Entrepreneur, Professional Learner, & Proud Failure. Writes about sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship from the eyes of a learning and development nerd. Lead teams, manage people, scale a business, and learn better through the biweekly irreverent newsletter, the TL;DR.
The TL;DR, Prepping For Your Itty Bitty Offsite
December 3 - December 9
Small, But Planning to be Mighty
The word "offsite" tends to conjure up an image of big corporate suited executives at either a hotel conference room or a golf course, talking about synergy and SWOTs.
Screw that. Offsites are for everyone.
No matter your organization's size, corporate-y-ness, or access to golf courses, teams need to enter a different headspace in order to be truly strategic. If you try to envision the future while stuck doing the day-to-day, you're doing Future You a disservice.
An offsite can be three hours in a bar's back corner, it can be a couple two-hour blocks over a weekend, it can be an afternoon in a VR office space...anything that's outside the day-to-day work and intentionally designated to talk big-picture topics.
We're working on an Offsite-in-a-Box guide over here in Learn to Scale land, but here's a few nuggets specifically for a small team.
We Offsite In Order Swing Hard
A small team simply doesn't have the time and money to be inefficient. Doing a lot of little things won't substantially grow your impact: you gotta swing hard on a few things. Picking what to swing at and how hard to swing is exactly what an offsite is designed to thoughtfully do.
Getting Started Is Half The Battle
One of the biggest hurdles a small team has to get over is simply deciding that they need an offsite at all. When you can look at your entire organization at a bistro table, it can feel like you have a lot of agency to do what you want to do: Why do we need a special planning session; let's just get coffee!
However, the point of the offsite isn't just to give yourself agency to make plans- it's designed to orient you into making better plans. If your quarterly strategy is something you kinda talked about at Starbucks last week, it's tempting to go to Starbucks this week and change it...or not follow it at all.
Your team deserves a special space to dream, discuss the best dream, and then say no to the other dreams.
The Other Half Of The Battle
Planning an effective small team offsite starts the same as a big-team offsite: begin with answering these three questions.
A Two-Part Offsite
If you're a small team (2-10 people) where you share decision-making, you could invite the whole crew to an offsite. However, if your small team has a number of contractors/part-time staff, invite them for a portion of the overall offsite. Consider having a second portion where the core offsite attendees present their work for feedback: everyone gets to have input but you don't have to bore (and pay!) your contract graphic designer.
More Offsite Goodies Incoming
We're hard at work organizing an eBook to make offsite planning easy! Stay tuned through the next few TL;DRs where we'll unveil more sneak previews for delicious strategy planning.
A TL;DR from the CRO
Allow yourself to grow out your winter haircut and sink into your shaggy personality.
-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer
Recent Articles on the Blog
Leadership through Listening
Effective listening is a simple way to drastically improve your business performance. Here's how to model leadership using listening skills.
How To End A Meeting Now
Stuck in a meeting and trying to wrap up? Use these one-liners to end a meeting gracefully.
Rock tumbling update:
Every week I take the most recent batch of stones out of the rock tumbler to put in fresh water and grit. A week of tumbling leaves behind a pretty thick grey slurry that should not go down the drains, lest it harden into concrete.
When it was summer/fall, I would go into the backyard and dump the slurry out on a gravel path and rinse off the rocks with the garden hose. It was a peaceful exercise and I would get delighted when rinsing off the rocks to see how they fared over the week.
Now that it's winter, the hose is shut off, so my water source is my kitchen.
On the 2nd floor.
I could pour the slurry into a bucket, rinse the stones off in the kitchen, and then trudge the bucket down a narrow flight of winding stairs to the backyard.
Or I could just throw the slurry out the window.
I've been throwing it out the window.
Don't tell my downstairs neighbor.
Discretely hucking rock water,
Dan from Learn to Scale
Opt-out from the newsletter | Unsubscribe from all emails | Update your Preferences | www.learntoscale.us, Boston, MA 02119
PS. Even villains listen to music while they focus on their terrible work.
Dan Newman
Entrepreneur, Professional Learner, & Proud Failure. Writes about sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship from the eyes of a learning and development nerd. Lead teams, manage people, scale a business, and learn better through the biweekly irreverent newsletter, the TL;DR.
A bi-weekly roundup of quietly suppressed opinions October 4 - October 17 What If Your Slack Got Wikileaked? Picture this: imagine that whatever you and your team use for private communication (Slack, Teams, long rambling email threads, texts, etc.) became public knowledge. And when I mean public, I don't only mean to other internal team members, but also clients, prospects, job candidates, etc. Yes, even Charlie. He's...horrified. And hurt. That mental image that's giving you the willies is...
Hey Reader, For six years, I’ve been a founder. The journey has been a winding road of trial, error, and a whole lot of learning. I’ve sold to HR departments, consulted for startups, and chased opportunities across different industries, always feeling like I was just one step away from "figuring it out." I was a generalist trying to solve everyone's problems. And it was exhausting. But looking back, a clear pattern emerged. Every time I did my best work, every time a client had a true...
A bi-weekly roundup of insights from six years of failure September 20 - October 3 Stitching A New Birthday Suit Next week, Learn to Scale turns six years old. I've been a professional failure for almost six years. I don't know about you, but birthdays make me reflective. It's a special event that connects you to previous versions of yourself: the person who used to believe one thing is the same person that you are today, but you've changed what you believe. And every year, the Dan from...