In the best mastermind groups and consulting relationships, the generation of ideas leads to a decision. This, in turn, leads to action steps, which encourages progress and accountability.
Sometimes your clients don’t know how to analyze all the options and make a good decision. Or, they don’t know how to create an action plan once they’ve made a decision.
Let’s talk about those two situations and I’ll share two exercises to help your clients and members get into action and make good decisions.
There are many places in the action planning phase where clients get stuck. When they need to make decisions which are either complicated or expose a conflict of values, the decision-making wheels grind to a halt.
For example, in a recent mastermind group meeting, Joan needed to make a decision about which target audience she wanted to market to. She could either work with seasoned women entrepreneurs or she could work with business owners in the startup phase.
Joan had a passion for both groups. She was a seasoned entrepreneur herself and loved the idea of supporting her peers. But she remembered the struggles of the startup phase and knew she had knowledge and experiences to share with this audience, too. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a lot of work to market to two audiences simultaneously, so she needed to choose one audience to work with first.
To help Joan make a decision, we used a simple “T” chart:
(This is a great group exercise, too. Use a whiteboard or flipchart, and let everyone jump into the written brainstorming!)
In Joan’s case, she decided to work first with the seasoned women entrepreneurs. Here’s why:
Because this choice aligned with both her goals and values, it was the perfect choice for her.
It can be daunting to choose a course of action and write up a plan. Mastermind groups help each member by giving them tools to help make the decision about which actions to take, whether to do it themselves or delegate the task, figure out what resources are necessary to complete the task, and assign reasonable deadlines to each project.
Now that she had chosen her target audience, Joan had to write a marketing action plan. There were dozens of tasks and projects to consider and she started to feel anxious and overwhelmed. In the next mastermind group meeting, Joan asked her co-members to brainstorm a To Do list so that she was sure of several pieces:
We put all the ideas for tasks onto Post-It notes and stuck them on a whiteboard. This allowed us to rearrange the order of tasks, and add sub-tasks as needed. Then Joan took a photo of the whiteboard so she could transcribe the finished results into her marketing plan.
With these two simple tools, you can help your clients and mastermind group members move forward!
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Awesome piece of advice. Really pactical which adds so much more value to it. Excited to go and try it out in my next MM!
Let me know how it goes, Gerrit!
Pragmatic step by step adds up to actionable and manageable goal setting. I like to values piece. I have used 3 x 5 index cards and laid them out on the floor to illustrate the path to the overarching goal. The cards can be rearranged to fit the journey.
I love this idea, Brenda! I sometimes use mindmaps for this sort of thinking and planning, especially electronic ones that let me move the pieces around easily.
We did it last night. The group liked the simplicity of it. One person felt that the approach ‘as is’ does not emphasize prioties of one goal over the other before doing the exercise.
The way I see it is that doing the exercise helps one determine/understand the priority.
Very useful, thanks Karyn.
In the beginning, Gerrit, doing these simple exercises are best. No need to complicate it in an everyday mastermind group meeting. If members wanted it, you could always designate a “planning meeting” where the focus of each Hot Seat is strictly to help each member create and analyze their action plans.