Our recipe for success. And an Allegory (best bit).

On Friday the senior leaders at Interactive Workshops London office got our of the office to connect, refresh, discuss and align. Getting out of the office is fundamental to a leadership teams success in the long term. Here's some of our tips and discoveries

1. Connection is key. The IW leadership team like each other very much, more than most senior leadership teams we work with. Yet, even despite all that, liking isn't enough. We need to connect. We need to connect more deeply than we do in management meetings. Like a good wine, we need a little time to breath. What is surprising to me is that, in creating a space, it's clarity that emerges.
2. Souls before goals. At the start we kept saying "lets not talk about people till at the end". But we couldn't do it. People are the lifeblood. People are the resources. People are the people. Like most leadership teams we care, much more than it probably shows. It's too easy to get busy, and forget to make it clear how much we as leaders care about the people we work with and judge so many of our actions by what others might think or feel.
3. All of business is a selection of trade offs. Sometimes you can get real synergy. Leadership teams constantly have to juggle these paradox's. Long or short term decisions. Profit or investment. Balance sheet or Bonuses. Performance and Potential. There are examples where we can straddle these paradox's in the same way the trade off you or me can be turned into We. Leadership offsites are about finding them.
4. We are the grown ups. None of our core team is over 50 (yet). All the decisions and challenges we face in a company are our responsibility.
5. Take no regrets bets. In our companies nearly 20 year history we have taken only two truly non-reversible decisions. Both major investments with multi year strategic impact, all of which must not be reversed in the short term. Strategy that changes are tactics by another name. But, with that, nearly every other decisions can be reversed, tweaked, adjusted. So keep making decisions and don't get paralysed.

A Story About a Boat.

At lunchtime we went rowing. We took a four person boat, designed to be rowed by two people.

We started with two people rowing, and two guiding passengers. We went pretty fast. And fairly straight. We were happy. Then we tried to add more speed. We switched to 3 people rowing. We got more speed. Much more speed. But we became unbalanced, and started weaving from side to side because instead of two individuals each with two oars, two of the individuals had their own oar. At this point the one person not rowing seemed like a captain. They couldn't get us to row straight. So even though we were faster, we were slower. And wasting effort. As a result, our team dialogues changed from self congratulatory to self critical.

Then we added another person on the oars. With four people rowing we had more power, but nobody was looking where we were going. Our coordination issues didn't double, they squared. In no particular order we nearly hit a swimmer, another boat, a stationary sail boat and two motor cruisers in 5 minutes. Without either one person on a pair of oars or a captain, we had no anticipation and no natural alignment.

We swapped back a bit but in doing or change process we lost one oar overboard. We circled back, but in doing so we nearly got stuck in some reeds.

At this point one very sweaty person pointed out they had been rowing the whole time without a break, so we swapped a bit more back to two rowers losing more time. Now we were back to the right formation, and it was only at this point we realised all our real success was because we were rowing with the tide, and with hour almost up, we had to row AGAINST the tide to get back to the boat hire on time. In moving around we realised, that, in fact, instead of the skills of individuals being the only factor, one of the pairs of oars had terrible rowlocks. There is a life lesson there.

Just when we needed our energies the most we were most depleted. The goal just wouldn't come. Some of the "captains" kept saying "we are nearly there". But we weren't. On and on an on we rowed in the blazing sunshine. The final tricky bit of rowing into the dock was best done by one person. Sunburned. Thirsty. Delighted.

And finally, everyone who was wearing a wedding ring got blisters right where the ring meets the palm. Read into that what you will.