High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit
Ace your impact in high-stakes meetings
Stop feeling underwhelmed and start excelling using the world’s most powerful toolkit for meetings that really matter. Designed by David Lancefield, founder of Strategy Shift.
- Increase your influence: tackle problems skilfully that stakeholders care about
- Improve your reward: do your best work on high-value issues
- Enhance your career prospects: signal your potential when it matters
Feel more confident and capable in every board, exco, investor, or stakeholder meeting. Check out everything you get in the list of guides, templates, spotlights, scripts, checklists, flowcharts, and tips below.
Extent: 150 pages.
£100.00
Excludes 20% UK VAT (added where applicable).
Price is for one user licence. Email us for multiples.
What makes our High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit unique?
- It’s comprehensive: the toolkit covers every element of a high-stakes meeting — from the initial idea to hold a meeting, to the actions that follow, and how to finish up successfully.
- It’s rooted in the latest practice and research in strategy, behavioural science, negotiations, and organisational culture.
- It has a modular design — so you can dive into one element on its own, and come back later to dive into another.
- We’ve included a variety of visual aids and learning styles: from flowcharts, to lists of questions and tips, to prose, to real-life templates.
- We focus on the hardest moments in high-stakes meetings, such as small talk, resolving conflict, surprises, groupthink and apathy.
- An attractive design with easy-to-follow charts, diagrams, and guides.
- We explore all perspectives: the chair, the team, participants, and wider stakeholders.
Who is the toolkit designed for?
This toolkit is ideal for people looking to increase their confidence and capability in high-stakes meetings. You might be:
- A new member of a leadership group keen to impress colleagues and sponsors
- A participant in high-stakes meetings, as a contributor or observer, who has ambitions to join the leadership group
- Taking on the role of chair of a leadership group
It’s also invaluable if you’re:
- Experienced in high-stakes meetings and want to move from good to great in specific areas, such as handling conflict, encouraging creative thinking and reaching decisions
- Preparing yourself to take on future leadership roles that will involve participation in high-stakes meetings
Relative to their potential, most people underperform in high-impact meetings
COMPLACENCY
leads to mediocrity just when you need to play your A-game
POOR PRIORITISATION
leaves you underprepared
INSECURITY
leads to indecisiveness
OVERCONFIDENCE
clouds your judgement
APATHY
diminishes the impression you leave on others
Your confidence takes a hit. You leave people wondering whether you’re up to the job. Your team wonder if you’re representing them as well as you should.
Your career growth stalls.
You start fearing, if not avoiding, high-stakes meetings. It doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine designing and participate in high-stakes meetings that are pivotal. It just takes dedicated effort to learn new mindsets and practices. That’s where the High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit comes in.
YOUR TOOLKIT CONTENTS
David Lancefield, Strategy Shift founder, has consolidated 30 years’ experience as a chair, participant, advisor, and observer, in more than 25 countries, into this one toolkit. Plus, he’s added the leading research from academia.
50 punchy guides showing you what it takes to master the mindsets and practices.
20 powerful templates to complete and use right away.
17 illuminating spotlights to elevate your skills to the frontiers of research and practice.
13 compelling scripts to help you say what you should, rather than forgetting, waffling, or getting it wrong.
10 rigorous checklists to help you remember to do what matters most.
Six impactful flowcharts to guide you through important decisions.
Four lists of incisive questions that help you surface the best thinking.
Three collections of valuable tips to enable you to focus on high value activities.
Check out the list of absolutely everything in the toolkit.
A QUICK LOOK INSIDE
A few of the 150 pages, from across seven sections, that you’ll get in your High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit.
Check out the list of absolutely everything in the toolkit.
About your toolkit creator
The High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit was created by David Lancefield, founder of Strategy Shift. He has worked with 50 CEOs and hundreds of C-suite executives over the last 25 years.
He’s led, facilitated, participated in, and presented high-stakes meetings in 30 countries — including board, exco, investor, regulator, and ministerial meetings.
He is a contributor to HBR, MIT Sloan Review, and Strategy+Business, and has been quoted in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. David’s HBR article ‘Stop Wasting People’s Time with Bad Meetings’ is one of their most popular and widely-read.
4 reviews for High-Stakes Meetings Toolkit
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN
YOUR HIGH-STAKES MEETINGS TOOLKIT
50 guides (over six stages)
1. Purpose
- Figure out how a meeting helps your strategy
- Work out if a meeting is the best option
- Identify three critical outcomes from the meeting
- Anticipate what comes next
- Think about your purpose and role
2. Design
- Determine the agenda
- Figure out who really needs to attend — and in what role
- Understand the perspectives, needs, and styles of participants
- Design the best format
- Decide what documentation is required
- Encourage people to attend
- Write the best email and agenda
- Prepare the set-up
3. Prepare yourself
- Appreciate the context
- Define your role and contribution
- Influence the chair and participants
- Write a compelling pre-read
- Prepare what you want to say
- Set up the room
- Use rehearsals skilfully
- Coordinate with your team
- Manage your schedule
- Adopt a positive mindset
- Look the part
- Take control of your body
4. Start well
- Strengthen your reputation
- Engage in small talk before the meeting starts
- Create a strong first impression
- Introduce the agenda with intent
- Encourage full participation
5. Lead the meeting
- Show gravitas
- Make your best pitch
- Communicate succinctly
- Use storytelling powerfully
- Observe and listen attentively
- Write good notes
- Respond well to surprises
- Manage difficult people
- Handle conflict skilfully
- Sustain your interest
- Break into the group when you’re new or different
6. Close & follow-through
- Close and summarise
- Reach a decision
- Communicate actions
- Leave the meeting with presence
- Capture learning and act on it
- Write up minutes
- Encourage people to deliver
- Nurture the relationships
20 templates
- Strategy and culture
- Purpose of meeting
- Email to trusted colleague about purpose of meeting
- Design
- Meeting roles
- Email to participants to introduce a meeting
- Strategic agenda
- CXO personas
- Making the most of meetings
- Prepare yourself
- Your best contribution
- First impressions
- Starting the meeting
- Leading the meeting
- Pitching your idea
- Crafting a strategic story
- Drawing a meeting to a close
- Following up the meeting with intent
- Capturing the meeting in full
- Follow-up email after meeting
17 spotlights
- Meetings as a negotiation
- Peak performance
- Typical roles
- Common meeting mistakes
- Thinking processes
- Skilful breathing
- Illustrating points vividly
- Using the ladder of misinference
- Learning from the practices of elite people
- Interpreting body language
- Why first impressions matter
- Using adaptive listening
- Mastering virtual (and hybrid) meetings
- Learning from neuroscience
- Decision-making formats
13 scripts
- How to ask a colleague for advice on the purpose of a meeting
- How to tell a colleague they’re not coming to a meeting
- How to encourage a participant to attend a meeting (and fully)
- How to have a good (positive) talk with yourself
- How to start a meeting positively
- How to encourage people to say what they truly think
- How to handle an aggressive person
- How to say no firmly and gracefully
- How to speak up skilfully
- How to bring a discussion to a close
- How to get a meeting back on track
- How to close a meeting
- How to encourage somebody to deliver on their actions
10 checklists
- Purpose of the meeting
- Design
- Establishing rules
- Using the right technology
- Making everyone feel included
- Preparing well
- Showing gravitas
- Making your best contribution
- Responding to surprises
- Keeping to time
Six flowcharts
- Asking yourself whether you schedule a meeting
- Considering whether you should attend a meeting
- Working out how to peak at the right moment
- Anticipating the ebbs and flows of a meeting
- Staying cool when you’re put on the spot
- Being systematic about decision-making
Four question lists
- Figuring out who to influence and why
- Anticipating the questions from the chair and other participants
- Thinking about what’s on the minds of people at the beginning
- What to ask during a meeting
Three collections of tips
- Reading the room, right from the beginning
- Dealing with personality flaws (including your own)
- Making decisions
Agnes Woolrich (verified owner) –
The tools, tips and skills I’ve learned will continue to make me a much more effective meeting chair and participant, and therefore a more successful leader.
Iain McCluskey (verified owner) –
It has already transformed the way I prepare, execute, and follow up on high-stakes meetings internally, and with clients.
Dan Mottram (verified owner) –
I now feel well-equipped to navigate complex board meetings, C-suite presentations, and critical pitches with confidence and poise.
Chris Shott (verified owner) –
It has completely reframed my attitude towards meetings to ensure I am making the most of often overlooked interactions that have become all too business-as-usual and should command more focus in my work week.