How To Plan a Team Retreat – Part 2: Retreats for Senior Leadership and Executives
A well-designed, professionally-facilitated leadership retreat can provide a wealth of benefits to your company. If you read the first part of this blog series, you learned the importance of designing your retreat to fit your organization and its goals. In this installment, you’ll learn how to build a retreat for senior leaders and executives, from strategic planning opportunities to ensuring that trust and team building start at the very top of your organization.
Retreats with Senior Leadership
The executives at the top of your company likely put in extensive hours. A senior leadership retreat can serve as a rare chance for them to set aside the demands of running an organization in order to take a fresh look at company goals and operational practices.
Often times, these individuals’ schedules are packed so tight that a retreat can be a unique opportunity to address specific needs – like yearly goal or budget setting – or larger picture items – like diversity, equity, and inclusion, organizational structure, and planning for multi-year growth.
Strategic Planning
In many companies, executive teams might only meet once each quarter. While these regular meetings are important to maintain the direction of the company and adjust plans and tactics as needed to keep goals in sight, they rarely give your C-Suite team the opportunity to truly work on a thorough, strategic plan. An executive retreat is a chance to get outside the traditional board room setting and foster meaningful conversations that your company can build upon as it moves forward.
A successful strategic planning retreat starts with deciding on a set of desired objectives and outcomes. Are you setting business goals for the coming year, a five- or ten-year growth plan, or reimagining your corporate structure? It’s important to identify and establish these objectives early, communicate them clearly to the participants ahead of time, and build your retreat around them.
Some other strategic planning options include:
Adding to or building a new leadership team
Succession planning for key leadership roles
Developing new or modified mission statements or company values
Reorganizing or reimagining your organizational chart
Implementing new technologies or systems
Budgeting and financial planning
Many more…
Team Building Starts at the Top
Executive teams might function differently than other work teams, but it’s still critical that they work together. Even with key objectives like those above, it’s important to also work in time to build on the existing relationships within your leadership team.
Whether your executive team has been together for years or is bringing on new members, a retreat is the perfect opportunity to get to know the individuals behind the titles. Giving corporate leaders the opportunity to share about themselves and their experiences allows the rest of the team to understand their leadership style while encouraging empathy at the highest level of your organization.
Where to Begin with Your Executive Retreat
Are you interested in hosting an executive retreat, but unsure where you want to start? Here are some recommended retreat topics and engagement prompts or techniques for senior leadership:
Goal Planning – Every business knows that well-established goals, and a roadmap to reach them, is key. Use part of your retreat to allow each executive the opportunity to share their key priorities for the next year. Then consider what key changes need to be implemented in order to achieve these priorities. Will these changes have an effect on staff operations or morale? Use this time to identify the path you want to pursue, any potential hazards along that path and how you’ll overcome them, and an implementation plan for the journey itself.
Company Culture and Values – Is your existing company culture where you want it to be? What role has the executive level played in establishing and shaping culture? Are you showcasing, from the C-Suite level down, how you would like work to be done, how to create spaces that foster equity and inclusion, and how to help your entire organization thrive?
Leadership Style – Dive into an exploration of the leadership style of your executive team. How is this being best aligned to motivate and engage the rest of the levels of your organization? Are you always leading with care and empathy? How is feedback both solicited and shared? Are future leaders being identified and developed to help the company grow?
Scheduling Your Executive Retreat
If you feel your organization could benefit from an executive retreat, Loeb Leadership is here to help. We’ve designed and facilitated many retreats for senior leaders and would be happy to help you create a successful retreat for your team. Contact us today to learn more.