then uses events to help implement solutions.
“Events are always a vehicle,” DiTullio said.
In 2003, DiTullio was brought in to help execute a major turnaround at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which had lost millions of dollars after a botched merger. When DiTullio arrived at the scene, the company was under state supervision and trying desperately to implement a long list of business priorities. DiTullio knew that the company’s turnaround plan had to be supported by employees in order to succeed.
“We had the philosophy that everyone in the organization had to have knowledge about what was going on,” she said. “We believed that everyone who knew about the company’s priority list of projects would be more engaged as an employee, and it didn’t matter if they were in customer service answering phones or one of the senior executives.”
So DiTullio helped develop an annual event whose main intent was to educate employees about business priorities and get them excited about the year ahead.
The event was designed as a trade show, with booths developed and staffed by teams in charge of specific projects. A team in charge of introducing new technology to the company, for example, would set up a booth that allows employees to discuss the new technology, find out why it’s needed and maybe even try it out. DiTullio contrasts this approach to that of organizations that simply send out newsletters to employees.
“We wanted every individual in the organization to experience the business plan in a way that would be memorable and meaningful to them,” she said.
While the event that DiTullio organized sounds like thousands of events organized by planners every day, her advice is sought after by CEOs because she helps them address specific problems and designs events only as a vehicle to help solve those problems.
Getting Through
It’s easy to dismiss DiTullio’s success as a result of her consulting specialty, since Harvard Pilgrim was in fact looking for a strategic partner when it hired her. And sometimes it can be tough trying to sell yourself as a strategic thinker when you’re known for logistical work.
“It’s scary, because the first thing a CEO will say to you is, ‘Who’s talking here? Aren’t you the guy who books rooms?’” said Eric de Groot, managing partner at Netherlands-based MindMeeting.
But Stacey Ruth, CEO of meeting company The Wow Factory, says getting through to CEOs isn’t that difficult. When she works with a client who dismisses her as an order-taker, Ruth finds a way to schedule a lunch or dinner with the CEO, and she usually succeeds.
If scheduling a lunch seems too daunting, event planners have many other opportunities to present a few ideas to the CEO. Event planners, unlike personnel managers or accountants, are constantly rubbing shoulders with CEOs, chief operating officers and other head honchos at company events and the planning sessions that precede them. But many planners don’t use these meetings effectively.
Once you have an opportunity to say something, of course, it’s crucial to say all the right things. And saying the right things is far more important than using the right language, Ruth says.
“It’s not about language, but about the topics you cover and how you think about them,” she said. “You have to understand the overall direction and strategy of the company, and if you’re not paying attention, you will not be seen as anything other than an executor of tactics.”
Granted, some CEOs are more open to viewing events in a new light than others. Tech companies such as IBM and Cisco, which innovate for a living, are known for giving huge strategic responsibilities to their event planning staffs. These companies are also struggling to compete for a small pool of very valuable employees and customers, and are therefore forced to use events as a competitive edge.
Still, innovative meeting planners agree: Any good CEO always wants to hear new ideas that will help boost the bottom line.
“All it takes is for the executives to hear your ideas. They want to be surrounded by smart people,” Ruth said. “I am sure there are plenty of CEOs who are not interested in listening, but I have not run across them.” One+
DALIA FAHMY is a business freelancer based in New York.
Getting From Here To There
You don’t have to go to business school or memorize Jack Welch speeches to be heard by the C-suite. However, there is plenty of homework involved.
• Catch up with the latest trends in the event industry. Reading a magazine like this one is a good start, but it’s really about attending conferences and workshops held by industry leaders and networking with colleagues who have already made that switch from party planner to corporate strategist.
• Find a mentor. Especially young meeting planners, if they feel they are being assigned lots of hotel bookings, should find a more experienced professional who can help nurture their ambitions.
• Read books by business people who have found new and innovative corporate strategies. For example: Good to Great by Jim Collins; Setting the Table by Danny Meyer; The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
• Listen at the meetings you attend and pay attention to the details. Find out how CEOs view their business, how they reach the conclusions about their business and how they word their concerns and vision.