What are your successful management retreat topics, ideas, activities, methods, etc?

Hi M,

My company makes ingredients used in food and beverage applications. At one "retreat" the team building activity was to have each team work together to design, cook and market a hamburger to the senior leadership team. It was easier to understand the link between our company and the team building exercise because of the link to how our products are used by our customers. I do not know what your business does, but if you can find something that links in, your brainstorming may benefit later. Also, just looking for activities that would link might help your own idea generation.

That said, make sure that there is a debrief on the team building activity. Without someone to purposefully guide and moderate the discussion of what the objectives and results mean, the potential team building benefits will be minimized.

I hope your retreat is successful. Deanna

I have seen some very good Stephen Covey disciples that can assist with this type of thing.

There are many forms of team-building exercises. One I particularly like is to have all participants complete a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) (http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/) and read the book Type Talk at Work (Revised): How the 16 Personality Types Determine Your Success on the Job by Kroeger, Thuesen and Rutledge. Just presenting the distribution of MBTIs of the participants to the gathered group generates a lively discussion about how communications and decisions are made among the group. Having an organization dynamics consultant interpert their results to each participant and to the group as a whole adds a level of understanding and connectedness that will be helpful for as long as you remember each person's MBTI. Good luck with your retreat.

One retreat that I attended that proved very successful was to form multi-functional competitive teams to construct a company turnaround (We were given "facts" that showed several units tumbling). The energy was great and the opportunity to work directly with engineering, actuarial, others formed the basis for new friendships.

Good luck.

Look for a Ropes course. We have one in our community and my boss went through it with a group of peers. He said it was awesome and at the end the event coordinator actually goes through and tells you peoples strengths, successes and why they were successful and ares of opportunity for the group. I plan to have my team go through it but maybe in the fall now, because it's getting too warm here!

Low ropes courses are negotiating real and imagine obstacles with teams.

Name games, people to people and Racoon Circle are fun ice breakers to break down barriers.

Group initiative problems include: The Muese, Spider's Web, Carpet Maze, Crocodile Pit, Whale Watch, Peanut Butter River, Ragging River, T.P. Shuffle, Nitro Crossing, and Group Wall

Trust-building games such as Willows in the Wind and Trust Fall.

Low Ropes Elements: a series of cables include: Swinging Balance Beam, Triangle Traverse, Tire Swings, and Mohawk Walk.

Why not a group "therapy" session centered around Team Alignment.

You can play games, brainstorm or do any other aspect of rah-rah, but if in the end you can not achieve alignment with your teams (and alignment starts with the executive team) then all you've done is waste your time; because you'll never execute any of your plans.

As you are part of a small team tasked with planning this, if I were you I would consider getting some referrals to folk who can help plan the overall agenda and also facilitate a strategy/team building session or two. The independence, objectivity, outside viewpoint and the skills of a good facilitator will often dispel issues about bias and personality/culture issues.

Try something incredibly basic and sometimes silly- take them bowling. If they physically cannot participate, then they are the scorekeeper/cheerleader. Then give them post-its and markers and conduct a brainstorming activity right there in the bowling alley. It's worked for me every time.

HRDQ (hrdqstore.com) has a wide array of outstanding activities from scenario based to theme based. You can even build events around some of them, and they can be done on or off-site. Incredibly flexible. I've used several and they've always been very successful.

Scavenger Hunt's are a great way to build team morale. We have done it several ways - older reps vs younger reps, women vs men, a mixture of all. It really is a ton of fun and can be done in an instructional way depending on the clues.
Another great thing we have done is break into teams. Each team is given the same marketing case study to present a solution for. Everything from who your client is, their personality, their goals, what the product is etc. Each team presents to the entire group after doing their break out session. It is a great exercise showing how the same challenge can be answered in different ways. The managers then vote on the best presentation.
Shows everyone how each person thinks and shows everyone how there are many different ways to come up with solutions that will please the client.

Cooking together is another good team-builder that can be crafted to enhance team communication. I have used this as a cook off where one team competes against the other making the same meal, and as a way to get team mates to work together by having them create on part of the overall meal together. People need to eat anyway so this is much more interactive and seemed to get people to relate to one another better at the end of the session.

M.

I recently ran an 1 1/2 hour meeting on the nature of low probability / high impact events that could impact our company.

In order to generate some creative, outside the box scenarios, I used the World Economic Forum's 50 risks identified in their Global Risk Report ( http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2013.pdf ) and put each risk and its two sentence description onto an index card.

During the meeting, all 50 cards were passed out to participants. We would then call two people at a time to each state their risk, identify ways that it could impact one of the company's main value drivers, and how each of the risks could join together to create a "Black Swan" type of situation.

It stimulated a lot of discussion and time flew by during that meeting (and how often can we say that!).

Dave W.

Recently, my (now former) organization ran an all-staff retreat (called it "Advance") as in "advancing the organization" - while not specific to Finance, it was a general call to activate employees on detailed projects instrumental to ongoing success - sales increases; production improvements; message delivery/ customer experience, and similar; teams were built of inter-departmental staffers, with hope of seeing different viewpoints/ perspectives/ solutions to organizational problems.An additional outcome was empowerment of staff and identified leaders within the staff. The organization has about 40 total employees.
Success was to be measured by successful project outcome - most all projects are still being worked, so results pending.
One specific activity was each staffer's ability to answer two questions: 1) what IS working in the organization? and 2) what is NOT working in the organization?
The leadership team (I was a part) was instructed to 'stand down' and not be overly involved in the project teams, but be available for mentoring, etc.
The plan was a solid idea, just not sure the organization's culture was quite ready to take on such an involving process.
Not sure if this helps, but perhaps you can use elements in your retreat.

Good luck!

I've found that the difference between successful management retreats vs pointless junkets often hinges upon first creating an environment where employees resistance to looking foolish is diminished.

Or, put another way, risking to say something not heard in the office is rewarded. I can't tell you how many times I've sat in a meeting that had an agenda item that could be summarized as, "come up with good ideas" and most people are silent. Or, they put forth a repackaged existing idea as a way of saying, "I agree with you."

Why don't employees come up with more and better and different ideas more freely?

Because employees perceive the potential cost in stature is greater than the possible gain.

And the sad truth is, they are often right.

Many ideas are greeted with "oh, we've thought of that and decided it wouldn't work," even before learning more about the idea.

If that's what the first person hears back on their idea, what a lousy opening act for the rest of potential idea suggesters!

So what is the point of these things anyway?

Often a perfunctory survey of the minions to reassure management that they have thought of all of the good ideas and no other ideas remain.

What a waste of time!

I would suggest that until management confronts the environment it has often created outside of a retreat, it will be hard to get real value from tips, ideas, activities, unique methods in a retreat. Or, the the value will be much diminished.

A good environment would be one that values a multitude of experiments. You cut or adapt the losing experiments and expand the promising experiments.

The only unforgivable sin is to not try anything new. And, that starts with management.

Of course, there are retreats that are rationalized as "team-building" and don't expect to generate any measurable change.

Those retreats, in my experience, defy any sort of rational cost/benefits analysis. A company that doesn't reward risk taking in the office first, doesn't need to take the show on the road.