1. Explore Fundamental Concerns
Suppose turnover in your organization is exceptionally high or staff morale low. Or the organization has seen a significant drop-off in customers or an increase in their complaints. A retreat can be the ideal forum to explore and address the underlying causes.

2. Harness the Collective Creativity of the Group
When it is important to generate ideas for new products, services, or work processes, typical brainstorming sessions often fail to produce significant results. Retreats, free of routine workplace demands, have fewer barriers to imagination and creative thinking. The offsite setting can help innovative solutions emerge.

3. Foster Change
A retreat can promote new approaches to strategic planning, product design, service delivery, or marketing. The open discussion that characterizes well-run retreats fosters understanding of and commitment to new directions.

4. Change Perceptions, Attitudes, and Behavior
In every organization, people make up stories to account for things they don’t understand. These stories lead to attitudes and actions that can be harmful to the organization. A retreat can be an ideal setting for participants to raise concerns and ask questions. Participants can share information, clear up misunderstandings, discuss the impact of past decisions, and modify those decisions if priorities have changed or if prior decisions failed to achieve their purpose.

5. Correct Course When Things Are Going Wrong
Executives cannot turn organizations around by fiat. People will change only when they see that it is important to do so. Retreats provide a forum for discussions about the reasons for and the urgency of a desired change. When people play a role in deciding what should be improved, they are more committed to ensuring that the change effort succeeds.

6. Transform the Organization’s Culture or Improve Relationships Hindering Its Effectiveness
Suppose members of a team or division are having difficulty communicating effectively with one another. Or two departments seem unable to work together. Or people are afraid to tell a client what they think she might not want to hear. Retreats can help people open up to one another and can create a climate of trust.

7. Create a Collective Vision for the Organization
Much of the tension that exists in organizations stems not from inherent personality conflicts but rather from individuals pursuing their own (and sometimes conflicting) visions of what is best for the organization. These visions often clash with one another because none of them necessarily represents the complete picture of an organization’s circumstances. Retreats can foster alignment by helping participants understand and build commitment to the organization’s overall priorities. Greater understanding and commitment encourages individuals to hold themselves accountable for the organization’s success, not just the interests of their own work groups.

8. Accomplish Something That Cannot Be Done by the Leader Alone
No matter how experienced and competent leaders are, they can’t do everything on their own. Retreats provide an environment in which everyone can contribute knowledge, expertise, and skills to address issues that often plague and confound busy executives.

9. Make Tough Decisions
Leaders often confront very tough decisions: should they eliminate a signature product or service? Close down a particular operation? Reduce staff? Change the nature of a long-standing alliance? There will be greater commitment to the eventual course of action if many people from different levels in the organization have participated in deciding what to eliminate or change and how to go about doing so, rather than simply being told by the leaders what to do. At a well-led retreat, leaders receive the benefit not only of broad participation in idea generation but also of better decisions, because the group collectively will have a wider perspective and a greater number of ideas than the leader does alone.

What Can a Retreat Achieve?
A well-conceived, well-designed, well-run retreat can:

• Help change an organization’s strategic direction
• Generate new solutions for old problems
• Get everyone pulling in the same direction
• Help people feel heard about issues that matter to them
• Deal with sources of overt or buried conflict
• Allow colleagues to get to know and come to trust on another
• Foster new ways of working
• Help people see things in new ways and envision new possibilities for themselves and the organization
• Create a common frame of reference for past events and future expectations
• Contribute to creating a new and healthier culture for the organization
• Encourage people to take risks that are necessary for the organization to thrive

When Is a Retreat Not the Right Tool?
Don’t agree to a retreat if you intend to:

• Use the offsite just to improve morale
• Reward people for their hard work
• Punish non-team players
• Advance a covert agenda
• Control the conversation
• Avoid conflict
• Create a platform for your own ideas
• Disregard what participants recommend
• Defend a point of view, promote a position, or maintain the status quo
• Merely keep up the tradition of having annual retreats

 
Excerpted from Retreats That Work: Everything You Need to Know About Planning and Leading Great Offsites (Pfeiffer Essential Resources for Training and HR Professionals), by Merianne Liteman, Sheila Campbell, and Jeffrey Liteman, Pfeiffer; Pap/Cdr edition, July 18, 2006.