Workshops and Retreats

After this diagnostic phase is completed, most groups choose to start the change process with a retreat. Sponsors of the retreat and the facilitators who will conduct it use the assessment results to design a retreat that is tailored to address the issues raised in the assessment. Retreats vary from one another, but they almost always consist of two parts:

• Basic Team Skills Workshop
• Real World Application and Practice Workshop

Here is a brief description of each:

Basic Team Skills Workshop: This highly interactive workshop describes the structure of a team and shows how it differs from other kinds of work groups. It defines the roles of team leaders and team members and provides lots of practice on how team members communicate with one another. It also shows team members how to:

• Give one another feedback
• Resolve differences and disagreements
• Facilitate team meetings
• Arrive at consensus and make good decisions

It explores the stages that a team goes through as it continues to grow and develop, explains pitfalls that teams often experience at each stage and provides ways to avoid or remedy them. Simply put, this workshop teaches the ground rules of team membership and time-tested techniques for making it all work.

Real World Application and Practice Workshop: The real work of building a team now commences. The coach begins to lay the groundwork for helping the team address the problems and issues raised during the assessment stage. Because the following twelve issues are common to many NGOs, they can serve as a model for the work done during this part of the retreat.

1. Producing open communications, by surfacing “undiscussables” (things people talk about around the water cooler but never out in the open), and taking action on them


2. Establishing team norms and identifying the team’s purpose


3. Engaging with “productive disagreement” as a way channeling normal conflict into decreasing group tensions


4. Examining style diversity, by revealing individual styles and learning how they contribute to or detract from the team


5. Increasing accountability among team members by sharing the responsibility for seeing that accountability becomes a reality


6. Identifying team or individual behaviors that contribute to poor relationships with other units outside the team


7. Clarifying the changing role of the leader and of leadership itself as the team continues to develop


8. Strengthening what works by celebrating what the team does well


9. Conducting productive, focused, results-oriented meetings


10. Honing the team’s ability to assess its own performance accurately, and then achieving a willingness to build on its successes and correct its weaknesses


11. Examining the notion of virtual teams and exploring ways to make them work


12. Embracing cross-cultural challenges, by learning to work with these differences and using them to the advantage of the team

This retreat marks the kick-off for the team enhancement process and sets the stage for everything that follows. Teams typically conclude the retreat by setting concrete plans with measurable action steps for addressing its problems and its work.

There is a formal commitment to use and practice the skills and techniques learned here in the on-going operations of the team.

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