Our desire to engineer a quarterly offsite and have exercises that everybody gets the same thing out of, it works against us. A weekly taxical meeting, you got to be like that. Your daily check-ins, you got to be like that. But during that off-site, different people are going to get different things from different sessions. That's okay. Things kind of come to the surface at the right time. What you want people to do during a quarterly offsite

is be genuinely open about who they are, what their concerns are, where they're at. And that's

going to move the team and the projects forward faster than anything else. Welcome to At the Table,

the podcast that lives at the intersection between culture, leadership, teamwork, and organizational

health. I'm Pat Lanchone with my co-host, Cody. We're either both hosts or co-hosts. Today we're both

co-hosts, Cody. Let's do a co-host thing this time. Yeah, I like it. What's our subject, Cody?

It is death by off-site. That's right. The dreaded off-site meeting, something we've talked about for a long time.

We wrote a book called Death by Meeting where we talk about that there needs to be four different

kinds of meetings, really. One of the problems we talk about is that when we have meetings do,

when we try to have every kind of meeting in the same session, it never tastes very good.

And the offsite is the fourth kind of meeting. We should have daily check-ins that last five to ten minutes. We should have weekly

tacticals where we go over our goals and solve problems. We should have ad hoc strategic meetings

where we get together for an hour, two or three in a room and try to solve big strategic,

hairy problems. But then there should be a quarterly

meeting where you get out of your office. Doesn't mean you're going to the Bahamas, unless,

of course, maybe your company is in the Bahamas, then go into the Bahamas for your off-sites. It's a

good idea. But where you just get out of the office away from your day to day and you step back.

And this quarterly off-site has gotten such a

bad rap for good reasons over the years because it's been largely boondoggles where people go off

and they get drunk and they scuba dive, which you should never do at the same time or golf or

whatever else. And they call it an offsite meeting. And it's not really a because there's things that we need to do at off sites where we have to step back and

reevaluate what's going on and rebuild our relationships and reassess our strategy and our key

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