With a nod to Kelly Clarkson, the first part of a fiscal year for many firms is “off-site” time. Leaders go with their teams to a place off-site with hopes that a change of scenery – and sometimes a round of golf or some collegial dinners – will change dynamics and improve performance.
It probably won’t.
But don’t blame the off-site for the lack of a durable performance bump.
Taking teams and groups out of their normal settings to another place can have tremendous advantages in shifting and improving any number of team dynamics: communication, understanding, innovation, planning, etc. Why? The simple act of changing physical space shifts the patterns and dynamics between people. And the fact that you’re stuck someplace with somebody else with limited time to hide increases the odds for chance interactions and with some smarts the chances of a favorable exchange.
Except when it doesn’t.
And the the memory, noted by psychologist and Psychology Today writer Ben Dattner, “of listening to your co-workers sing “Dancing Queen” might endure much longer than you want it to.”
Or as the Harvard Business Review reported in a piece titled “Off-Sites That Work”, “Few executives would call their off-sites outright disasters, but it is the rare management team that can look back six or 12 months later and say that the meeting truly changed the way the business is run. Most would agree with what a senior vice president at an Internet company said about his last strategy off-site: “It simply left no fingerprints on the business.”
First things first: an off-site session does not have to be at a fancy hotel or expensive conference center. As the Wall Street Journal reported, some firms are utilizing the meeting space of other companies to great advantage.
Here are five other things you can [click to continue…]
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