Case Study: Turning 14 Overlapping Meetings Into a Governance System Leadership Actually Uses

The Situation A global travel & hospitality membership business brought its executive leadership team together for a 3-day strategic alignment offsite. The starting diagnostic was blunt: communication effectiveness dropped sharply by level, 68% of senior executives felt informed and aligned, versus just 34% of frontline employees (Towers Watson benchmark cited in-session). Internally, teams described working in silos as one of the top blockers to execution, alongside short-term focus and unclear empowerment.

My Role I facilitated the full offsite — from the leadership-behavior framing ("the strongest message about your culture is how you run your meetings") through to a working governance model the team left with.

What We Built

Meeting governance framework — catalogued all 14 recurring leadership meetings (staff meetings, monthly business reviews, quarterly business reviews, forecast reviews, CX reviews, town halls, and more), each with a defined owner, objective, required attendees, and cadence, replacing an ad hoc meeting culture with a designed one.

Meeting operating standards, a shared rulebook: 45–50 minute time-boxing, defined roles, a decision-making method, a "parking lot" for off-topic items, and mandatory pre-reads.

Project governance model , a 5-stage lifecycle (formulation → approval → implementation → tracking → closure) with a standardized intake form, feasibility criteria, and resource-approval gate, so projects stop competing informally for budget and headcount.

Strategic focus areas, leadership aligned on 4 pillars for the year (Strategy & Execution, Sales & Growth, Customer Experience, Talent & Leadership), each with named owners and success metrics.

Keep/Stop/Start action plan — diagnostic findings converted into committed actions: stop working in silos, start structured cross-functional task forces and technology/automation initiatives, keep the CX momentum already in motion.

Communication plan framework, mapped every audience, message, channel, and cadence needed to cascade decisions from the leadership team down to frontline colleagues.

Preliminary Outcome The leadership team left the offsite with a governance system, not just intentions: a defined meeting cadence, a shared project intake standard, named owners for every strategic focus area, and a communication plan ready to execute in the following quarter.