Article written by Kirsten Goodwin
For every leadership Away Day, you lose a full day (or more) of your organisation’s entire senior decision-making capacity to one room.
This is a huge investment – not just in venue costs and refreshments, but in time, energy and focus of your most expensive people.
According to McKinsey’s Centre for CEO Excellence, companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance.
That’s the ROI on an Away Day – not just a warm feeling and some nice platitudes, but a day that genuinely moves the business forward.
If you’re planning a senior leadership Away Day and want a second opinion on whether it’s set up to earn that cost back, get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing and we’ll talk it through.
Why psychological safety is the thing that actually matters
There are some familiar fundamentals to a successful Away Day: clarity around a shared purpose, the right data, a comfortable environment, an agenda that allows room for flex. But there’s one factor that is not as obvious: psychological safety.
Google spent two years analysing 180 teams across 250 attributes in its Project Aristotle study to determine the basis of high-performance. Psychological safety came out top, ahead of talent, tenure, or seniority.
That’s the variable that decides whether your Away Day works: whether the room feels safe enough to discuss the difficult but important things. And that’s hugely influenced by the person managing the room.
Why it can’t be the leader
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher who coined the term “psychological safety”, has long argued that hierarchy is one of the clearest obstacles to it – the more senior the person in the room, the less likely everyone else is to say what they actually think.
They are still part of the room’s politics. They have a stake in the outcome and relationships to protect, and everyone in the room already knows which side they’re on.
Plus McKinsey has found that leaders consistently rate their own team’s effectiveness more highly than the team rates itself – so the person deciding what the day needs to fix is often the person least able to see what’s actually broken. The team leader cannot effectively chair the session.
Why bringing in “someone external” isn’t enough on its own
Often people turn to an external facilitator, whether from another department like HR, or an outside professional.
And being external gets you halfway there. It solves the politics problem – but it doesn’t automatically create the conditions in which people say the thing they’d normally keep to themselves.
This is where you need a skilled professional who has experience in creating that kind of feeling in the room.
Hosting Impact Scale
I think about it as three levels – the Hosting Impact Scale.
Level 1: Competence. The facilitator ensures the Away Day runs to plan: the agenda holds, the day keeps to time, transitions run smoothly. All of this matters – but it is the basics, not where the real return comes from.
Level 2: Presence. The facilitator responds to the room as it actually is, not the room the agenda assumed you’d have. It means scheduling a break when the group is getting bogged down, letting a conversation run past its slot because it’s working, or cutting one short because it isn’t, and reshuffles the plan when it stops fitting what’s in front of them. This is much better – but it still doesn’t get to the heart of what makes an Away Day really worth the investment.
That’s Level 3: Resonance.
Resonance means not only does the facilitator do all of the above – but they also go beyond it. They are brave enough to lift the rock, or name the elephant in the room. It means being willing to challenge, and be challenged. It means pushing hard enough that the real issue surfaces while keeping the room safe enough that people don’t shut down when it does. Sometimes that means playing devil’s advocate. Sometimes it means taking on the difficult role in a conversation so the leader doesn’t have to spend their own credibility doing it.
The wrong question most companies ask
When companies choose who’s going to run their Away Day, the question they usually ask is:
will this person keep the day professional and on track without anything going wrong?
That’s Level 1 thinking. The question that actually matters is:
will this person get the room to say the thing it’s been avoiding – and help them work through it?
Senior leaders, internal HR partners, well-liked colleagues – all can be genuinely skilled at running a session smoothly. But few will have built the specific, separate professional skill of getting a room to be honest with itself.
If you’re not sure which level your last Away Day reached, that’s usually the first thing worth working out on a discovery call, before you book the next one. Get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing.
How that safety actually gets built
Psychological safety isn’t built on the day itself, it starts well before.
I meet every attendee individually before the day, to get their thoughts on what’s working, what’s not, their goals for the Away Day itself, and where potential roadblocks might come from.
I meet the team leader more than once to clarify objectives for the day/s, and turn them into a workable agenda that allows room for responsiveness.
This way, potential issues are surfaced in advance, to avoid nasty surprises; and it creates the conditions for a mutually agreed playing field when the day starts. All of this pre-work is crucial to building trust with me, and solidifying it between the team.
This work then continues through the day. As well as the usual “Presence” responsiveness, I am proactive about pulling on loose threads, picking up on almost unspoken objections, or pointing out where the team is trying to side-step something.
This has to be done carefully, and respectfully, sometimes in the room and sometimes individually outside, and always with an eye on the wider goals – but it is important that it happens, otherwise those issues will only surface destructively afterwards.
And finally, the work continues after the day: ensuring decisions are logged and effectively followed-up; giving participants a chance to reflect honestly on the process and what could be improved, in terms of their own contribution and the room as a whole; and checking-in as the year progresses. I’m usually asked back to repeat this process twice a year.
What it produces
I have successfully been running Away Days for leadership teams for many years now.
The outcomes have been tangible: finally working out who should own what after months of uncertainty; agreeing specific concrete goals that the team could actually be held to, and then delivered successfully; tackling difficult topics and resolving them; shaping and redirecting strategy in the face of challenges or opportunities.
Dynamics between participants change for the better; the mission is pushed forward; and the results are felt in higher performance over the next year.
And the teams themselves recognise that these results are possible because of the psychological safety in the room.
One participant commented on how I created an environment where the management team
“were able to express opposing opinions in a constructive way… driving towards a consensus” – with a level of psychological safety notable enough that, in his words, it “certainly hasn’t felt safe like that in management meetings etc. this year”.
Another said, “Kirsten comes in and feels like one of the team, which helps so much with the trust we need to have the difficult conversations.”
And the best recommendation of all: “I’ll help convince [the CEO] that spending money on you is worth it more often :)”
Conclusion
Psychological safety is what makes an Away Day worth the time, money and opportunity cost. Google’s own research found it’s the biggest driver of high-performing teams, bigger than talent or seniority – and it’s exactly what a leader, however capable, can’t provide as the chair, because their presence in the room is part of what keeps people quiet.
A Level 3 facilitator, like me, solves that problem: I build the trust before, during and after the day, to ensure that the room is willing to lift the rocks and resolve the things that matter – that they might have been avoiding. And that’s where you get the decisions that drive high-performance in the year ahead. It’s the only version of the day that earns back what it costs you.
If you’re planning your next senior leadership Away Day and want it to achieve the outcomes you get with a Level 3 Resonance facilitator rather than stop at Competence, get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing.
Here’s to events that land,
Kirsten
Please note, this article was originally published on kirstengoodwin.co.uk and can be accessed by clicking here.
