Leading Purposeful Team Gatherings
Published on July 31, 2023.
Team gatherings, sometimes referred to as team retreats, extend beyond the day-to-day work tasks and team check-ins often utilized by supervisors. Now is an especially important time for leaders to emphasize the human aspects of work and offer options for team members to connect with each other.
Team gatherings can contribute to higher levels of team morale and effectiveness. A supervisor’s role in the event includes planning for the event beforehand and directing conversations during the gathering. Both roles are critical for enhancing your own leadership effectiveness as well as that of your team’s. This newsletter includes practices and recommendations to help put together an impactful and meaningful team gathering that leverages your leadership vision with current work realities.
Planning for the Event: Keep it Simple and Intentional
Team gatherings can focus on a variety of team and organizational components, including team strategies, goals, and work processes, as well as the context in which you conduct your work. It is important to identify the specific goals and desired results for this kind of session.
Less is more: Select fewer focal points for discussions
- Norms. Define team norms and practices, including communication needs and expectations, and the values important to team members. This is especially critical if your team hasn’t gathered in the past year or two or if 50% or more of your team is new to the group since the last gathering.
Context. Discuss the realities in which your work is conducted. This includes ongoing or expected transitions and obstacles team members manage in their work.
- Goals. Re-establish goals or strategic priorities and discuss how the team intends to reach them.
Continuous improvement. Identify inefficiencies and other process improvement needs to strategize how they can be improved or resolved.
Prepare: Start pre-event communications with individual team members
- Leverage check-ins and team meetings to gauge interest, readiness, and input several weeks before the gathering. Ask team members what they are interested in addressing or learning more about.
Generate a draft of the agenda for the event that connects the event components to the intended purpose and goals. For example, start with a statement about the purpose of the gathering and include a list of the topics that will be addressed. Other ideas include:
Structuring the meeting around a set of questions to be answered rather than listing topics to be discussed.
Consider the roles team members can play in preparation for the gathering. This includes facilitating conversations during the event. Supervisors don’t need to facilitate conversation and can empower others to contribute their perspectives and expertise to the focus areas.
Set an event pace that ensures time for breaks to access food, restrooms, socialize, etc.
Do not overshadow the event with big news. Leverage one-to-ones and regular team meetings to introduce major changes or transitions intentionally, especially with those most affected.
A clear purpose keeps the gathering focused and efficient while signaling to the team where input is desired.
Directing the Conversations During the Event: Tools and Frameworks to Support Leadership
An effective team gathering requires preparing oneself for a leadership task that’s quite visible to team members. Planning and executing a successful event is an opportunity to demonstrate leadership to the team. While this can feel intimidating or uncomfortable, it is a key moment in a supervisory and leadership journey. Show compassion to yourself and seek input and support from others. Consider these tools and resources to support the effort:
- The roles and responsibilities exercise on page three provides step-by-step directions on how to facilitate a team-based exercise. It is especially helpful for members of a team to re-establish norms or welcome a new team member into existing practices.
- Sharing the most recent Employee Engagement data can inform or build on team goals. This data can provide insight on challenges or issues team members are experiencing and allow an opportunity for discussion on how to improve the situation. Using the Employee Engagement Drivers and Discussion Questions can help facilitate team-based discussions, further exploring both issues and strengths of the team.
- A simple and powerful tool such as a Context Map allows for discussion on the following work categories: trends, political factors, economic climate, technology factors, customer needs, and uncertainties. The tool can help gauge and track trends or changes that could impact both the work and how the work is conducted.
- A SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) can be a meaningful framework to think through existing team strengths as well as vulnerabilities. For example, to identify the challenges and opportunities that the team should prioritize.
Key Points
- Keep the goals and agenda for the day simple. No more than one or two key themes or discussion topics helps ensure an impactful and meaningful event.
- Review the team members. If they have not gathered for this kind of event in the past year, take time to re-establish norms and discuss team values. They are foundational to the collective work and goals.
- Taking time to gather as a team is a healthy practice for individuals and the unit. Discussions that are focused on processes and expectations for the work, such as decision-making roles, strategies for addressing conflict, and communication processes, can lead to positive individual and organizational outcomes. These also include an increased sense of belonging and increased ability to focus on job tasks (Kirkpatrick, Cullen, & Kelly, 2022).