Do-It-Yourself Retreats
Conducting Your Retreat
Retreating from the normal course of business allows you a more relaxed setting and encourages one to think strategically. This is your chance to consider how and why you do your work as a board. Ideally, participants will have open and frank discussion about critical issues facing their community and their working relationships. Both substance and process are important to getting your work done. A retreat should be a balance of how you work and what you want to accomplish.
What can a retreat achieve?1
A well-conceived, well-designed, well-run retreat can achieve the following goals:
- Help change your organization’s or community’s strategic direction
- Generate new solutions for old problems
- Get everyone pulling in the same direction
- Help people feel heard about issues that matter to them
- Deal with sources of overt or buried conflict
- Allow colleagues to get to know and come to trust one another
- Foster new ways of working together
- Help people see things in new ways and envision new possibilities for themselves and the organization
- Create a common frame of reference on past events and future expectations
- Contribute to creating a new and healthier culture for the organization
- Encourage people to take risks that are necessary for the organization to thrive
Follow our templates for a Do-It-Yourself Retreat
- From “Retreats that Work: Designing and Conducting Effective Offsites for Groups and Organizations”
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