Using a facilitator from a different department may also be an option. "In a strategic planning session, it will be very tough to have someone more junior in the organization telling the CEO and the VPs when to talk, when not to talk, and pushing back on them," Withrow says. "But a retreat for another reason, say it's a customer support area or they want to talk about new CMS system or something like that, a peer facilitator from somewhere else in the organization could handle it."
Dig Deeper: Offsite Bloopers
How to Plan a Retreat: Using Your Time Effectively
Planning is your friend when it comes to retreats. By the time you arrive at the retreat location, you and every attendee should already have a good idea of how you are going to accomplish your goals. Will you make decisions by consensus or majority? Does the person whose organizational responsibility the decision is get the final say? Will you debate, branch out into smaller discussion groups, or brainstorm? These are questions that you should work out before you get to the retreat.
"Participants should know from the beginning whether they are being asked to make decisions that the organization's senior leadership will support or recommendations that senior leadership will take into consideration," Liteman says. "Either is okay. What's not okay is for participants to be led to believe they're making decisions only to find out that the boss is cherry-picking: 'Let's implement this suggestion, but not that one. And by the way, here's something the participants didn't even think of that I'm going to ask them to implement.'"
There are innumerable ways to format your meeting time. Honig likes to start out strategic planning sessions by examining the history and milestones of the company. Withrow sometimes asks people to defend assigned positions during a debate. Cigale devotes much of his time to presentations by different departments of his company. And Liteman uses tools including improvising, role plays, storytelling, music, metaphor, silence, and art to facilitate retreats.
Some key principles to follow no matter what approach you choose are:
- Collaborate. "Even if there are fifty people, everyone should have the means and the opportunity to contribute to everything," Honig says.
- Make discussion introvert-friendly. Ask people to write down answers to questions instead of blurting them out, and ask every person in the room to give his or her opinion in an organized manner.
- Encourage people to express themselves. Have people use the same marker and type of paper to submit their opinions so they won't be afraid of judgment. Make sure minority opinions have a way to be heard.
- Combine team building with work. Obstacle courses might be a good way to diagnose team problems or have fun, but the real team development happens around the work. "What you do in team development is look toward the future and think about how the team is going to be different," Honig says. "Specifically, the team should decide their next steps in the future, versus just experiencing a task together and saying, 'look, we can work well together.'"
- Stay on topic. Withrow uses a "parking lot" to accomplish this. When someone brings up an issue that isn't on the agenda at that time, he'll write it down on a whiteboard or flip chart and come back to it at the end of the meeting.
- Diverge, converge. It can be effective to break up the team and assign them different aspects of the project that they can bring back to the larger group for discussion.
- Document your next steps. Assign a champion for each step that the team has agreed on. Make these steps as specific as possible. "Document who does what, by when, as measured by how at the end of it," Withrow says.
Dig Deeper: Escape From Meeting Hell
Resources
Fast Company's seven tips for rescuing an off-site retreat.
Looking for ice-breakers or team-building activities? Check out Teampedia.
The Free Management Library's guide for developing a strategic plan.
A timeline for retreat planning.
Nine reasons to hold a retreat.
