What happens at a virtual leadership retreat?
Learn more about a PeopleStorming retreat and pick up a few tips for yours
Since going remote, thousands of companies around the world are now hosting their own virtual retreats. As facilitators, workshop creators and leadership coaches, we love to help organizations create inspiring, engaging, fun events.
We’ve produced and hosted quite a large number of these events over the past few years.
One of our co-founders was interviewed about a client’s full-company virtual retreat on the International Facilitation Association podcast. So, if you’ve got 13-ish mins to spare, you might pick up a few tips for your next retreat. However, if you’re short on time, we’ve included 3 fundamentals for you at the end of this newsletter.
More recently, we were thrilled to be invited to host a 2-day virtual leadership retreat for the managers of another client.
It was such a great experience to have so many people come together and focus on the craft of leadership; to really take the time to ask the question “what does it mean for me to the best leader I can?”.
You could learn more about our retreat service from our website but we imagine you’ll find just as much benefit in hearing from one of the participants who (unprompted by us) wrote this wonderful post about her experiences.
If you're working on your own company or leadership retreat, you might be tempted to start with where and when. However, focussing on those things too early will tend to make you pass over more fundamental concerns. With that in mind, here are some tips to get you off on the right foot...
Start with why: What's the overall purpose of the retreat? What do you hope will be true as a result of convening it? If it seems like its just ‘get everyone together’, try to help everyone dig a little deeper.
Develop your why into a set of aligned objectives: Aim to articulate 1-3 specific objectives for the retreat and build early alignment around them with senior leaders / stakeholders (the group of which should be fewer than 5 people).
Unify your vision and objectives with a strong theme: This might be a word or a phrase. It could be one of your existing cultural pillars or something from the company’s strategy. It’s the hook that gets everyone thinking in the same umbrella terms whenever they think about the retreat.
If you'd like the support of our experience team with your virtual retreat, we’d love to talk about your goals and aspirations. Grab a call - we’re excited to hear from you!