I am preparing leadership work for a retreat next month. As I think about what needs to happen in the room, I also want to ask what has to be true on the first Tuesday back.
By then, people will be working through the emails that arrived while they were away. There will be customer issues to attend to and meetings that were in the calendar before the retreat began. Any new agreement will need to find its place among those responsibilities.
That is worth thinking through while we still have the team together. When we agree to change something, what will someone actually do with that agreement when they return to work?
The conditions around an agreement
A retreat gives a leadership team time to look at work they usually encounter from separate positions. People can explain what they are seeing, hear the reasoning behind a decision, and work through the concerns that make it difficult to act on.
Those conditions help an agreement make sense. The people affected may leave with a much clearer understanding of what needs to change and why.
Then they return to the places where the work happens. Some colleagues were never in the room. A familiar approval process is still in use. The next customer request arrives through the same channel it always has.
The agreement has to reach those parts of the business too. That takes deliberate work, and some of it belongs to the leaders whose habits helped establish the current way of doing things.
Follow one decision into the week
Here is an illustrative example. A leadership team agrees that the sales director will now approve discounts below 10 percent. Until then, every discount has gone to the CEO.
The team wants routine decisions made closer to the customer. They discuss the boundary, agree on it, and record the decision in the retreat notes.
On Wednesday, a sales rep needs a 6 percent discount to close a deal by Friday. The rep emails the CEO, as they have done before. The CEO has a full inbox, sees a request they can answer quickly, and approves it.
The rep has an answer. The sales director has had no part in the decision. The working process has continued along its familiar route, even though the leadership team agreed to change it.
That example raises a few practical questions for the retreat. Who will tell the sales reps where approvals now go? Who will update the quote template? What will the CEO do when the next request arrives in their inbox?
The sales director can own putting the change into use. At Monday’s sales meeting, they explain the new approval boundary and where requests should go. They arrange for the quote template to be updated that day, with finance informed of the change.
The CEO also has a part to carry. When a request arrives, they forward it to the sales director and make the new route clear to the rep. Each time they do that, they help the decision become part of how the business works.
Give the decision an early review
The team can also book a short review for two weeks after the change begins. By then, there should be some actual requests to examine.
Where did those requests go? What made any of them difficult to resolve? The answers might show that a rep missed the announcement, the template still points to the CEO, or the sales director needs information that is hard to obtain.
That is useful information while the change is still young. It gives the team a chance to adjust the process and clarify the agreement using what happened in the work.
I think that first review deserves a place in the retreat conversation. Agreeing when we will return to a decision asks us to think about what we expect to see, who will know whether it is happening, and what we might need to learn.
Prepare one decision for its return
Choose one important decision your leadership team has made recently. It can come from a retreat or an ordinary meeting. Write down five things:
The person who owns putting it into use.
The first visible action, and the day it will happen.
The colleagues affected, including anyone who needs to redirect a familiar request.
The date of the first review.
The question you will ask at that review.
If a line is hard to fill in, work through it with the people involved. Then put the first action and the review in the calendar.
When you review it, bring one real instance of the decision being used. Trace what happened, including any point where the work returned to its old route. That gives you somewhere concrete to make an adjustment, and a clearer idea of what the agreement needs to hold through another working week.
Retreats are only valuable if the work carries forward into the workplace