Welcome to Friday 411, issue #079. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll be equipped to host a transformational leadership retreat that builds relationships and gets results.

 

1 Insight

Leadership retreats can be a waste of significant time, energy, and money if you make common mistakes.

Whether it’s a quarterly one-day event or a multi-day annual retreat, leadership retreats require significant investments. Preparations suck energy from your daily responsibilities. Your team spends valuable time to attend. Expenses add thousands of dollars to your budget. Flights, hotels, meeting space, meals, and activities cost a lot of money.

Despite their best intentions, many leaders fall into common traps that can diminish the effectiveness of these retreats. You don’t want to get to the other side of all that working and spending and feel like it was a waste of resources.

Avoiding these three mistakes will ensure you have a great retreat:

 

Mistake 1: Not Allowing Enough Time for Leadership Conversations

Leadership retreats often become a blur of back-to-back sessions with little time for leaders to engage in meaningful conversations. When you don’t provide time for leaders to talk with each other, they experience three negative effects:

1. Leaders are unable to process information. During these leadership retreats, participants absorb lots of important information, but it won’t do any good if they can’t process it with each other. People need time to discuss key insights and how it applies to their responsibilities.
2. Leaders are unable to help each other. Great retreats provide space for leaders to discuss their biggest challenges, share best practices, and coach each other for greater results. These conversations create an internal network of leaders who help each other.
3. Leaders are unable to connect with each other. Leadership can feel lonely and isolating. It’s easy for leaders to feel like they are on their own. Often they assume that everyone else has “this leadership thing” figured out, so they remain silent so they don’t make a fool of themselves. Retreats provide a great opportunity for leaders to connect to each other personally and professionally.

Give your participants space to talk to each other by carving out conversation times throughout the day and facilitating guided discussions.

 

Mistake 2: Scheduling “Programming” Instead of Launching “Pathways”

Many retreats schedule a lot of programming:

• Costly keynote speakers who inspire your team with little direction.
• Presentations by team members updating everyone on past progress without future plans.
• Breakout sessions that result in squabbling more than moving forward.

All of these programs leave people informed. Considering the money you’re going to spend, leadership retreats should do more than inform. They should leave your team transformed.

It’s important to understand the difference between programs and pathways:

Programs inform while pathways transform.

• Programs provide short-term, inspirational training without ongoing support, leading to minimal long-term impact.
• Pathways offer practical, continuous development with sustained support, fostering deep and lasting leadership growth.

As you’re designing your leadership retreat, think through the long-term growth you want your team to experience. Make plans for ongoing training and support they’ll need to continue growing. Before the retreat ever starts, schedule follow-up sessions, coaching, and accountability groups or online resources.

At AdVance Leadership, one of the ways that we can help is by working with you to create these pathways. Here’s how we do it:

1. We help you identify the root issues that are causing challenges in your business. (We talk about these 7 Issues that cause 95% of Organizational Problems all the time in this blog.)
2. Once you’ve identified these, we deliver ridiculously practical training to your team that’s focused on resolving those root issues.
3. We also provide follow-up training and coaching sessions for your team to ensure that new ideas and methods stick and become part of the way your team operates.

 

Mistake 3: Focusing on Past Metrics, Rather than Future Actions

Imagine if a teacher told your child that he was failing math but provided no guidance on how to bring his grade up. The teacher left your kid to figure it out on his own. You’d be frustrated, maybe even furious.

But this same negligence happens during many leadership retreats. Participants spend time hearing updates on past metrics. Maybe the good metrics are briefly celebrated. Then presenters spend ample time talking about the bad metrics. But they rarely discuss specific strategies or actions that need to be done differently in order to get better results. The participants might understand the problem, but they’re left scratching their heads about what to do differently.

Do this instead:

1. As you talk about the metrics, discuss what those metrics indicate. Are there root issues that cause many of these negative metrics?
2. Identify strategies and actions. You might want to tell your team what to do differently next year to get better results. Or you might need to give them time to strategize about what they will change. Either way, don’t walk away from the leadership retreat without everyone on the same page.

By avoiding these common mistakes, you can plan a leadership retreat that is not only productive but also transformative. For more on planning a great leadership retreat, check out this article.

Ready to plan a leadership retreat that transforms your leaders and get results for your business? Contact us at AdVance Leadership for help in creating a retreat that drives lasting change.

 

1 Action

Contact us at AdVance Leadership to help you plan your next leadership retreat. In a 30-minute call, we can help you discover the biggest issues that are causing problems in your business and the pathways to move forward.