all-staff retreatFrom Retreat Week to Working Practice:
Rebuilding Cross-Team Collaboration at Scale
110 staff — 5 days — 87% success, by the team's own measure
The Situation
A global nonprofit organization, with staff spread across many countries, brought me in to design and lead a five-day, all-staff retreat in Europe, ahead of its annual planning cycle. Leadership already had a sense of where the pressure point was. They suspected cross-team collaboration was the thing standing between what they hoped to accomplish that year and what they could truly pull off. Staff worked across a range of specialized departments, rarely in the same room together. This retreat set out to spark org-wide behavior change: a shared read on the year ahead, sharper instincts for working across team lines, and a handful of live cross-functional projects tangibly further along by the time everyone flew home.
The Discovery
On paper, the ask was simply to teach people to collaborate better. I see my role as one that looks for the root causes others might miss and the systemic interconnections that need to be addressed alongside them. So I ran a Discovery cycle for about five weeks before the design locked. That included one-on-one interviews and group calls across departments, analysis of two prior organization-wide engagement surveys, a dedicated pre-retreat collaboration survey, a deeper look at the organization's culture and vision, and time spent watching live cross-team projects unfold in real time.
The patterns that emerged shed a bright light on the brief. Pre-retreat scores for collaboration sat in the muddy middle across most teams, and when people explained what got in the way, the answers converged on structure more than sentiment: uncertainty over who owned a decision, information or consultation arriving after the window to act on it had closed, project discipline that varied team to team like local weather. Almost no one described a colleague they didn't want to work with. What people described, again and again, was working well with each other one relationship at a time, or within their own functional teams, and losing that thread the moment more than two teams needed to move together.
Underneath it sat something larger: an organization that had outgrown its own operating model. It had started as a tightly unified structure where everyone shared context by default, and had grown into distinct specialist departments, each with its own mandate, its own priorities, and its own way of optimizing toward a particular goal. That's a healthy thing for a growing organization to do. But nobody had gone back and rebuilt the coordination habits for the structure that replaced it. Decisions got made and then evaporated, undocumented, unannounced. The teams most other people depended on to unblock their work were the last to hear a decision had been made, brought in once there was nothing left to shape.
That changed what the retreat had to be. Not just a skills gap, but a gap in norms and practices. The work grew to support teams in identifying who needs to be in the room before work starts, knowing who decides and when, and making sure the right people are informed of shifts, progress, and decisions in the right way. Three words scaffolded the week: Connect. Decide. Communicate.
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“What we were able to achieve in those groups over three days could have taken three weeks or more normally. It felt tangible, real, and took the theoretical into the practical in a way that felt more sticky, because we knew the projects we were working on would be a focus of our year.”
The Solution
Mornings built one of those three domains through discovery, dialogue, and practice. Afternoons sent people into real, cross-functional project teams to apply what they'd just learned to actual work headed into the year's plan. Nothing was hypothetical, and what people were learning created a real, felt sense of progress. That's what makes behavior change stick.
Teams were composed on purpose, across departments, so colleagues who may have never really worked together were now solving a real problem across the same table. As the week went on, the design adapted in response to what staff were experiencing, placing a stronger emphasis on decision-making and consultation. Teams practiced defining who owned a call, working through complex tradeoffs, capturing and sharing what got decided. The week also held onto and prioritized real unstructured time: shared meals, walks and talks in nature, room to just be near each other without an agenda. Trust has to exist before people will say the hard thing across a team line, which is why Connection came first. Decision-making and Communication don't hold without it underneath them.
The Results
From the post-retreat survey, two numbers stood out. Against the retreat's intended goals, sentiment was strongly positive: a 4.33 out of 5 mean score on whether the retreat achieved its aims of building shared understanding of the annual plan, strengthening cross-team collaboration skills, and advancing cross-team projects. Overall retreat satisfaction landed at 8.55 out of 10.
These are numbers from the weeks following the retreat which is a read on immediate sentiment, not a claim about what's held up since. Turning a strong week into a lasting behavior and culture change takes deliberate follow-through, and that work is ongoing this year: partnering with internal teams to embed the Connect, Decide, and Communicate habits into how people actually operate, through continued enablement and applying them to real, live work rather than letting them fade once everyone's back at their desks.
“I feel more empowered to clarify who the final decision maker is on any given team or project, and to map out all the stakeholders. I feel more connected to colleagues outside my team.”