Speaker 1: Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor.
I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders
activate performance and engagement and keep burnout at pay.
I've been speaking to leadership teams across industries
about this, and I would love to spend time with yours.
Reach out anytime at rachel@leadabovenoise.com.
And before we jump into today's episode,
can I ask a quick favor?
I know all the podcasters ask,
but if you're a regular listener, I would love
to hear your thoughts on the show.
Leave a quick review on whatever podcast app you're in.
Okay, so how's your team doing?
I mean, really, I can't see you and I don't know your team,
but if I were placing bets,
I would guess they may be a little overwhelmed,
a little disconnected, a little bit like, why are we all
so busy every minute of the day when I'm not even sure
what we're accomplishing sometimes?
Does this ring true for you? If not, you're in a minority.
I'm talking to so many teams
who are riding the struggle bus these days.
They are really needing, really craving some space
to hit pause just for a day on the work and to come together
and do some work on them.
This is the magic of a team offsite.
I plan and run many dozens of these each year,
and I'm a huge believer in the power of an
outside facilitator.
But if that's just not an option right now, then I'd love
to share with you some of my favorite elements
that you are super welcome to Stitch Together
and create your own amazing team offsite experiences.
But if that's not an option right now, then I'd love
to share with you some of my favorite elements
that you are super welcome to Stitch Together
and create your own amazing team offsite.
Now, offsites can come in many forms
to serve different purposes,
but today let's focus on the kind designed
to drive connection, alignment, priorities and agreements.
Before we get into some of my favorite exercises,
let's quickly touch on creating a meaningful
space for an offsite.
Because an offsite is at its best when all participants feel
okay to speak up, to participate, and they feel energized.
I always like to have lots of snacks and caffeine on hand,
and I always set Vegas rules.
You know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas
because we wanna tap into people's vulnerability.
Okay, so now let's talk about your run of show.
I always start with an icebreaker.
This can be quick and simple,
but I like to make it purposeful to get people speaking
and connecting and feeling a little bit
of lightness without necessarily feeling silly.
There are infinite exercises you could do here,
just ask Google or chat GBT.
But I often start with something super simple like a
partnered q and a.
I use a deck of cards,
but you can certainly roll without one.
I ask people to pair up partner A asks partner B, a personal
but not invasive question.
Maybe it's something about their favorite childhood movie
or the best thing about the town they grew up in.
And then partner B answers. And then we swap.
And then I pull everyone back into the circle
and I ask each person to share one at a time.
What is one thing you learned about your
partner you didn't know before?
I like this because it's quick and simple,
and it activates not only our talking,
but our listening muscles, because asking
and listening is an essential element of any great offsite.
Next, have the team craft a shared vision.
Here I might move people into small groups of three and four
and invite each group to create
what we call a cover story mockup.
One thing I find is that everyone is so busy these days,
but when we pause to check in, it's not always clear
that we are all chasing the same end game.
Plus, we all know that feeling a shared sense
of purpose can enhance both our employee engagement
and our capacity for driving results.
So this exercise is a fun
and creative way for a team to imagine
what the future might be like a year from now if their
current efforts were to be successful.
A cover story mock-up serves as a visual representation
or a prototype of the story
that a magazine would publish a year from now if they were
profiling your success.
It generally includes a title, some featured images,
headlines, and a summary of the story.
You can get creative, have people draw pictures,
additional elements that might help spark creativity.
Could be an anecdote about,
or even some quotes from top customers or clients
or patients that focus on the value your product
or service is bringing.
And it might also highlight which team members delivered
which bits of value, which can help with roles
and responsibilities down the road.
And also build some more empathy across your team
by understanding a little bit how each
of us is contributing to a meaningful outcome.
Run it how you like, but it's just a fun
and creative way to push everyone just for the day outside
of the boundaries of timelines and pressure,
and into a space of imagining
what we could all be working together to make happen.
Next, align on priorities.
So with a shared vision in place, we've now gotta make sure
that we are collectively prioritizing
and deprioritizing the right stuff.
And here's where some bullseye
diagramming can come into play.
This is just three concentric circles.
The innermost one is your top,
your most critical priorities.
The second is kind of your nice to have.
And the third is your not now and maybe never.
And the power of this exercise is that it forced us
to look at projects and initiatives
altogether on a single page
and to prioritize them relative to each other.
And as we prioritize, we are constantly looking back
to our magazine mockups to ensure that we're choosing things
that are designed to get us to that ending the fastest.
The bullseye limits. How much you can identify is critical,
forcing your team to really talk about
what is most essential before producing anything.
And since each successive circle is larger than the last,
you must carefully consider what is most critical,
what is important, and what is maybe just peripheral.
Often this means having to make some trade-offs,
but the result is generally a clear delineation
of your team's consensus about each
item's relative importance.
It's a pretty simple means of making difficult decisions.
And finally, find your enabling mechanisms.
So priorities are a focus on products,
programs, and initiatives.
You know, the things we wanna build or deliver.
But once we've aligned on those, I then like to move into
what I call enabling mechanisms.
And these for me, are the ways that we tend
to spend our time in service of building those outcomes.
It's our habits and practices and our rituals.
It's our meetings, our one-on-ones,
our dashboards, our presentations.
I love to use a two by two grid.
You know, you draw a big plus sign to create four quadrants.
The upper left says stop. The upper right is start.
The bottom left is more, and the bottom right is less.
And here's where we start looking at
how we actually spend our days.
And we question of how much of what we're currently doing
actually supports our current priorities.
What meetings are we having that we need to continue
or maybe shorten or make less frequent
or to shut down completely?
And what meetings aren't we having that we need to be
all in service of achieving our vision
and supporting our priorities here?
We've gotta be ruthless. Nothing can be held sacred.
Every standing meeting presentation
dashboard has to be on the block.
Just because we've made a habit
of it doesn't mean it holds more weight than the meeting
we're not having because we can't find the time.
So now we've created some connection
and we've crafted a vision we're excited about,
we've identified what to focus on and how to spend
and not spend our time at this point.
Have we changed the world? Probably not.
But if we've done this well, we've reconnected and realigned
and shut down some time wasters
and added some fresh value in my book,
A pretty great way to spend a day.
If you are looking for someone to run your next offsite
or really if you just wanna bounce some ideas off someone,
reach out anytime, Rachel, at lead above noise.com.
And if your team or organization needs a boost,
whether a workshop, a keynote, a pulse check, let's talk.
You can find me@leadabovenoise.com.
And if you're loving the show, don't forget
to follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you listen and leave that review.
Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week.
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