Many of us in the corporate world experience the occasional “offsite.” At work, our teams may take timeouts a few times a year and spend 1-3 days focusing on strategy and goals, relatedness, team dynamics, problem or opportunity solving, and usually some fun as well. Offsites may be held in exotic locales or even onsite or near to the workplace but the one thing they have in common is this: they take the team out of their normal day-to-day activities to focus as individuals as well as a group around common purposes and goals.
While corporate teams are well-versed in the art of the offsite, it wasn’t until this past year that my husband suggested we start taking family offsites. When he first said it, I said, “You are a genius, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.” Thus began our commitment to family offsites. We’ve committed to family offsites at least twice year where we block out the usual activities of making dinner, doing laundry, pet care, and responding to over a 100 emails a day to focus on us, our family, what we want to create together, what our opportunities are, and the like. Oh yeah, and we throw in some teambuilding fun for good measure! Our first offsite was at the Oregon coast last summer over a weekend and our most recent is taking place while we are vacationing on the Big Island in Hawaii but really, they could have been held anywhere.
Why do a family offsite? To get clearer on what your family goals are, to improve communication and talk about things that maybe aren’t being talked about but should be, to clarify assumptions, and most importantly make plans for how to achieve more of what you want from your life together as a family. You can do this over the course of a few hours in a day or break it up over several days. If you have a larger family or need for more dialogue, don’t rush it and take more time. Sometimes, it takes more talking to get down to the nuggets of what really matters to an individual or to the group. Consider hiring a facilitator who is a neutral third party if you want to make it even more productive.
What type of agenda should you have? It will vary depending on the family, where it is in its evolution or maturity, etc. For an example, here's our most recent agenda and a few notes about each segment:
· Pick 3 words to describe what’s on your mind or most relevant to you and come prepared to share with others why you chose them, what they mean for you.
· What is our vision or goals for our family over the next 5 years? This one was done as a brainstorm activity and will be sorted and narrowed further over the coming month.
· What do we, as a family, value? This, too was a bit of a brainstorming activity but each of us had done a personal values exercise in recent months so we were able to come up with a list that really spoke to both of us fairly quickly.
· How will we go after living our vision and collective values? What steps do we need to take? Do we want to set any boundaries, etc.? Given some time constraints in our most recent offsite, this work will be revisited within one month to get to a more concise list of actions.
What do you think could come from your own family offsite?
If you have conducted one before, what was it like, what worked and what didn’t?
