The 3 R’s of Conducting an Executive Retreat – Behind the Scene

Taking time away from the office with your executive team is an essential part of team alignment. When you are conducting an executive retreat, you want to make the most of it by remembering to include the three details plus all the strategic initiatives. One big mistake I see with conducting an executive retreat is the total focus on the organization’s work, projects, and goals. It is common to ignore the things discussed in the video. When conducting an executive retreat, you want to cover more than just the “work.”

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Conducting an Executive Retreat: The Transcript

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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

[0:03]
Well, this is a boardroom that I used last week to work with some clients. And this boardroom represents some really powerful work and thinking that was done inside that two-day experience.

[0:17]
So I want to ask you a question, how often do you and your team, your executive team, get out of the office and go on a retreat, or go on a work session? It really is something I think is really important. Because we’re so much going on with our work, there’s so much going on with the day to day that sometimes we just need to get away, we need to get away as a team, I want to go over three things that you’d want to cover inside of these experiences. This boardroom was exact boardroom, I was in with this team. And we had a fantastic experience talking about these three things.

[0:56]
The first one is the results, right? We are here to create results for our clients, we are here to create results for our shareholders, maybe, maybe we’re here to create results for our team as well. So you want to look at the results that you’re created in the past, you want to review some of the things that are done those key metrics, and really look at what’s happened and be honest with each other. This is the hard part, you can’t just all be doing great. You can’t every department is not doing great. You want to look at each department within the business, you know marketing, sales, operations, customer service, data, finances, sales, marketing if I repeated myself there, but you kind of get the idea, really break them down, put a microscope on each one of those things to look at where you’re performing well, and where you’re not performing well. And that’s the results portion of this conversation. And you do this as a team so that everyone is on the same page.

[1:56]
The second part of this, is really looking at relationships that you have relationships you have with individual players on the team, how, how are they working? Are you guys truly trusting each other? Are you empowering each other? Are you lifting each other up? Is there anything that’s getting into it fracturing that relationship, you can have those conversations, and this is the part that’s really never had inside of our normal, you know, Monday meetings or team meetings, we were so focused on the work. And that’s important, but you want to so want to make sure that those relationships are nurtured, and that they’re taken care of, and if any of distrust is rebuilt. And you can do that inside these retreats by having some focused sessions on that I facilitated that with this team. And I think what came out of it was some real realizations of the way things really are and what they could be like, and what we need to do to move toward that. So relationships are a big part of it.

[2:53]
The third part behind this is having these retreats will allow you to refocus on what’s most important, because many times we lose sight of it, we lose sight of exactly what is most important inside of what we’re doing. This is the whiteboard that we filled up to refocus the business, it spans the entire room. We use every part of this room to create an experience that this team will not forget. And so my question for you is when you look at the results when you work on the relationships, and you refocus everyone to the one strategy, and the one thing that’s most important, that allows you to align together at a different level. And having these every quarter, or at most every six months, will help you become a stronger team, which is what you really want. You want to make sure that you as the CEO and his executive team are working together, removing those boundaries and playing live at the highest level.

[3:56]
So having these off-sites, we can get away, I will tell you one little added benefit behind this, the CEO kept saying to me, I need to get out of my office because I don’t want to lose sight of a lot of the things that happen inside of our office that keep us from really having the deep doing the deep work. I live in Atlanta, but they came to Atlanta to do that.

[4:17]
So make sure that you’re getting away from the office to have these retreats and work on the results, work on the relationships, and refocusing on all of the things that are necessary for the company to hit the next milestone, and your revenue growth.

[4:31]
My name is Gene Hammett. I work with CEOs and their teams to help them continue growing. I help them create leadership and culture structures that allow for fast growth. And this all comes from my fascination with working with Inc 5000. If you want to be on the Inc 500 day or you want to continue your growth, then make sure you reach out stay in touch with this content. And if there’s anything I can do for you, make sure you go check out the website genehammett.com we have a lot of free resources there that you can take in and grow your business. As always leave with courage. I’ll see you next time.

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

Conducting an Executive Retreat

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