Leveraging Leadership

Listener Question: How to Lead Effective Conference Prep Without Doing All the Work Yourself

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 192

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A listener asks how to prep for a conference kickoff meeting without getting overwhelmed. Emily explains that a Chief of Staff shouldn't do all the work alone and suggests framing group discussions around key topics like conference themes, attendee info, and potential Q&A panel questions. She shares practical tips like getting input from team members and focusing on facilitating effective conversations instead of having every answer ready in advance.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

01:08 The Role of a Chief of Staff: Clarifying Responsibilities
01:55 Group Discussions: The Key to Effective Planning
03:41 Framing the Conversation: A New Approach
04:45 Logistics and Agenda Setting for Kickoff Meetings
06:01 Gathering and Utilizing Background Information
08:10 Final Thoughts: Shifting Mindsets and Effective Leadership

emily-sander_3_06-10-2025_141627:

All right, listener, question time. This listener says Emily. I have this kickoff meeting coming up with our internal team to start planning an upcoming conference, and I'm completely overwhelmed trying to prepare for it. I've been trying to get everything in place, drafting the agenda, thinking through the theme and messaging for the conference. Gathering background info on conference attendees, anticipating what questions might come up for our team's q and a panel. Um, I'm in back to back meetings. I have no time to think about this. I have no mental bandwidth. Uh, I feel like I'm trying to solve this whole thing. I feel like I'm trying to stay ahead of everything for everyone as a good chief of staff does. Interesting. Um, is there a better way to approach this? Okay, yes, there is a better way to approach this. First of all, the reason I kind of, uh, hesitated or bumped on as a good chief of staff does a good chief of staff thinks ahead. Yes. A good chief of staff anticipates the needs of their principal and team. Yes, I don't think a good chief of staff takes on the work of their entire team. what I'm kind of getting from your question is you're taking on a whole bunch of stuff unnecessarily. So your description here screams group conversation to me. So for instance, when I see things like thinking through the theme and messaging for the conference, gathering background information on conference attendees, um, anticipating the questions for the q and a panel, those are all group discussions for me. for you to try to answer that yourself. Might not be getting to the best answer for the group. if you open that up to the group for discussion. Hey, let's, let's talk about the q and a panel now. Um, what types of questions do we want to think through in advance? And someone who. Maybe, uh, maybe a, a sales leader has been in the field or has been talking to prospects or strategic partners and it's like, I'm getting a lot of chatter on this stuff. this is like top of mind for a lot of people. I'm sure. We're gonna get a question about this. You could get someone from marketing or someone, like your CEO might be talking to people and having conversations that you're not in where it's like, this is hot. Like this is a hot topic right now. this is, I think where we're. We're gonna get asked about this. You could also hear a question from the group where it's like, Hmm. I don't know if we're gonna get that question, but I think we should answer that question. So you could be like, all right, let's prep as a team. If we get a question even near this one, answer that question,'cause we want to answer that question, to me that's a much more effective, fruitful, dynamic conversation than just you coming up with here's the list of questions that we could possibly get. Memorize the answers. I've done this for you, so there's like a mindset shift. So when I hear is there a better way to approach this, the biggest thing I'd say is a mindset shift where instead of saying, I must do all the work myself and have all of this done for my team, move to, I'm going to tee this conversation up and facilitate this conversation for my team. There's a difference there, right? So, and also like this is the, yeah. Kickoff meeting. So I would imagine you might have a series of prep meetings for this conference. And if this is the very first one, you're kicking this off for you to have the expectation that you have to have all the answers ready for your team before the kickoff meeting. That's putting a lot on yourself. That is a lot of work. I would be overwhelmed if I tried to do that. Instead, if you go, Hey, I have this upcoming kickoff meeting. I wanna be thoughtful about it. Let me tee this up. Let me frame this up for the team. Let me make sure everyone's clear about. How these prep meetings are gonna work, what we're trying to accomplish across the series of meetings. What's on the agenda today? you can start with like logistical things, right? So, you know, everyone's here today. If you have team members who you think would benefit from being in this meeting or would be able to provide input that's helpful for the group, then go ahead and add them as optional. You can go through the logistic things like that, and then you might open it up to, okay. by the end of this, I wanna make sure that everyone here, everyone going to the conference, everyone prepping, people going to the conference knows our two main points we wanna make in terms of theme and messaging. I wanna come up with, I. Two main things we wanna get across to everyone we speak with. So if you're speaking with individuals at the booth, if you're speaking with individuals at the breakfast, lunch, dinner meetings, we have certainly on our panel, the two things we want people to remember about our company and about our team are this and this. So I wanna make sure that we're all clear on that coming out of this, uh, prep meeting or series of prep meetings. Okay? So That's framing the conversation. It's not giving the answer. There's a big difference there. Now you might. Kick off the answer like, you know, something I was thinking about was this and this. Like, I've heard this and this over and over again. So those might be our two things we wanna get across just to get the ball rolling, but then invite other people or make it clear like this is a group discussion type of thing. what else? Think through the team of messaging background information. there's different ways to read that part. So gathering background information on the conference attendees. So if you're talking about. Providing the background information to your team about who else is gonna be there, that's one thing. So maybe you like work with the, the organizer of the conference to see if you can get an attendee list or at least a description of the type of people they're trying to attract to the conference. That might be one thing. Another way to read that might be, if you're looking for your team to gather intelligence about the people they speak to at the conference. So we did this a lot. So our sales team would always, um, like exchange business cards and then write a word or a phrase on the back of the card to one, categorize them as a type of prospect and two, just help them remember the conversation.'cause they're, you know, flying, talking to dozens of people. So if it's like, hey. Remember, here's our system for doing this, and here's how we're gonna catalog these in salesforce.com when we get back, da, da, da. You can make sure everyone is reminded or clear about that. It could be, we have a team of five going to this conference. I'm just making that up. We have a team of five people going to this conference, and we really wanna get some intelligence on this, on this question about a recent competitor's product launch or this question on what people are. Thinking of in terms of the AI update that just went out. are they fearful of it? Are they excited about it? What's their use case? How are they thinking about it? We really wanna get some conversations around, around this topic, so it could be, you know, by the end of this meeting prep, I want to identify those things. Might be one. It could be like we have those topics and here are some ways that you can prompt those conversations with other conference attendees. So that's framing the conversation and then have the group discuss that and you might very well have to facilitate that and kind of make sure people are staying on track or focusing the conversation or making sure different people are having a chance to talk. All of those good things, but it's not. I've done everything for you. Here's the answer. It's teeing it up. It's framing it up for a group discussion. All right, so I hope this helps. And the biggest thing I would say is move from that. I must do everything myself to, I need to tee up the conversation for my team, and I think that will help relieve some of the burden and some of the overwhelm. And I would also use that approach for other things that you might be involved in. So if you have a habit of taking on things yourself, like I'll just do all of that, or I have to do all of that myself. Just, just, just let go of some of it and say, actually I don't. What I really need to be good at and make sure I'm effective at is teeing up that conversation and framing that conversation in an effective way. And by the way, that's not a small thing. it might be small time-wise, as in it takes less time, which is good, but it's not a small thing. It's a leverage point, right? If someone doesn't tee up that conversation well. Well, that whole series of prep meetings could be a huge waste. It could be a waste of people's time. They don't get anything out of it. It's super disorganized. We're talking about the wrong stuff. We have like the wrong questions being prepped for Having that. Conversation framed up in an effective way is really big. It's really important, and I think that's even more valuable than having quote unquote, all the answers ready to go for your team. So I would leave you with that. Hopefully that helps. I hope you have a great series of prep meetings and I hope you have a great conference and I'll catch you next week on leveraging leadership.