Sunday, February 16, 2025
As a leader, when you identify a problem and propose a solution – whether it’s leadership training, a retreat, or coaching – how can you be sure that there isn’t a gap between your understanding, and the underlying organizational reality? Understanding this gap can mean the difference between addressing a surface-level issue, and solving the root causes.
As a leader, when you identify a problem and propose a solution – whether it’s leadership training, a retreat, or coaching – how can you be sure that there isn’t a gap between your understanding, and the underlying organizational reality? Understanding this gap can mean the difference between addressing a surface-level issue, and solving the root causes.
I see this often when asked to facilitate a retreat. The rationale for the retreat is usually clear: leadership training, team-building, or maybe to kick off (or finalize) a common task together, such as strategic planning, budgeting, etc. On the surface, this seems straightforward. But diving deeper during the prep, in individual conversations with each participant, a different picture often emerges – one that can reveal differing priorities, challenges, or opportunities. So what to do?
Here are three insights, to start:
- Symptom vs. Root Cause: What leadership perceives as the solution may only address surface-level symptoms. External perspective can often uncover deeper organizational dynamics that need attention.
- Multiple Perspectives Matter: While individual viewpoints provide valuable data points, the real insights emerge when each participant describes the same challenge from different angles. Sadly, there is no “AI” that can do this real-time type of pattern recognition as yet: it is in the conversations with each person.
- Strategic Alignment: Sometimes the stated need and the actual requirement align closely. Other times, the gap between them presents an opportunity to reduce friction and misalignment.
Retreat facilitator or “gap discoverer”? Very often I’ve been asked to facilitate a retreat or other critical meeting. Here’s a secret – the quality of the facilitator’s “performance” (and therefore the impact of the retreat itself) is directly related to the work effort beforehand. Beyond what is learned about the culture and dynamics, much more can be uncovered that will impact both how the retreat is delivered, and even the agenda itself. As a “gap discover”, this is what is possible…
- Ability to gather unfiltered feedback
- Pattern recognition across multiple stakeholders
- Objective perspective on organizational dynamics
- Experience with similar situations across industries
This Week’s Action Plan
Every organization has critical team meetings – whether they be retreats, professional development days, team planning meetings, post-mortems, etc. If you think that they can be done better, consider HOW you use your external facilitator. Before launching your next critical team meeting, consider these questions:
What is the mechanism to gather input from everyone around the table (and beyond), beforehand?
Who will analyze any patterns that emerge from this collective input?
How will this impact the agenda, so that you are addressing root causes, not just symptoms?
How might an external perspective validate your assumptions, or bring outside-of-the-box thinking to bear?
Related Posts: Building Front-line Buy-in, Problem Solving with Appreciative Inquiry, The Power of Diversity
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