At Disruption Advisors, we specialize in activating growth in leaders and teams to enable them to disrupt themselves and their organizations. This isn’t a quick and easy process for anyone. It requires getting comfortable sitting in discomfort. This means addressing the challenging, complex, and often emotional needs and questions of your team and organization.
One of the most effective ways to do this? Team offsites.
Offsites are a great place to prioritize and address critical questions and issues. However, if done correctly, they’re an even better place to foster connection and build a team culture that your team is not only excited about but proud to be a part of.
When our team gets together for an offsite, we consciously prioritize connection, collaboration, and trust-building over the strategic and tactical items on the agenda. At the end of our offsite, we manage to walk away with all of the business-critical items crossed off our lists because we spend time prioritizing our team culture. We push each other, ask the hard questions, and listen to the tough answers. We laugh, cry, and, frequently, laugh until we cry. Our time together allows us to work toward our goals while strengthening the connections that tie our team together.
Below are five ways offsites strengthen the culture of your team and increase satisfaction, productivity, and growth.
1. Forge Bonding and Connection
Getting your team together in a relaxed, neutral environment away from the office allows team members to connect in a meaningful way and get to know each other in a new light. Creating space where teams can naturally form bonds with each other boosts productivity and engagement by developing a sense of shared ownership and responsibility. Strengthening connection also encourages creativity and collaboration across the team, which can sharpen soft skills and highlight potentially untapped strengths and skills of employees and leaders.
2. Build Trust
There are multiple avenues to generate team trust. Offsites provide the foundation and space to capitalize on the various activities that align best with the interests and needs of your team.
Trust builds when your team is encouraged to be vulnerable, share honestly, and reflect deeply upon their unique perspectives and experiences. This establishes rapport and camaraderie while developing a mutual understanding and appreciation for one another. As dialogue and experiences are shared during an offsite, the neural pathways associated with trust formation are reinforced. This neural reinforcement enhances the brain’s ability to replicate trust-related behaviors and responses, thereby making it easier for team members to access and strengthen their trust pathways both during and after offsite gatherings.
3. Create Space for Tough Conversations
Employees frequently note feeling hesitant or fearful to speak up when they have an idea, make a mistake, or need support out of fear of judgment from their leaders and peers. Offsites create a rare opportunity to put everyone on an even playing field, regardless of title or experience. Then, expert facilitators create a space for open dialogue, encouraging team members to speak freely without fear of reprimand or judgment. This facilitation empowers employees to experience a new level of psychological safety. This results in higher engagement during discussions because participants can trust that their voices will be valued, heard, and explored.
4. Empower Your Team to Conquer Challenges Together
During an offsite, your team members gain invaluable insights into each other’s strengths and experiences through engagement activities and facilitated discussions. This enhanced knowledge and understanding of individual capabilities creates a solid foundation for collaboration. By leveraging this understanding upon their return to the office, team members can effectively utilize each other’s strengths and tap into useful knowledge or relationships that exist outside the team. Armed with this deeper understanding and collaborative approach, your team is not only better equipped to face challenges but also more confident in their ability to overcome obstacles together.
5. Humanize Your Leaders
Remember the feeling of seeing your elementary teacher in public outside of school hours? It felt weird and unnatural because, as adolescents, our teachers were solely teachers. This same feeling often exists, to some extent, across teams. It can be challenging to view leaders as anything other than the boss. On top of this, when leaders experience adversity and vulnerability, it is often masked by competence, fearlessness, and strength to their employees. This makes leaders feel untouchable and can easily result in a presumed lack of empathy or understanding when mistakes happen or deadlines are missed.
Offsites create a neutral space where power dynamics are eliminated, enabling vulnerability and openness across all members of the team. Additionally, offsites provide time for leaders to be humans and intentionally connect with their team on a more personal level outside of a professional office setting. This level of connection humanizes leaders by unveiling a new layer of themselves and their personalities that enables employees to see their bosses in a more comprehensive light.
Taking time away from the office and your to-do list is hard. But stepping back from the day-to-day allows you to slingshot forward, to propel the growth of your team along a new trajectory with a greater potential upside.
Offsites, when done correctly, can be a powerful tool to enable your team to break down barriers and propel forward. By creating a neutral environment that fosters positivity, vulnerability, and collaboration, participants have a safe space in which to freely voice their thoughts and opinions and be fully present in the conversation. Utilizing an outside facilitator to lead the offsite is a key component in achieving this environment, as they can stay focused on the bigger picture while remaining removed from the emotions involved in tough conversations.
Even as a team of professional facilitators, Disruption Advisors brings in a third-party facilitator to our offsites. It allows us to capitalize on the unique opportunity for each member of our team to be present and fully engage in our offsites as an equal participant. It is the only way we’ve found to even the playing field while allowing everyone to participate fully.
Interested in exploring the benefits of an offsite for your team? Our team of seasoned facilitators is eager to elevate your team’s experience and maximize the impact of your time together.
