What Can Be Accomplished at a Facilitated Board or Team Retreat?
Planning: More collaborative, consensus-driven strategic and tactical planning
- Examine the mission statement
- Create a vision and direction for the organization
- Develop or review the organization’s strategic plan or annual tactical work plans
- Translate complex plans into one-page strategy maps for aligning the organization, communicating to staff their role in the bigger picture
Teambuilding: Strengthen the team, its capacity to work optimally together
- Establish roles and responsibilities of board members
- Solidify and improve board and board-staff relations
- Analyze, recruit, orient and engage new board members
- Understand personalities and individual strengths
Conflict resolution: Move through conflict, strengthen peacemaking and conflict resolution skills
- Identify what conflict is
- Explore ways to prevent conflict from escalating including managing emotional responses and identifying triggers
- Assess your conflict mode
- Learn an 8 step process to resolve conflict
- Practice conflict resolution tools and skills using scenarios based on personal experience
- Create a plan for managing conflict situations
Evaluation and performance measurement: Strengthen the organization’s capacity to conduct meaningful program evaluations
- Understand different types of performance measures
- Look across your sector and populations served to better partner and evaluate collective impact together
- Build capacity to demonstrate results, clarify the purpose and audience for the evaluation, resources, methods and more
Whole-Scale Engagement: Engage all stakeholders and community partners in a participative planning, solution search, or process improvement, change readiness-type event
- Clarify processes for developing and sustaining collaborative teamwork among all project stakeholders.
- Partnering includes: shared goals, open communication, problem identification and joint problem solving, formal conflict resolution, the evaluation and feedback of team performance, developing a spirit of teamwork and cooperation.
- Potential benefits include improved project cost and timeliness as well as reduction or elimination of stakeholder conflict, claims and/or litigation.
Change the culture or focus for a board or large cross-section of management
- Develop a fund-raising or marketing plan with specific board and staff responsibilities
- Engage the board in broadening the reach of fundraising or marketing efforts
- Define cultural traditions, behavioral agreements, cultural levers for alignment
Optimize your time together by incorporating other educational offerings in your retreat. Select from the following topics (with a mix of learning activities and educational content):
- Building Effective Teams
- Change Resiliency/Navigating Transitions
- Developing Your People
- Effective Communication
- Employee Engagement
- Providing Feedback Effectively
- Dealing with Performance Deficiencies
- Coaching for Results
- Understanding Personalities (True Colors, Myers-Briggs, Other Tool)
- Assessing Team Effectiveness
- Running Effective Meetings