Sokolove Success Blog – Our Perspective on Legal News that Matters

Corporate retreats have acquired a bad rap with many in the legal and business worlds. And not without good reason: we’ve all heard the horror stories or done time in offsites that were either poorly conceived, or badly facilitated, or whose teambuilding exercises could make a “Survivor” challenge seem positively tame by comparison.

So I read with some interest a recent piece on this subject in the Legal Intelligencer by Joel Rose, a management consultant to law firms.  Rose’s article dealt with the topic of law firm retreats, and he argued that a retreat could be a very effective management tool to accomplish many purposes.

I agree. A change of venue can help jumpstart a change in thinking. Why? Being out of the office levels the playing field and gives everyone a chance to contribute and be heard. And leaving the day-to-day distractions of work behind—even for a brief time–is an effective way to get leaders to think outside of the box and dream. Finally, it’s been my experience that people simply behave differently out of the office.

But like Rose, I think that retreats have to be done right – and for the right reasons — particularly in challenging economic times. A retreat really isn’t supposed to be a day at the beach – even though you may be staying near one.

First and foremost, the retreat must serve a specific purpose.  Rose says it could be as simple as asking the partners to take a step back to think longer-term about the firm’s objectives, or it could be to gather the firm’s leadership to tackle a specific problem. Both are good reasons to forcibly wrest the partners from the shackles of their client work to briefly come together to make important decisions.

But retreats can serve another important purpose and that is to force leadership to think critically about the evolution of their industry and to develop strategies and tactics for how a particular firm or company can respond to those changes.

At Sokolove Law, for example, we’ve made good use of short and highly focused retreats on a number of fronts: to bring key leaders together, to hone strategy to better serve the changing needs of our co-counsels, and to set high expectations for the execution of that strategy. (We’ve recently had two successful retreats with subsets of our staff for exactly these purposes.)

Whatever your reason for calling a company retreat, Rose says that good planning and execution are the keys to a successful outcome.  This includes setting a focused agenda, having the right people in the room, making sure that there is a session leader who can get the most out of the assembled group, and setting a clear plan for implementing recommendations and action plans coming out of the session.

If you follow these practical steps, I think you will find that the company retreat is nothing to run away from.