🖤 Open Works #40 Facilitating Your Newly Formed Leadership Team's Away Day

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📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🧭 Edition 39: How To Diagnose And Fix Workload Issues In Your Org

🧑‍🎨 Edition 38: How To Build An Innovation Engine - a change agent’s guide to borrowing good stuff from other disciplines…

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

Newly formed leadership team. Not just the founders anymore. There is agreement that you need *waves hands in the air* “alignment” or some such like, and big surprise…the job has fallen to you to make it so via an exceptionally crafted offsite. Next week if you please. Sound familiar? 🙂 

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

Simple is beautiful. Go with an agenda that flows down from: Vision → Strategy → Team and use facilitation structures that focus on inclusivity without falling into word-smithing doom spirals!

Let’s get into it! 👇️ 

The Macro Flow For A Solid First Leadership Team Offsite

Vision → Strategy → Us, The Leadership Team

1. Vision → What are we building and why does it matter?

2. Strategy → What choices are we making to focus our direction of travel?

3. Team Ways of Working → What’s our job as SLT, how are we going to operate as a unit? what do we expect of each other and how will we do our best work together?

💡 If you have more than one day, then great places you cango next are:

• Company-wide culture – Where do we see the opportunities in our ways of working? Where is it currently off?

• Problem solving – Tackle 1-2 wicked problems in small groups using tools like “How Might We…” or pre-mortems.

• Org design and priorities – Map out how your structure and goals need to evolve to support strategy.

• Capability bets – What people, tools or systems are we missing to get where we want to go?

📌 Thinking: The best away days don’t decide everything. They create shared language and momentum—so people leave with more trust, clarity and energy than they came in with.

Part 1: Vision

Start with the future you are trying to build aka direction. Everyone’s got ideas in their head about “where we’re going”, this is a great opportunity to help surface those ideas and turn them into a shared narrative.

📍 This part depends a lot on the kind of CEO you have. Some will want to lead out on this, others will want more co-creation with the rest of the leadership team. If it's the former, they should own this part of the day.

My favourite way to run this bit:

1. Use a 1-2-4-All to gather input on what success looks like 3 years from now.

2. Prompt: “If we were wildly successful, what would our product/company have changed for customers?”

3. Start wide, then converge into a rough single statement.

What’s a good vision statement look like?

Plenty of different opinions on this, but i think good principles are: clear, memorable and evocative. In practice, i think that looks like:

Part 2: Strategy

Strategy is about choices.

This is typically where I spend the heart of the day.

• Break the team into pairs or trios. Have a discussion and use magic whiteboard and sticky notes to complete:

  • “To win in the next 12 months, we must…”

  • “We are not doing…”

  • “We will prioritise [X] even over [Y]”

• Regroup and synthesise live

• Use a quadrant to plot tangibles*.

*You can do simple buckets of:

🟢 Must do | 🔴 Must not do | 🟡 Nice to do | ⚫ Distractions

But, any Impact x Value style prioritisation framework will work here e.g:

A note on Even/Over Statements if you’ve not come across them

An Even/Over statement is a phrase containing two positive things, where the former is prioritised over the latter.

These are super useful in this setting because they force you to make hard choices. So if your strategy session ends up with 20 massive initiatives in the “WE MUST DO” bucket. Use Even Over statements to force focus and make hard choices.

📌 Bonus read: how to create your first people strategy

Part 3: Team Ways of Working

User Guide To Me

Before the day:

• Get each SLT member to create a “User Guide to Me” or “Personal User Manual” (how I do my best work, what you’ll notice if i’m in conflict, how I like feedback).

• Share them with the rest of the team beforehand, to absorb

💡Creating a user manual allows you to reflect and be self-aware, while also being proactive about letting others know how you work best.During the day:

On the day

• Share personal user manuals in small groups → Discuss surprises, overlaps, tensions.

• Co-create a Team Charter:

  • Purpose of the SLT

  • Decision-making rules

  • Communication norms

  • Conflict expectations

💡If a team charter doesn't feel like you. A simple retrospective on how you've been working together is also a great activity here. Try to create some safe space to reflect inwards and come out the other side with a new agreement. 

Role cards (bonus)

Adam and I consider ourselves quite fortunate in that we get to see how a lot of very different leadership teams operate.

A pattern that we see often is: even experienced teams have fuzzy or conflicting ideas about what each other’s jobs really are!

Specifically:

• What am I actually accountable for?

• What are you actually accountable for?

It’s not always because people are unclear or too afraid to challenge this, it’s sometimes because the org has changed, and the old expectations no longer fit. Other times, there’s been no space to name and align on it explicitly. And sometimes, it’s just because no one ever wrote it down.

So if that sounds like you, one thing you might consider is a simple alignment session on each other’s top 3-5 accountabilities in the form of a Role Card.

🛠️ Quick Facilitation Format

Solo (5–10 min): Each leader writes down their top 3–5 accountabilities: what they believe they own.

Pair + Share (15 min): Take turns presenting to the group. Invite clarifying questions only.

Group Align (15–20 min): Discuss overlaps, gaps, and surprises. Where do assumptions diverge? What needs updating?

If You Only Have One Day...

Here’s how your one-day agenda might look:

Things That I’ve Learned Work

• Decisions Not Discussions → End each block with: “What did we just decide?”

• Clarity Check → Ask: “On a scale of 1–10, how clear are we on this now?”

• Documentation = Power → Snap pics, take notes, and remember to ship a 1-pager after the session to the wider team. “This is what we did, this is what we decided, this is why, this is what’s next”

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 1-2-4-All Liberating Structure [Miro Template]

⚒️ Creating a team charter [WantToWorkThere.com]

⚒️ The Team Canvas

🐟️ Fearless Culture’s article on even/over statements

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

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With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

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