Location, Location, Location

Why out-of-office meetings are worth the effort.

Charles D. Morgan

IT’S ALWAYS A hassle to tear your leadership team away from their everyday agendas—their client phone calls and their group huddles and their internal problem-solving—and instead to uproot them to some out-of-office location where, for two or three days, they’re expected to stop looking at their smartphones and turn their attention to Big Picture issues. It’s such a hassle, in fact, that over my many years of experience as a CEO I’ve tried to hold planning meetings in the office as well as in several different out-of-office locations but still in-town. 

What I’ve learned is that there's something special about the psychology of everybody getting away and having—crazy as it may sound—breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinners together. It creates an atmosphere, a mind-set, that's different from that of being in the office and trying to carry on the everyday business. Everyone drifts into what I call Planning Mode. It's like something in the brain shifts gears: We're in planning mode now. We’re going to be talking about the future.

In planning mode, you don't feel the deadlines like you do when you meet in the office, or even in town. At both Acxiom and First Orion, we would come in on a Monday and finish on Tuesday, or come in on Tuesday and finish on Wednesday. We always began the session the first afternoon, then had drinks and dinner, then breakfast the next morning, and wrapped up our meeting sometime that second afternoon. We tried to keep it loose and flexible, but if we needed to go to 5 p.m., we would do it. The goal was to finish with a concrete result. 

Sometimes we would have three-day meetings, and in that case, we would have the leadership team sessions Monday through Tuesday morning, and the rest of the people would come in by noon of that second day. At that point, we might go from 15 people in the leadership group to 32 people. Well, 32 people are too many to do any kind of planning, so in the bigger group we would focus on having presentations and small-group break-out sessions.

After all these years of leading such meetings, I’m still not sure exactly why the off-site ones work the way they do. But I do know this: In planning mode you settle into a beneficial rhythm. We’re no longer in operational mode. Everybody looks forward to drinks and dinner together, and sometimes the business talk carries over to dinner, but more often than not the dinners are for team building. I suspect this is because at these off-site retreats we all feel the freedom—the space—to shed, at least for a little while, our office personas, which in turn loosens any hierarchical boundaries or restraints. We become just a group of people who happen to be colleagues. 

So the environment really matters. But the success of these off-site get-togethers depends entirely on everyone’s becoming comfortable working in that environment, which puts a whole lot of pressure on the planning and the tone-setting for these meetings. And here’s another thing I know for sure: There are more ways to do it wrong than there are to do it right. 

But that’s a subject for another post! 

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