How to plan a board retreat |
On Board Online • Leadership Development • October 13, 2008
By Doug Eadie
Many school districts around the country, along with other nonprofit and public organizations, have found that a retreat for district leaders can produce powerful results. The term “retreat” is typically used to describe a special work session lasting at least a full day, and often two days. Anything less than a day is a meeting, not a retreat.
A retreat is held away from the office and focuses on accomplishing work that cannot feasibly be done in regular board meetings. Typically, the full board, the superintendent and senior administrators participate.
It’s really important that you hold your retreat in a comfortable setting as far away from district headquarters as feasible, since a different location will help participants rise above the “business-as-usual” mentality, freeing their minds for “out-of-the-box” work.
The location doesn’t have to be a resort. I’ve seen modestly priced, nearby hotel meeting rooms work well, and you might even be able to arrange for donated space, such as the board room of a local corporation. The point is to avoid holding a “suspend the rules” meeting in your boardroom, where the rules come all too easily to mind.
Because of the unique climate that a retreat provides, leadership teams can accomplish extraordinary tasks, such as:
- Updating district values and vision statements.
- Identifying critical issues facing your district.
- Brainstorming possible change targets to address the identified issues.
- Thinking through improvements in school board structure and process to strengthen governing performance.
- Coming up with ways to enhance the board-superintendent working partnership.
However, retreats are also high-risk endeavors. A poorly designed or poorly facilitated meeting may leave everyone feeling bored. There can be far more damaging outcomes, such as a visceral debate that fractures consensus and produces oodles of bad feelings, to boot.
Experience has taught me that if you don’t take steps to minimize the risk, you’d be better off skipping the retreat. Fortunately, there are four steps that a retreat organizer can take to ensure that a retreat produces powerful results with minimum risk: (1) Involve the board in retreat design. (2) Set precise objectives. (3) Build in active participation. (4) Program in systematic follow-through.
1. Involve the board in retreat design.
Consulting board members will give the organizer the benefit of their experience will build a sense of ownership among board member members in the upcoming retreat. A very simple approach that I’ve seen work well countless times is to create an “ad hoc retreat design committee” involving board leadership and the superintendent to put together a detailed design for the retreat: its objectives, structure, and the blow-by-blow agenda.
Form a retreat design committee. The board of a mid-size suburban district in the Midwest, for example, involved their board president, vice president, secretary/treasurer, and chair of the policy and planning committee, along with the superintendent. This ad hoc committee created a six-page retreat description that was sent to all participants three weeks before the retreat.
2. Set precise objectives.
There’s no way you can come up with a workable structure and process for your retreat if you don’t specify what you want the event to achieve. This is one of the key responsibilities of your ad hoc retreat design committee.
For example, among the retreat objectives set by the design committee mentioned established above were: “to clarify our district’s strategic framework – its values, vision, and strategic directions; to understand the implications for our district of national, state and local conditions and trends; to identify strategic issues facing our district.”
Editor’s note: Be sure the objectives you set are consistent with New York State’s Open Meetings Law, which forbids boards from conducting public business at retreats. It’s a good idea to consult your school attorney to be sure your retreat objectives are not in conflict with the Open Meetings Law.
3. Plan for active participation.
One of the best ways to achieve participation is to use breakout groups led by board members to generate information and ideas in your retreat. For example, one school district used nine different breakout groups led by board members at one of its retreats, including groups titled “vision,” “values/culture,” “strategic issues,” and “characteristics of a sound board-superintendent partnership.” Of course, breakout groups can bomb badly if they aren’t meticulously designed to produce specific results through well-defined methodology and if the board members who lead them aren’t well prepared to play the facilitator role.
4. Plan for formal follow-through.
Spending only a day or two together dealing with really complex, high-stakes matters isn’t enough time to come up with final answers about anything. Many school districts have reached agreement as part of the retreat design process on how follow-through will be handled. One district, for example, required that the professional facilitator it retained for the retreat prepare a detailed set of action recommendations, and created a steering committee for the express purpose of reviewing the recommendations and taking them to the full board for decision-making.
Retreats are probably the best way to involve your board creatively in generating critical products that can’t be handled in regular board meetings, so if you haven’t made use of retreats as a board involvement tool, you’re well advised to. Planning ahead can help you make the most of it.
Doug Eadie is president and chief executive of Doug Eadie & Company, a firm specializing in building strong board-superintendent partnerships. He is the author of Meeting the Governing Challenge (Governance Edge, 2008). You can reach Eadie at Doug@Doug Eadie.com or (800) 209-7652.