We highly recommend that you hire a professional Executive Coach to facilitate your leadership or team-building offsite. When you’ve gone through all the work and expense to organize the retreat, it is worth it to have an expert facilitate, otherwise what has all that expense been for?
If you chose to disregard that advice, at least take these tips with you so that you can get the most out of your offsite:
- Do your homework. Know all you can prior to the offsite about the mission of the company, the team and the specific players on the team.
- Know the context. Have diverse experience throughout the corporate sector. Be on the forefront of thought leadership, especially regarding the topics of the upcoming offsite. Get specific information about where this company and team have been and where they intend to head.
- Establish an objective. All good coaching and facilitation supports the client in getting to their objective. You must know where you are headed.
- Keep the group on their agenda and moving along, and know when a conversation is important enough to veer from the timeline.
- Say the bold thing. A facilitator can ask the question of the CEO no one else is willing to ask. In order to lead an offsite, you must be willing to step into that role.
- Identify the team’s patterns of behavior and thinking. The team can’t see itself from the inside: you must provide the outside perspective.
- Challenge the team in new ways. Bring thoughtful tools and paradigms.
- Be adaptable. Going with the flow of conversation and still honing the offsite to meet the objectives can be challenging. Sometimes the route is not as direct as you’d planned.
- Manage the tone in the room. Keeping the tone appropriately light or serious at the right times can make all the difference in what gets accomplished.
- Get the team to create concrete actions and takeaways that they will commit to. Putting the conversation from the offsite into action is where the rubber meets the road.
For more on how we as Executive Coaches manage off-sites, see also these blog posts: Top Five Mistakes When Planning Leadership Retreats, How do I Plan a Leadership Retreat?
Contact us for a consultation regarding your retreat.
How to Facilitate a Corporate Retreat like an Executive Coach
