Tune up your EQ

It is with deep regret that the family and friends of Galba Bright wish to inform you of Galba’s untimely passing.

Galba Francis Adeyinka Bright, Human Resource Consultant and Author, died at his office on March 31 of natural causes, leaving his wife Sandra, numerous family members, friends, associates, readers and fans.

Out of respect, the Tune up your EQ website created by Galba will therefore be offline for a short period.

We thank you for your understanding at this time and appreciate the interest you have shown in Galba’s work and ideas.

Should you wish to post comments about the personal impact of Galba’s thoughts and writings, please feel free to click here or go to his blog.

The Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Galba Bright will be held at St. John’s Methodist Church, Montego Bay, Jamaica, at 1.00 pm on Sunday, April 19, followed by interment in Dovecot of St. James Memorial Park, Orange, St. James.

5 Emotionally Intelligent Retreat Tips

December 18th, 2006 by Galba Bright

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Do your people enjoy your organisation’s retreats? Do they leave feeling purposeful and energised or do they emerge bored, stiff and uninspired?

The key to a successful retreat is to find practical ways to get participants’ emotional commitment. Here are my 5 top tips for building Emotional Intelligence into your retreats.

1. Is the way you normally conduct your work meetings appropriate for the retreat? Establish and share ground rules about the event with those who are due to take part.Get their buy-in again at the beginning of the retreat before you kick off proceedings.

2. Does everyone know why they’re here? Do they know what is expected of them? Ensure a good level of participation by designing a clearly understood process where everyone feels involved. Approaching your agenda as a shopping list that you jump into straight away on the day “because time is too short” simply won’t cut it.

3. Share as much written information with participants before the event so they can review and process it. Tabling volumes of papers on the day weighs down proceedings, prevents flexibility and ruins your chances of making good decisions.

4. Find out how participants feel. Robert Cooper, author of “Executive EQ” recommends a great approach. At the start of the retreat ask everyone present to rate their current
level of open-mindedness and energy and their ability to focus on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest. This tip has worked well for me on retreats that I’ve facilitated recently. Proceedings have moved quickly and energy levels have remained high

5. Bring variety into the event and keep participants involved by using brainstorming, mini-presentations and small group discussions at appropriate points.
We often act as if we leave our emotions at the door when we attend retreats. Let’s acknowledge them and use that awareness to make them productive, valuable and enjoyable.

These tips form part of our Retreats That Work™ approach. Would these tips will work for your organisation? What other tips would you add?

Read this post to learn about the values that inform the Retreats That Work™ approach.

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10 Responses to “5 Emotionally Intelligent Retreat Tips”

Ellen Weber Says:
January 11th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Galba, what great insights to help us launch winning retreats. Thanks for the posts — you site is a treasure chest of insights that will help business leaders in any field.

I especially appreciated the golden thread through these tips - to help participants come onboard in dynamic ways. It dawned on me that this interaction would enrich the retreat materials as well as enhance the retreat outcomes.

Would you agree that it’s also a good idea to invite folks to ask questions ahead, based on what they think they’ll get out of the retreat? Would that open more mental curiosity for the retreat topics? Perhaps the questions could be passed in at the opening session, and then answered along the way - or made a point of discussion at regular intervals.

Great ideas here Galba, and it reminds me how rich retreats can be when these mental tools come into play! Thanks for the heads up.
Galba Bright Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
You’re welcome Ellen. I think the 5 Tips have now become 6 :)at least. Your suggestion about inviting participants’ questions beforehand as a means of stumulating involvement is great. If we want people to be committed, we need to involve them every step of the way and demonstrate that we’re willing to respond to their suggestions and inputs.

In my experience, the biggest barrier to a successful retreat is fear amongst the participants. Although fear is a notoriously hard issue to surface information and involvement are good antidotes. That’s why your suggestion that facilitators should remain energised by drinking plenty of water is an excellent one because they’ll need all of their resources to help people to negotiate the human processes involved.

These observations all speak to the need having a conscious design process and aligning everything that you do, eg choice of location, room layout etc. with your desired outcomes. It reminds me of your excellent table about using your beliefs to achieve business outcomes which I have on my wall.

Ellen, I notice that you described these approaches as “mental tools.” I agree with your description. Does this tell us something about the resources that we use to deal effectively with emotional situations?
Ellen Weber Says:
January 13th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Great question, Galba. Wow! Emotions for me are in no way separate from intellect - as I suspect the same is true for you! They enhance the brain, though, only when we learn to wield them as resources and not leak them as deficits:-)

Galba, I’ll be leading a retreat soon and I will open with a 2-footed question we will chase down together for the entire time, using all of the intelligences.

I am so looking forward to the question and the responses — to see how many mental tools we’ll use to give every participant a robust experience and strong takeaway - the kind that people deserve:-).

Retreats offer amazing space for the mind to reboot — and it’s a pity not to capture their magic the way folks like Norman Vincent Peale did. Great post!
Galba Bright Says:
January 13th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Ellen:

I think you absolutely nailed it in your first paragraph. I’d love to use this quote in future Learning Programmes. Not a word wasted and full of insight.

The great thing about tools like two footed questions is that they do achieve better outcomes than what we’re used to using conventionally.

Do let me know the outcomes and what you learn. When people have a memorable learning experience that also assists people to accept methods that might otherwise seem quirky.

It puts a lot of onus on innovative facilitators to prepare effectively. With this in mind, I’d love to know what method you find to be the best way to prepare for a retreat scheduled for the following day? How would you persuade other facilitators to adopt this practice?

I enjoyed writing the Norman Vincent Peale post and I’m glad you liked it.
Florian Says:
January 28th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Hi,
I found your blog via google by accident and have to admit that youve a really interesting blog
Just saved your feed in my reader, have a nice day
Galba Bright Says:
January 29th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Thanks Florian.

Enjoy your reading.
Tanika Williams Says:
April 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I do find your post on retreats interesting. I personally have never been to one. However, I intend to have one for my school club’s executive team and some one of affluence has asked me if I have ever thought of hosting retreats?

I have personally committed self to gather all available information on this topic and hence I take these information as learning materials.

I like the point about establishing ground rules and getting info. to the possible participants way ahead of time so that a great deal may be achieved.

I love the embracing of total involvement of the participants after all they are the primate reason for hosting the retreat, anyway.

I endorse the suggestion by Ellen concerning questions from the target group after all their needs need to be fulfilled that’s one medium via which a retreat reap success.

However, I now question - is there a way by which the facilitator may get a feedback as to how each participant feels? In other words, is it possible to ask each participant to give a quantiative summary of at least two strengths and weakenesses of such a process/presentation? Or what they think could have been done better? I hope you are able to follow and understand my line of thought.
Galba Bright Says:
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Hello Tanika:

Thanks for your interest in retreats. I’ll share an overview of all the major things that I seek to do.
1)I try to gauge where people are emotionally at the beginning of the retreat.
2)I check, by asking questions as we go and by observing particpants’ body language.
3)I ask people to rate their levels of understanding of the planned next steps. I also ask about their level of commitment.
4)I ask everyone to complete an evaluation report.
5)I review the summary report with the project sponsor and I ask them a series of open ended questions to help evaluate the impact of the retreat.
I hope this is helpful. I’ll write more about this in a while.
By the way, with your teaching skills, your involvement in the Living Values Project an your well developed self awareness you have some great transferable skills that you could use to become an effective facilitator.
Brigitt Says:
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:58 am
Galba

Wonderful information on Retreats - it is that time for my company and in fact the first. You have some good tips which are basics and although do not seem to have any diredct relationship to EQ do impact if they are not understood. Thanks!

I am curious to find out how many HR professionals are using this site? Many companies are using psychometric tests to employ but are we using these tests to develop our teams? I have been able to use some of your information to help craft better interview questions - the more youo have on a candidate - the better the selection!

Keep the articles coming,
Brigitt
Galba Bright Says:
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Hello Brigitt:

Thank you for your comments. I encouraged to know that you find the info. helpful. In the Caribbean, you’re probably well placed to know whether your counterparts are using the Tune up your EQ resources. Do encourage others and tell me how I can improve your experience as a reader.

There are some psychometric assessments that can be applied to teams. May I ask you Brigitt, does your gut feeling as an interviewer play a role in your recruitment decisions?