This time of year is popular for team retreats, often set off-site to create spaces disconnected from daily work life and spark reflection in a different setting. They generally include after-action reviews, professional development and training, and planning for the future. Teams break bread together and spend some time on relationship-building activities.
I always valued these activities, both as a participant and as a leader. While I was planning a team retreat years ago, one of my mentors asked me why I called it a “retreat.” He graduated from West Point Military Academy, where he’d studied military strategy, and we talked about what a “retreat” means in the context of battle: the act or process of withdrawing from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable. It’s the process of receding from an established position. Armies generally retreat when something has gone wrong and they’re in a vulnerable position. While there may be times when retreating results in future gains, my mentor suggested that isn’t the image teams should have in their minds when they gather. What impact, subtle or otherwise, does the word “retreat” have on the goal of building my team up and strategically preparing for the future?
Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the past several years researching such impacts. In his first book, Contagious, Berger shares six principles of contagiousness, one of which is triggers — the stimuli that prompt people to think about related things. He advises us to consider context, including what cues make people think about your product or idea, as well as how you can use triggers to prompt behavior you seek.
Ultimately, the response I want to trigger from a strategic-planning, team-building session isn’t that we’re facing something difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable. I don’t want the team to feel, even subconsciously, that we must recede from something we’ve worked hard to achieve. I want our gatherings to help us make progress, move forward, and take some aggressive steps into the future.
So, what do I call these off-sites now? My mentor gave me the answer all those years ago: “You aren’t retreating,” he said. “You are advancing!”
While I wasn’t trying to get my new moniker to catch on, over the years, I’ve had staff and their friends and family share the idea of “team advances.” Maybe this concept could be a bit contagious: Let’s head into these meetings prepared to advance toward our future and energized for what will come next.
Katherine Primus is executive director of communications and donor relations for Wharton External Affairs.
