by Ralph van Roosmalen, Management 3.0

As any distributed team, we know how important it is to get together now and then. It really makes the difference between a good and great team. We consider ourselves to be a great team 😊

14th June was the start of our fourth team retreat and this year we went to Prague in Czech Republic. We booked a hotel and a meeting room in the hotel. Everyone arrived on Thursday, we started with some drinks and catching up on a nice terrace next to the river Vltava.

Some of the highlights of our retreat.

We discussed why we exist as Management 3.0. What our purpose is and what we’d like to realize. You might ask how it’s possible that we didn’t know what our purpose was? d We try to practice what we preach but there are areas we can also improve. It took a while, and in the end, we crafted our purpose on Sunday morning. We had to review it a few times. The purpose of Management 3.0 is, for the moment:

Redefining leadership to create happier people and successful organizations.

Management 3.0 Purpose

And as Agile as we are, it will definitely change again in the future.

We reviewed our Supporters program. We launched it at the beginning of May and in addition to our 400+ facilitators we already have 69 supporters! As we’d like to grow it even more to bring our mission statement to life we discussed how to keep adding value for existing as well as new supporters, and I think we have some great stuff lined up.

Many facilitators have asked us: How can I play the Change Management Game? In so many ways, but we understand we can provide some more examples. We came up with a new example, a bit more complicated but we think it has some nice dynamics. We tried it out, made some improvements and it will be published in a few weeks via this blog.

We had a great time together! I heard someone saying a while ago at Agile Lean Ireland that: “Retreats are all about building team memories”. And so we did! There was the Nightmare bar, Sam struggling to install her new laptop, the too warm room, the Indian restaurant that was also way too hot, the terrace on the boat where we tried to find a seat three times and did not succeed, hiding from the rain under the tree. You get the point, we have many new team memories.

We discussed the new Master Program and also played the Change Management Game to help us with the new program. The game is meant to give insights into a change, and insights is what we got! We discussed two cards and almost completely redesigned the program. More on that later via this blog.

We also have a tradition, which is a fun icebreaker. Two truths and one lie. We play this every retreat. Each person writes down two things that are true about them and one lie. Someone collects all of the papers and throughout the work sessions, we pick a card and read them out one at a time. For each card, we try to guess who it is, and what the lie is. Because we play it every time it gets more and more personal. Yet there are still, so many things we can learn about each other.

What makes our team so great? Many things such as the discussion we had about our salary model. We use commitment levels, and there is some freedom on how to interpret a commitment level. We had a very open discussion about how each of us looks at a commitment level and how she or he uses them. I am proud of our team, that we can have open and respectful discussions about these kinds of topics.

We also tried out something new. We call it unstructured working time. For a few hours on Saturday afternoon, we opened our laptops, looked to our Trello board and started working. Some of us worked alone on some tasks, and others joined behind one laptop to finish something, I believe a distributed team can be very productive, but it was also great to work together as a team for a few hours. It’s definitely, something we’re going to to do again at the next retreat.

The last thing we did was play Moving Motivators. We hadn’t played it yet with the current team members. We played it because our facilitators teach it to other people. Of course, every person is different but it was surprising to see how often Freedom was mentioned in the top three of all team members. We value freedom as individuals and as a team.

It was a great retreat. Everyone arrived home safely home again. We are going to keep improving the Supporter’s program, and also start working on the Master program. Just follow us to keep updated on all the great stuff that lies ahead.

Learn more about our team and what we value.