Meeting and Retreat Facilitation

Expert facilitation that unlocks your team’s full capacity. Tackle crucial strategic challenges with expert facilitation for high-stakes meetings and team retreats. Help your team break through logjams, find common ground and build momentum to accelerate progress on your most important initiatives.

In every organization, the success of crucial projects and initiatives periodically rests on your team’s ability to overcome impasses and make rapid, breakthrough progress. When progress is critical and tensions are high, you need a cool head and a steady hand to keep everyone moving toward the finish line.

Even at the best of times, successful collaboration and clear communication between team members can be difficult to achieve. As pressure mounts and problems begin to appear, challenges with collaboration and communication are amplified. Progress comes to a standstill as communications collapse and team morale takes a nosedive. Defensiveness, denial of responsibility and transfer of blame can quickly begin to take hold.

At times like these, the guidance of an objective expert with excellent communication, interpersonal and problem-solving skills is invaluable to help you navigate difficult terrain, regain momentum and reach your goal. I help your team get there faster, by bringing a fresh perspective and an objective overview that isn’t tangled up in team dynamics and office politics.

Some situations where outside facilitation can make a dramatic difference in a very short time include:

• Strategy meetings
• Cross-functional team meetings
• Architecture and design meetings
• Executive leadership team meetings
• High-stakes meetings with potential partners, vendors and other key parties

Results include:

• Resolving disagreements on strategy/direction
• Overcoming impasses and regaining traction
• Reducing cross-functional friction
• Identifying and resolving hidden obstacles to progress
• Reaching consensus on crucial decisions
• Increased team engagement and buy-in

To discuss facilitation for your next high-stakes meeting, contact Steven here.

Every team periodically needs to get away from the day-to-day operations of the organization in order to tackle big-picture challenges, re-energize and lay the groundwork for the future.

Retreats provide the time and space to delve deeply into the core purpose of your team, strengthen working relationships, gain new insights, make pivotal strategic decisions and shape your organization’s future direction.

Retreat topics and activities may include:

• Mindful leadership and teamwork
• Strategy development
• Team alignment
• Mission and vision development
• Work/life integration
• Generating action plans to be implemented following the retreat

All retreats are designed from the ground up to meet the specific needs of your team. A typical retreat engagement includes the following components:

• Defining the retreat objectives
• Information gathering and retreat design (includes interviews with key stakeholders to identify opportunities and challenges)
• Pre-retreat preparation for participants (may include recommended reading or other preparatory work, in order to maximize the value of the time spent on retreat)
• The retreat itself
• Post-retreat follow-up (may include an on-site, off-site or online follow-up session depending on your needs)

To discuss your retreat planning and facilitation needs, contact Steven here.