You want to run an offsite for you team. You're craving the connection, the alignment, the levity and the action plan. You just don't know where to begin. Well, it's here. You begin here.
You want to run an offsite for you team. You're craving the connection, the alignment, the levity and the action plan. You just don't know where to begin. Well, it's here. You begin here.
Modern Mentor is hosted by Rachel Cooke. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a question for Modern Mentor? Email us at modernmentor@quickanddirtytips.com.
Find Modern Mentor on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or subscribe to the newsletter to get more tips to fuel your professional success.
Modern Mentor is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/modern-mentor-newsletter
https://www.facebook.com/QDTModernMentor
https://twitter.com/QDTModernMentor
https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-mentor-podcast/
Hey, it’s Rachel Cooke, your Modern Mentor. I’m the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders activate performance and engagement without burning out. I’ve been speaking to leadership teams across industries about this and I would love to spend time with yours. Reach out any time at Rachel@leadabovenoise.com.
Hey before we jump into today's episode, can I ask a quick favor? If you're a regular listener - or even an occasional one - and you have something to say about the show I'd love it if you'd leave a quick rating or review in your podcast app. Kind of the best way to help the show find new listeners. And couldn't we all use a boost at work?
So hey. How’s your team doing? I mean, really. I can’t see you. I don’t know your team. But if I were placing bets, I’d say your team may be a little overwhelmed. A little disconnected. A little bit…”why are we all so busy every minute of the day when I’m not even sure what we’re accomplishing?” This ring true for you?
If not, you’re in a minority.. I’m talking to so many teams riding the struggle bus these days. They are really needing - really craving - some space to hit pause, just for a day, on the work. And to come together and do some work on them.
This is the magic of an offsite. I plan and run many dozens of these each year. And I’m a huge believer in the power of an outside facilitator. But if that’s just not an option right now? Then I’d love to share with you some of my favorite elements that you’re super welcome to stitch together and create your own amazing team offsite.
Now offsites can come in many forms - to serve many purposes. But today, let’s focus on the kind designed to drive connection, alignment, priorities and agreements.
Before we get into some of my favorite exercises, let’s quickly touch on creating a meaningful space for the day. Because an offsite is at its best when all participants feel OK to speak up, to participate. I always like to set Vegas rules. You know - what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Because we want to tap into people’s vulnerability.
OK. Now let’s talk about your run-of-show.
This can be quick and simple - but I always like to make it purposeful. To get people speaking, connecting, and feeling a bit of lightness without necessarily feeling silly.
There are infinite exercises you could do here - just ask Google or ChatGPT. But I often start with something super simple like a partnered Q+A. I use a deck of cards, but you can certainly roll without one.
I ask people to pair up. Partner A asks Partner B a personal (but not invasive!) question - maybe something about their favorite childhood movie or the best thing about their hometown. Partner B answers and then we swap.
I then pull everyone back to the circle and ask each person, one at a time, to share one thing they learned about their partner.
I like this because it’s super quick and simple, and it activates not only our talking but our listening muscles. Because asking and listening is an essential element of any great offsite.
Next, I might move people into small groups of 3-4 people and invite each group to create a cover story mockup.
One thing I find is that everyone is so busy these days. But when we pause to check in - it’s not clear we’re all chasing the same endgame. Plus, we all know that feeling a shared sense of purpose can enhance both our employee engagement as well as our capacity for driving results.
This exercise is a fun and creative way for a team to imagine what the future might be like a year from now if their current efforts were to be successful.
A cover story mock-up serves as a visual representation or prototype of the cover story that a magazine would publish a year from now if they were profiling your success. It generally includes the title, featured images, headlines, and a summary of the story.
Additional elements - to help spark creativity - might include an anecdote about or some quotes from top customers, clients, or patients - that focus on the value your product or service is offering them.
It might also highlight which team members delivered which bits of value, which can help with roles and responsibilities down the road and can also build empathy across your team through understanding how each role affects overall team success.
Run it how you like it. But it’s just a fun and creative way to push everyone, just for the day, outside the boundaries of timelines and pressure - and into a space of imagining what we could all be working together to make happen.
So, with a shared vision in place, we’ve now gotta make sure we’re all collectively prioritizing (and - ahem - DE-prioritizing) the right stuff. And here’s where some Bullseye Diagramming comes into play.
The Bullseye is just 3 concentric circles. The innermost one is your top, most critical priorities. The second one is more nice-to-have, and the 3rd is not now and maybe never. And the power of this exercise is that it forces us to look at projects and initiatives all together on a single page. And to prioritize them relative to each other. And as we prioritize we’re constantly looking back to our magazine mockups to ensure we’re choosing the things to get us to that ending the fastest.
The Bullseye limits how much you can identify as critical, forcing your team to really talk about what’s most essential before producing anything. Since each successive circle is larger than the bull’s-eye, you must carefully consider what is critical, what is important, and what is merely peripheral. Often this means having to make trade-off decisions. The result, however, is a clear delineation of your team’s consensus about each item’s relative importance. It is a comparatively simple method of making difficult decisions.
OK, so priorities are a focus on products, programs, and initiatives. The things we want to build or deliver.
Once we’ve aligned on those, I then like to move into what I call enabling mechanisms. These, for me, are the ways we’re spending our time in service of building those outcomes. This is where we take a hard look at things like meetings, dashboards, 1-1 conversations, processes, presentations.
Here I love to use a 2x2 grid. You know - draw a big plus sign to create 4 quadrants. The upper left says Stop. Upper right is Start. Bottom left is More, and bottom right is less.
And here’s where we start looking at how we spend our days. And we question how much of what we’re currently doing actually supports our current priorities. What meetings are we having that we need to continue? To shorten or make less frequent? To shut down completely? And what meetings aren’t we having that we should be?
All in service of achieving our vision and supporting our priorities.
Here we’ve gotta be ruthless. Nothing can be sacred. Every standing meeting, presentation, dashboard is on the block. Just because we’ve made a habit of it, doesn’t mean it holds more weight than the meeting we’re not having because we have no time.
So now, we’ve created some connection. We’ve crafted a vision we’re excited about, we’ve identified what to focus on, and how to spend (and not spend) our time.
Have we, at this point, changed the world? Likely we have not. But if we’ve done this well, we’ve reconnected, we’ve realigned, we’ve shut down some time-wasters and added some fresh new value.
In my book? A pretty great way to spend a day.
If you’re looking for someone to run your next offsite - or really if you just want to bounce some ideas off someone? Reach out anytime at rachel@leadabovenoise.com
And if your team or organization needs a boost—whether it’s through a workshop, keynote, or Pulse Check—let’s talk. You can find me at LeadAboveNoise.com. And if you’re loving the show, don’t forget to follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week.
Modern Mentor is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It’s audio-engineered by Dan Feirabend. Our Director of Podcasts is Brannan Goetschius. Our Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist is Morgan Christianson. Our Digital Operations Specialist is Holly Hutchings. Our Marketing and Publicity Associate is Davina Tomlin. Our Marketing Contractor is Nathaniel Hoopes.