How to Retreat
3 tips for planning our next all-staff retreat. Plus, new facilitation workshop date announced!
🎉 New: Facilitation Training Workshop on January 10 🎉
After taking a brief election-related hiatus, I’m thrilled to bring back Facilitation Training Workshops in 2025, with the first scheduled for early January. If your 2025 goals include developing your skills as a meeting leader, this workshop is for you.
The training focuses on how to get to the heart of your meeting’s purpose, craft an effective agenda, and coax your team to generate creative ideas. Plus, we’ll tackle how to manage tricky meeting participants.
This is a great way to spend leftover professional development budget from this year, or get a jump start on your 2025 professional development goals.
The details:
Date: Friday, January 10
Time: 10am-2pm ET
Where: Virtually, on Zoom(!)
Price: $400 early-bird discount if you register by December 15, $500 after
How To Retreat Responsibly
As we enter into what I lovingly call “retreat season,” you might be grappling with how to bring your team together. Whether your goal is prioritizing work for 2025, evaluating work from the past year, or just have some time for team bonding, I know planning a retreat can feel daunting.
Here’s the bad news: there are no short cuts. Planning an effective retreat is time and labor intensive to get right.
The good news: I do have some tips to help. These lessons are gathered from my experience working with organizations to plan and facilitate all-staff retreats and strategic planning sessions. And perhaps even better news: If you’re planning an upcoming retreat and need support, I can help. Whether that’s providing an outside perspective to refine retreat goals, craft an agenda, or have someone on-hand to facilitate the tricky conversations — let’s chat about how I can help.
Now, on to the tips…
Tip 1: Refine Your Goals
This requires killing some of your darlings. Sorry.
One organization I worked with to plan and facilitate their two-day staff retreat came to our first meeting with a list of 10 goals. That’s too many goals. Together, we worked to prioritize the list, cutting it down to three core goals.
To refine your goals, think about:
Work you’ve already done as an organization and want to build on
Existing challenges that needed an immediate solution
How you want to reconnect as a team, especially for remote organization
Clarifying organizational purpose in light of a shifting landscape
Assessing your organization’s strengths and challenges
A quick rule of thumb: Three main goals is a realistic aim for a two-day retreat.
Tip 2: Don’t Overstuff The Schedule
Once you have clarity on your goals, the next task is to plan your agenda. Just as it’s important to narrow the focus of your goals, it’s critical not to overstuff your agenda.
I’ve seen retreats packed to the gills with back-to-back sessions, only for a team to leave feeling exhausted. A retreat shouldn’t drain your team of energy — it should restore it. You want people to leave feeling connected and motivated. That’s not possible if you’ve run the team ragged.
Give your team time to breathe and to build connections organically with their colleagues. It may feel counterintuitive to the goal of productivity, but I promise it’s productive in its own right. Consider mixing in some non-work related activities. Last September, I facilitated a team retreat where one of the activities I created was a scavenger hunt in the National Portrait Gallery. It was an opportunity for inspiration and to connect to with one another in a completely different way.
As you build your agenda, budget time for:
Comfort breaks: going to the bathroom, breathing fresh air, refilling coffee (very critical)
Solo reflection or writing time: not everyone thrives in group work, so it’s important to make time and space for people who need different types of ways to engage
Travel and transition time so you’re not rushing from place to place or session to session
A balance of full team and small group activities
Tip 3: Don’t Expect a Cure-All
A retreat is not going to fix all of your organizational problems. Sorry!! But you can leave with a lot of progress.
One org I worked with spent most of their retreat addressing a big shift in organizational priorities. That’s not an easy conversation — or the last they’ll have about it. But it was an important starting point for an organization in transition.
Going in with the expectation you can solve every challenge is a recipe for disappointment. Instead, think about the strengths you want to build for the long haul. This could include:
Building up better communication skills
Developing tools for assessing project opportunities
Creating cohesion among a specific team or department
Whatever it is you’re trying to solve for, think about your retreat as a step along the path, not the whole marathon.
Bonus Tip: Have some fun.
We’re all craving community more than ever right now. We need community to make it through these next few years. Yes, it’s a work retreat, but make sure you inject some fun into your time together. More than anything, people will walk away remembering how they felt more so than any one activity. Being intentional in creating that feeling is critical to your organization’s culture and health.
Ready to start planning and looking for some expert help. Get in touch with me here or just reply directly to this email!