Not a retreat! Stop
groaning. We all go on retreats as part
of jobs and extracurricular activities and have since youth. (High-school Orchestra and Band retreats,
anyone?) There are many reasons for this: team-bonding leads to stronger ties
within a group, helping people to work together. Although I had attended a
number of strategic planning retreats through various jobs prior to my work in
India, I had never organized and led one myself. Putting one together and seeing what an
impact it had on my co-workers was one of the most fulfilling memories of my
Sandbox Fellowship.
I had assessed that my NGO needed a retreat for a number of
reasons and started planning. Getting the staff together to think about our
organization’s future and plan goals and milestones for the upcoming three
years enabled everyone on the staff to not only understand exactly what the
organization was doing, but also to feel as though they were part of a real
team. Finally, dividing specific
milestones for the year amongst the staff made each person accountable to
everyone else.
I tried to recruit an appropriate retreat facilitator since
as a member of my office I did not want to be vulnerable to accusations of
bias. However, since the actual dates of the retreat were not confirmed until
shortly beforehand, I was unsuccessful and had to lead the retreat myself.
On both days I started off with Ice-Breaker activities that
I had either done myself at retreats in the past or had found on the Internet –
I wanted people to feel loose enough to contribute to the dialogue. Traditional hierarchies in India often
prevent people in lower positions from expressing their ideas and opinions to
people in superior positions. Two good
Ice-Breaker activities:
1) Show-and-Tell,
Retreat-style. Call upon each person to select something from their purse or
pocket that is important to them, and tell the group. This is fun because people will choose all
sorts of random things, but they do so for a reason. You learn a lot about your colleagues, and
this isn’t an activity that requires anyone to be clever or say something that
may get them in trouble.
2) Top Three.
Write the following on a big sheet of paper or board: “In Order for (insert org
name here) to be truly successful, we must be especially good at a)____, b)____
and c)_____. Give the group about 5
minutes and let everyone compose their Top 3 items. After the time is up, call on everyone to
give their Top 3 and write them on the board/paper. (If your group is big, have each person
select one or two of their three.) Then,
as a group, pick the Organization’s Top Three and keep it posted throughout the
duration of the Retreat.
As facilitator, I made sure that everyone present voiced
their opinion by calling on the people who were shy to volunteer their ideas,
and otherwise preventing one person from dominating the conversations too
much. Given that my organization’s staff
was extremely small – only three people plus I – anonymity was impossible, and
even the newest addition to the team soon felt comfortable expressing her
opinion. To bring a topic to a close, I would try to adequately summarize the
conservation. We would establish consensus on the summary, and then make any
decisions that were required through a majority vote.
The difficult moments were those when I would facilitate a
conversation about a topic about which I had a very strong opinion, and I had
to struggle to remain neutral. I managed
those conversations by sharing some of my past experiences relevant to the
topic at hand and inviting the others to reflect and discuss. Sometimes, being a leader is knowing when to
step back and let the others come to their own conclusion: It wasn’t my opinion
that mattered, but rather the process through which the staff came to own the
organization’s work. And that ownership
is KEY to staff motivation.
Even if your retreat isn’t about strategic planning, it
doesn’t hurt to spend some time going over the Mission and Vision of the
organization – updating them, potentially.
People at all levels of an organization NEED to have a clear
understanding of their organization’s goals and work, otherwise no one can be
invested in the office and its big picture ideas.
Another key to running a successful retreat is
organization. Assign a timekeeper and
make sure they enforce the limits. If
your retreat is about strategic planning, set goals for 3 years ahead, and then
move to the more micro-level one-year goals.
Set milestones to help keep the group motivated throughout the
year. And devise a plan for following up
on the goals set – a big issue with retreats everywhere is that they inspire
people but then depress them when all the ideas and plans that emerge from the
retreat fail to become part of office policy.
Don’t let all that hard work become empty words.
Tags: Lesley Pories, Water Literacy Foundation
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