Kickstart Your Year With A Retreat

A wonderful tool we have in our EOS arsenal is our annual retreat.

These two days are spent together as a leadership team, away from the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day work, in a venue where the group can play together, they can work together, they can be vulnerable together, and they can grow together and plan together.

The retreat is typically two days long and the off times are spent with activities to get to know each other better, to have some fun together and to build the team spirit. During the working hours we focus.

The first day is a day to do real team building and we use the principles of Patrick Lencioni's book "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" to kickstart the process.

We look at the role of trust in a team, how conflict is handled, how people buy in, how people hold each other accountable and what results the team as a whole produces.

That's the five dysfunctions of a team. We make, them 'how can we be a very high functioning team?' - so we flip them around so that they are not dysfunctions, they are actually how we become a highly functioning team. That's the first principle.

Some of the other exercises build the team spirit through vulnerability and that grows trust. Things like your personal histories - where people have been coming from, what are their careers have been, what are the past challenges and we share that in an exercise.

And then the most powerful exercise we do in the first retreat is called the 'Johari Window'. This is where we as team members work together to identify our blind spots. The team members tell us what our blind spots are and what we should be working on for the best of the team for the next year, and we call that our 'one thing', our one thing commitments, where every person has to come up with one thing they're going to work on in the next period so that that'll make the team better.

So that's the first day - team building. The day is ended, or finishes off, with some group activities, maybe a dinner together, maybe we do some games together, but something happens in the evening as well to bring the team together.

The second day is more of a planning day. We're finishing off our team building and then we start focusing on what do we need to do in the next year to kick it out of the park, and what we need to do in the next quarter to make sure that we can get to that place in the next year. So we plan out the next year.

The beauty of these retreats are two-fold.

First of all, they build the team spirit, they build the team morale, they're a real team builder for everyone. That's the first thing.

The second thing is they finish off the previous year at a high and they kickstart the next year, so that you're all motivated and you've got it planned out, and you know exactly where the company is going in the next year.

So I highly recommend you consider this as part of your EOS journey. You need a kick-ass retreat to take your team into the next year successfully.

Have a great week!