Planned, designed, and facilitated well, an offsite executive retreat can be a powerful vehicle for addressing the challenges of change and transition within your organization. For more than a decade Moore & Associates has delivered customized retreats, offsites, and intensives for senior management teams that enhance team member awareness regarding its effectiveness (past and present), revealing the gap between current performance and where the team needs or wants to be, and preparing the team to lead change in their organization.
Within the retreat, this new collective understanding becomes the catalyst among team members to take the steps to make the changes necessary to develop the level of effectiveness needed to meet future demands of the organization.
We're often retained by clients who have had a few offsites to work on strategy, mission, vision, major goals, etc., and are frustrated that those important initiatives lose steam or never gain traction when the leaders get back to the office. To address this dilemma and help our clients achieve change that sticks, we partner closely with them to deliver retreats whose objectives explicitly include:
- Enhance better communication, trust, and understanding among team members, and
- Proactive surfacing and facilitation of conflict, clearing the air so focus on the "business of the business" of the organization is constructive, creative, and productive.
Clients tell us our coaching and facilitation skills that make the greatest contribution to their post-retreat success in implementing positive change include:
- Help our clients significantly increase awareness about their team's dynamics
- Create an environment in which to talk about difficult issues that need addressing that the team until now has not been able to deal with in a constructive way
- Provide a framework for the team to assess its working relationship, functionality, and effectiveness past, present, and future
- Teach what it really takes to make positive and sustainable change personally, as a team, and organizationally
- Coach the team on why role, communication, and style differences are usually tremendous challenges but understandable, and can be turned into the team's greatest assets by taking advantage of diversity and differences
- Make value judgments that focus discussion of the business agenda items, work plans, and priorities that result in commitment, decisions, and next step action items
- The use of allegories, symbols, humor, and storytelling to teach organization development, change management, group psychodynamics, conflict management, and leadership performance
- Encourage active participation by all team members.
When done right, your next executive retreat can strengthen your leadership team in numerous ways - and just possibly make the team itself a powerful vehicle for change!
2010 Copyright © Moore & Associates
Comments