Planning a team retreat or strategy session? Apply these principles to leverage the group’s time together, provide a high integrity process and achieve outcomes with lasting impact.

1.      Invest in pre-session planning – Crystallize objectives, focusing on outcomes that will make a discernible difference. Communicate goals in advance and prepare people with relevant pre-work. Design a process to meet goals and match participant dynamice. Attend to room set-up, resource materials, hospitality and any other support for you and the meeting.

2.      Fully engage all participants - Ensure that all voices are heard and that each participant feels ownership for helping the group achieve successful outcomes. Work to gain active participation from everyone present. Begin the engagement process prior to the meeting. Minimize or eliminate one-way presentations on the agenda.

3.      Introduce key stakeholder perspectives - Incorporate diverse stakeholder views to help shape thinking and bring real-world context into the process. Explore the “what’s in it for me” tensions and common ground among constituencies. Provide perspectives related to individual, team, and organizational contexts.

4.      Allow for a fluid process - Have a plan… but respond to the group as the session unfolds. Vary work group sizes, techniques and tasks to maintain individual and collective productivity and to keep the process fresh. Balance the need to stick to the pre-planned agenda with the need for authentic, relevant and important conversation.

5.      Don’t retreat from “groan time”. Avoid gravitating towards closure too quickly when dealing with complex, “messy” issues. Give time and effort to divergent thinking before converging into shared decisions. Dig to uncover root causes and systemic patterns that are below the surface of organizational challenges. Strive for inclusive solutions that integrate diverse views.

6.      Support group learning - Provide new ideas and tools for the group to incorporate in the session…and its ongoing practices after the session. Integrate team building with ongoing work. Provide group feedback and reflection time to help the group harvest learning. Generate individual and group commitments to apply learning back “on the job”. Inject fun into rigorous agendas.

7.      Carry forward meeting outcomes.  Deliver actionable follow-up communication that informs and engages meeting participants and other stakeholders. Build decisions and new directions into your regular process and measurements. Continue a strategic check-in on a regular basis. Track progress. Celebrate and amplify successes.