Welcome to the last video in this series. Today I am going to speak about long-term success for your Strategic Conversations group. Specifically, I will talk about:

Ruth Stevens was a vital part of our very first peer group. Listen to here comments, what she took away from the experience in a recorded live interview six years after the group began and after we stopped meeting regularly. Click here & listen to her comments

• Polling to monitor your members experience
• What happens when somebody leaves
• The option of professional management

As I am sure you know from experience, maintaining any group of people over the long-term poses challenges - internal, external, and environmental. In the case of Strategic Conversations, we've seen that as long as people are engaged and see real benefit, they will stay involved.

One important element of the Strategic Conversations process, something I mentioned in a previous video, is the need for structure on the call, to keep it focused and on purpose.

While each meeting will have important discussions around the results of actions already taken - based on the insights offered during previous meetings, a focus on the future will help to keep the group dynamically addressing what's around the next bend.

To do that you can use the capabilities of your Yahoo! of Google group to periodically survey their members so the group as a whole can receive feedback on what's working, and what's not.

We can never really know the experience of another person until they have a safe method to tell us. Having periodic feedback on the group meetings, allows for frustrations to be aired, best practices to be followed.

We suggest a quarterly format in the beginning; this may be reduced to twice per year as time goes on. From our experience after the members of the group feel comfortable with the process they will offer ideas for future direction, future discussions, and even future subject matter experts for guest presentations.

The ability to "poll" your members is part of the simple functionality of both Yahoo and Google Groups.

Having a feedback mechanism to assess the experience for members is an important tool. It can prevent the unnecessary loss of members.

Nevertheless, the ultimate loss of members, is a reality in most groups. While we might think it won't happen to our group, we must still be ready to manage the challenge of rotating membership.

Even when a group is doing everything right, there will be occasions when members drop out. Let's face it things change, people take new jobs with new responsibilities or they pack up their fishing pole and head for the hills. Whatever can happen will happen. You want to be ready for it when it happens to your group.

When a member leaves the group, the group has two options: to find a replacement, or to continue the group as it is. This can be a topic of discussion during the group business portion of the meeting. And when the time comes to make the decision you will know instinctively what the right decision is.

There may be someone that one of the members knows who would be interested in joining. This, however, needs to be determined by the group collectively.

In the event you find yourself looking for a replacement, I strongly recommend that any potential replacement join this free video series - so when they do come on board they'll hit the ground running.

Finally, I want to speak about another option for running a group: professional management.

While this would incur a cost, it has the benefit of taking potential tension away from the members managing themselves. With a professional manager, the only responsibility the members would have, is to show up and focus on their issues and those of their fellow members.

The manager would facilitate the meetings, act as an intermediary between members, and oversee the communication technologies, for the group. This can take the effectiveness and professionalism of the group to a whole new level.

This now brings us to the conclusion of this series. It's my hope that you feel encouraged to begin this powerful process and form your own Strategic Conversations group.

We want you to have access to the videos to watch again and again - so we have created a summary page with links to each of them. Later in the week you'll receive an email with a link to that summary page.

I'll also include a brief video on additional resources to make your Strategic Conversations group a successful and rewarding experience, for years to come.

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