Building High-Impact Board-CEO Partnerships Blog - Doug Eadie & Company

Friday, February 27, 2009

A few weeks ago I facilitated a 1 ½-day board-CEO-senior management retreat for a nonprofit health services client. It was without question a highly successful event, serving as a really powerful tool for getting on top of strategic change in a highly volatile environment. Not only did we update the organization’s values and vision statement, we also examined pertinent conditions and trends, identified a number of high-stakes issues that are now being reviewed by the board’s planning committee, and brainstormed possible change initiatives to deal with the issues. And in addition to achieving our substantive objectives, to judge from what several participants said in the closing session on Saturday, people went home feeling very satisfied and energized – a truly important “process spinoff.”

I’m sure one reason the retreat was so successful was our use of 9 breakout groups led by board members, which met in three rounds of three each over the course of our 1 ½ days together. I was especially impressed by the power of creative involvement to transform a board member who came into the retreat planning process as a harsh critic. A retired former senior banking executive, this board member had, according to the CEO, not only opposed hiring me as the retreat facilitator, he also thought having a retreat was a waste of time. When the CEO, who had only been on the job for a couple of months, and I chatted about the composition of the “ad hoc retreat design committee” that we were putting together to oversee my development of the agenda, we spent several minutes discussing our vociferous board critic as a possible member. My only question was where this critic stood vis a vis the new CEO: A strong supporter? Neutral? A detractor? When I learned that he was solidly in the CEO’s corner, that settled the question: he would definitely be asked to serve on the ad hoc committee. He was, and he accepted, albeit reluctantly.

In the process of developing the objectives, structure, and agenda for our 1 ½-day retreat, our resident critic metamorphosed into a supporter of the event, although frequently sharing his concern that it wasn’t likely to accomplish a great deal. What took him the rest of the way – from reluctant supporter to ardent participant in, and owner of, the event – was his serving as leader of one of the brainstorming groups. Having his 75 or so minutes in the sun, taking his breakout group through its assigned tasks and making the group’s report to all participants in plenary session, was transformative.

This experience reinforced a lesson I’ve re-learned countless times over the 25 years I’ve been designing and facilitating retreats: Bring your harshest critics into the fold, make them part of the family, thereby turning them into owners, rather than leaving them on the outside where their negativity and opposition can cause real harm. But the transformation is likely to be successful only if you make sure that your breakout group leader/resident critic is well prepared to play the leader role, primarily by training him or her on facilitation techniques and making sure he or she has a firm grasp of the jobs to be accomplished by the group. Successfully leading a group is a sure-fire path to ardent ownership, but letting your resident critic fall short in the role would risk transforming a critic into a real enemy.

2/27/2009 3:35:12 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Disclaimer | Comments [0] | Trackback

On this page....

Turning a Retreat Critic Into an Owner