Retreats that Work, Expanded Edition: Everything You Need to Know about Planning and Leading Great Offsites

Citation

Liteman, M. (2007), "Retreats that Work, Expanded Edition: Everything You Need to Know about Planning and Leading Great Offsites", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 15 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2007.04415gae.001

Retreats that Work, Expanded Edition: Everything You Need to Know about Planning and Leading Great Offsites

Retreats that Work, Expanded Edition: Everything You Need to Know about Planning and Leading Great Offsites

Merianne Liteman, Sheila Campbell, Jeff LitemanPfeiffer2006

Most change-management efforts involve a retreat, even when the change agents or consultants have not thought about it initially. Retreats, whether conducted in a fancy hotel or a remote wilderness lodge, entail reflection or some form of thinking about thinking. Leaders may raise questions about strategy for the organization or the direction or pace of the change effort under way.

Irrespective of the goals or the level of intervention, facilitating retreats is a special form of facilitation because of the high stakes involved with the client resource investment and the high expectations for results. It is further complicated by client and participant hopes sometimes differing widely.

Retreats that Work focuses on results and on methods of orchestrating the many elements of retreats, offering discussion and advice that are as purposeful as we are told a facilitator must be throughout the process of contracting, planning and leading the retreat, to the final report. When well orchestrated, all pieces build to a great offsite and great client results. Participants will have experienced the joy of generating ideas, will have faced tough decisions and created a plan for action that should yield results in the workplace.

Liteman, Campbell and Liteman bring us many illustrative stories of what can go well and what can go wrong in leading retreats. They offer advice and provide the guidelines.

The planning stage is essential: secure commitments from the client about openness and intentions, ask for desired outcomes and align yourself with those, negotiate for the flexibility to custom design the retreat and for the flexibility to make mid-course corrections as issues arise. The authors summarize their acquired wisdom in a checklist for partnering the client. They discuss the other stages of retreats just as skillfully and in order, concluding the first section with closing the retreat and working on implementation.

In the second section, the authors provide materials for the client, including how to work with the facilitator. A third element is a compact disc, containing a small handbook of advice for the client and a number of handouts and templates that are part of the participant activities described in the book.

Participants come together in a retreat because it is more conducive than the workplace to the awareness and conversations that are the beginning of group creation. The facilitator sets the conditions for these experiences and makes them richer with activities that open individuals to levels in themselves that are not tapped day to day at work, allowing them to contribute depth to the effort.

Retreats that Work is a fine resource of activities presented as a richly varied smorgasbord for facilitators. When it would be useful, templates and handouts for them are included on the CD. Taken together, the activities address many components of building toward results as well as addressing a broad range of personal characteristics and group dynamics.

All activities are written clearly, and usually come with a special section of “facilitator notes”. They often come with call-out boxes for “experiential elements” and “set-up”. One sample activity that I have used with much success asks small groups to make collages that represent a particular idea or goal. Another sample, and one of the many delightful activities that are new to me, is an “obstacle buster” (one of three) that involves balloons representing identified obstacles, batted about then burst, and subgroups discussing the resources available to them to overcome the obstacles. The authors also offer models that help participants to analyze components or opportunities of the particular discussion point.

The idea of retreating, of pulling back from hectic daily work in order to regroup, has enormous appeal in a world that is moving fast. In retreating with the very people who share your hamster wheel, however, there may be suppressed thoughts and feelings in the group that now have the space to surface.

The skilled facilitator will have planned activities to appeal to the several strengths, personality types and motivational states that he or she expects to show up, at the same time building to the desired results. And then, as anticipated and unanticipated behaviors occur, the facilitator will judge when to let the group handle things and when to step in and manage the situation, preserving everyone’s dignity.

When to intervene is a section of the book, as well as how to handle ways in which things can go wrong. The authors provide many notes to facilitators on the potential for difficulties and alerts for special care in some situations. The facilitator’s skills come into the spotlight when there are clashes or hostility in the group, when someone really disrupts the discussion, when a few members dominate the discussion, and when the offender of the norms established for the retreat is a senior manager. The advice here is brief and to the point.

As well as specialized retreat skills, the book covers facilitator skills that are common to most group-learning situations: knowing what interactions and outcomes can be gained from specific activities, allowing for a variety of personal styles, and maintaining the energy and interest of the group.

The authors acknowledge throughout their sources of inspiration and learning in the literature. There are occasional call-out boxes suggesting a particular book as valuable to the discussion at hand. There is an extensive list of recommended resources at the end, categorized by appreciative inquiry, assessments, case studies, contracting with your client, creative thinking, diversity, dividing people into groups, facilitation, flip-chart preparation, specialized-retreat formats, strategy, teamwork and team building, and varying methodologies.

Retreats that Work is a fundamental reference for facilitators. Its value begins with the first chapter’s cautionary advice that retreats are not always appropriate in which the authors point out specific limitations of the approach. Its value continues with positive guidance. Once an informed decision is made to hold a retreat, the authors want us to know how to design and deliver one most effectively. I believe the book easily accomplishes that goal.

Reviewed by Kate Trygstad, Creative Facilitating, Arlington, Virginia, USA.

A longer version of this review was originally published in Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, 2007.