Senior professional ‘offsites’ have many benefits including getting to know your colleagues better, discussing clients in common or riffing on industry developments.
However, many of these benefits – although very real – are somewhat intangible and hard to ignite spontaneously. For example, many management teams long for greater collaboration which will result in more rounded or effective go to market propositions that can sell the whole firm. When pulling an offsite agenda together they hope that by simply getting the senior group together and having an office by office update it is going to do the trick and meet this objective. Answer: it won’t.
If management teams want to pull people together, get them to collaborate and thereby develop new opportunities to grow revenues, I think the principal challenge is one of growing trust in each other. Just as research says that a professional may need to have seven to 10 positive interactions with a prospective client before they buy, so similar levels of trust need to be present before many professionals will introduce a new colleague to their client or share a valuable (but unproven) new business idea.
Turning insight into action: Building trust in others doesn’t happen overnight (and especially not in three hours in a boutique hotel) but it’s long been known that opening yourself up a little to others is a really good way of building trust and connection. I am not suggesting that everyone immediately turns confessional, but what I have seen work really well is for attendees to complete a ‘social styles’ type profiling survey in advance. The results and a discussion on styles and what they mean for collaboration is then facilitated. It’s important that the methodology used is one that is focused on and explains how your team members like to work and what role they are best suited to when developing go to market propositions and winning client work.
As a result, you can then pair the pioneering types with those happier to deal with the details and from my experience, the resulting planning delivers a team more likely to succeed. It’s also a brilliant icebreaker for drinks in the bar: a place where valuable new business ideas are often cemented and friends for life are just as often made.
