Leadership Minute - Take Your Team Off The Grid

Leadership offsites are vital to team cohesion, strategy and performance. Plan yours thoughtfully and intentionally

Professionally, the Covid-19 pandemic was less disruptive for our company than it was for many. Acceleration Partners was 100 percent remote, so our people were used to working from home, and we had the type of well-structured, supportive remote working environment others had to build on the fly.

But one thing I sorely missed during the pandemic was our senior leadership team offsites, which we had to run through painful, marathon Zoom sessions. For years, we had been holding them at my condo in New Hampshire, having graduated from using my parents’ house in Vermont where we had our earliest ones. There was something about heading into the wilderness as a team for two or three days to focus intently on the big picture of the business that everyone always valued.

The best companies seem to make a habit of hosting quarterly offsites. This is the right cadence to check in on the team’s cohesiveness and performance, and it’s a good interval for evaluating your company’s long-term strategic plan.

The ideal leadership team offsite serves two main purposes:

• To take stock of your progress toward your long-term plan over the previous quarter and determine how you’ll pursue it over the upcoming quarter.

• To create the opportunity for deep connection so your team leaves with stronger personal bonds than they arrived with.

And hosting these offsites doesn’t need to be difficult or even particularly expensive. There are a few things I recommend for an excellent leadership team offsite.

Go remote

Some leaders default to having their meetings in bland hotel meeting rooms in cities with major airports. While that’s easy and convenient, I don’t think it’s the best environment to accomplish the goals above.

Instead, I’d recommend choosing a more remote setting outside the city. Rather than meeting in a cookie cutter hotel, consider renting a house for the full team, or choosing something quaint like an inn or lodge in a small community.

This off-the-grid approach has a couple benefits. First, it’s ideal to meet in an environment where people don’t feel tempted to go off on their own to sightsee or enjoy local nightlife. Instead, team members should be compelled to stay onsite, spending quality time together during unstructured parts of the offsite. Some of the most powerful bonding experiences I’ve had with my team were sharing a glass of wine late at night and getting into a deep conversation, or gathering for a casual evening game in a house we stayed at together.

Second, being in a quieter, more remote place is ideal for clearing people’s heads and getting everyone into a fresher state of mind; it really pulls people out of the daily grind both physically and mentally. That type of environment yields the clearest, most creative thinking.

Prioritize teambuilding