Strategic offsite meetings are places where you want everyone to do their best thinking.  Facilitation will help your group work together toward common goals by encouraging full participation, promoting mutual understanding and cultivating shared responsibility.

Do you recognise these work-group challenges?

Meetings that go round in circles. You need to work together to discover something new but the same old conversations are holding you back. You’d like more focus and clarity so you can make progress together.

Relationships that seem to have stalled. You want to get everyone’s opinion listened to and their expertise valued. You’d like to have group conversations with more structure and influence.

Situations with an unclear decision-process, which take forever to move forward. You need to work to qualify intentions, understand decision criteria and make the next action steps explicit.

Negotiations and problem solving, where agendas are getting in the way. You need everyone to participate and get mutual understanding. You’d like to build inclusive, sustainable agreements.

So, will a Strategic Offsite Meeting help you?

Well only if you truly want to accelerate decisions and results!

Executives who use me to work with their teams want to experience more productive meetings, influential relationships, smoother decision-making and resolved conflicts.

On a more personal level they also want an external ‘thinking partner’ to help individuals make changes, so they break through their own performance thresholds.

The clients who benefit most from working with me are those who are ready to work with others, to get the results they want. They recognise that the above scenarios go more smoothly when people:

• Participate fully in the decision-making process;
• Promote mutual understanding of issues and problems;
• Build on multiple perspectives to create solutions;
• Share goals and develop strategies for getting results;
• Generate new value through interpersonal relations;

What types of things can we work on?

Visionary Business Modelling

This process allows teams to explore and create a Visionary Business Model, comprising of purpose, vision, core values, desired culture and specific goals and strategies. There is no ‘mission statement’ writing or ‘tree hugging’.

The aim is for teams to come away with a clear idea of where they are headed, the strategies they have chosen, specific goals they need to achieve and individual’s roles in making it happen.

Accountability For Performance

This type of session follows on from strategic planning. The aim is to keep the momentum going and accelerate results through regular action planning and review sessions. The core of these sessions is a process that recognises what is working well and tackles the obstacles that are slowing things down.

Highly visible planning documents are organised so that monthly, quarterly and one-year actions are documented and clearly communicated to everyone involved. Measurement keeps the team aligned and makes each individual’s accountability and progress transparent.

Creative Collaboration

This type of developmental facilitation goes way beyond normal team-building events by focusing on how people work together on real business issues. By becoming aware of how the group interpersonal dynamics and processes work, a team can make changes and greatly improve their performance.

Collaborative group processes to work with include problem solving, dialogue, managing conflicts, social styles, innovation and decision-making.

Would your team benefit from a fresh look at working together toward common goals? Which behaviours would you like to see change in your team?

Please read what others say about my work and contact me if you would like to discuss a project.