Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders activate performance and engagement and keep burnout at pay. I've been speaking to leadership teams across industries about this, and I would love to spend time with yours. Reach out anytime at rachel@leadabovenoise.com. And before we jump into today's episode, can I ask a quick favor?
I know all the podcasters ask, but if you're a regular listener, I would love to hear your thoughts on the show. Leave a quick review on whatever podcast app you're in. Okay, so how's your team doing? I mean, really, I can't see you and I don't know your team, but if I were placing bets, I would guess they may be a little overwhelmed, a little disconnected, a little bit like, why are we all so busy every minute of the day when I'm not even sure what we're accomplishing sometimes?
Does this ring true for you? If not, you're in a minority. I'm talking to so many teams who are riding the struggle bus these days. They are really needing, really craving some space to hit pause just for a day on the work and to come together and do some work on them. This is the magic of a team offsite. I plan and run many dozens of these each year, and I'm a huge believer in the power of an outside facilitator.
But if that's just not an option right now, then I'd love to share with you some of my favorite elements that you are super welcome to Stitch Together and create your own amazing team offsite experiences. But if that's not an option right now, then I'd love to share with you some of my favorite elements that you are super welcome to Stitch Together and create your own amazing team offsite.
Now, offsites can come in many forms to serve different purposes, but today let's focus on the kind designed to drive connection, alignment, priorities and agreements. Before we get into some of my favorite exercises, let's quickly touch on creating a meaningful space for an offsite. Because an offsite is at its best when all participants feel okay to speak up, to participate, and they feel energized. I always like to have lots of snacks and caffeine on hand, and I always set Vegas rules.
You know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas because we wanna tap into people's vulnerability. Okay, so now let's talk about your run of show. I always start with an icebreaker. This can be quick and simple, but I like to make it purposeful to get people speaking and connecting and feeling a little bit of lightness without necessarily feeling silly. There are infinite exercises you could do here, just ask Google or chat GBT.
But I often start with something super simple like a partnered q and a. I use a deck of cards, but you can certainly roll without one. I ask people to pair up partner A asks partner B, a personal but not invasive question. Maybe it's something about their favorite childhood movie or the best thing about the town they grew up in. And then partner B answers. And then we swap. And then I pull everyone back into the circle and I ask each person to share one at a time.
What is one thing you learned about your partner you didn't know before? I like this because it's quick and simple, and it activates not only our talking, but our listening muscles, because asking and listening is an essential element of any great offsite. Next, have the team craft a shared vision. Here I might move people into small groups of three and four and invite each group to create what we call a cover story mockup.
One thing I find is that everyone is so busy these days, but when we pause to check in, it's not always clear that we are all chasing the same end game. Plus, we all know that feeling a shared sense of purpose can enhance both our employee engagement and our capacity for driving results. So this exercise is a fun and creative way for a team to imagine what the future might be like a year from now if their current efforts were to be successful.
A cover story mock-up serves as a visual representation or a prototype of the story that a magazine would publish a year from now if they were profiling your success. It generally includes a title, some featured images, headlines, and a summary of the story. You can get creative, have people draw pictures, additional elements that might help spark creativity.
Could be an anecdote about, or even some quotes from top customers or clients or patients that focus on the value your product or service is bringing. And it might also highlight which team members delivered which bits of value, which can help with roles and responsibilities down the road. And also build some more empathy across your team by understanding a little bit how each of us is contributing to a meaningful outcome.
Run it how you like, but it's just a fun and creative way to push everyone just for the day outside of the boundaries of timelines and pressure, and into a space of imagining what we could all be working together to make happen. Next, align on priorities. So with a shared vision in place, we've now gotta make sure that we are collectively prioritizing and deprioritizing the right stuff. And here's where some bullseye diagramming can come into play. This is just three concentric circles.
The innermost one is your top, your most critical priorities. The second is kind of your nice to have. And the third is your not now and maybe never. And the power of this exercise is that it forced us to look at projects and initiatives altogether on a single page and to prioritize them relative to each other. And as we prioritize, we are constantly looking back to our magazine mockups to ensure that we're choosing things that are designed to get us to that ending the fastest.
The bullseye limits. How much you can identify is critical, forcing your team to really talk about what is most essential before producing anything. And since each successive circle is larger than the last, you must carefully consider what is most critical, what is important, and what is maybe just peripheral. Often this means having to make some trade-offs, but the result is generally a clear delineation of your team's consensus about each item's relative importance.
It's a pretty simple means of making difficult decisions. And finally, find your enabling mechanisms. So priorities are a focus on products, programs, and initiatives. You know, the things we wanna build or deliver. But once we've aligned on those, I then like to move into what I call enabling mechanisms. And these for me, are the ways that we tend to spend our time in service of building those outcomes. It's our habits and practices and our rituals.
It's our meetings, our one-on-ones, our dashboards, our presentations. I love to use a two by two grid. You know, you draw a big plus sign to create four quadrants. The upper left says stop. The upper right is start. The bottom left is more, and the bottom right is less. And here's where we start looking at how we actually spend our days. And we question of how much of what we're currently doing actually supports our current priorities.
What meetings are we having that we need to continue or maybe shorten or make less frequent or to shut down completely? And what meetings aren't we having that we need to be all in service of achieving our vision and supporting our priorities here? We've gotta be ruthless. Nothing can be held sacred. Every standing meeting presentation dashboard has to be on the block.
Just because we've made a habit of it doesn't mean it holds more weight than the meeting we're not having because we can't find the time. So now we've created some connection and we've crafted a vision we're excited about, we've identified what to focus on and how to spend and not spend our time at this point. Have we changed the world? Probably not.
But if we've done this well, we've reconnected and realigned and shut down some time wasters and added some fresh value in my book, A pretty great way to spend a day. If you are looking for someone to run your next offsite or really if you just wanna bounce some ideas off someone, reach out anytime, Rachel, at lead above noise.com. And if your team or organization needs a boost, whether a workshop, a keynote, a pulse check, let's talk. You can find me@leadabovenoise.com.
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