Officer Retreats
 

Anyone with any good ideas for officer retreats? Looking at having a goal-setting/kicking back retreat with my exec... and was wondering if anyone has had any really good ideas for it... Feel free to email me directly if its something you dont want to post... JLD34@drexel.edu

Thanks for the help

We rented a few rooms and a conference room at a hotel in Oklahoma City... Conveniently next door to Hooters...

Anyhow.. Had a great night leading up to it.. We partied there a little.. Probably the funniest thing we did was going down to the Borders Book Store that we coud see from one of the windows and move compact cars around (pick them up and put them in strange places in strange positions). We didn't actually do any damage to anything but it was a blast.

The next day though we had a pretty serious goal-setting/planning meeting. Our chapter actually lays out the entire Master Calendar before the first day of the semester. Generally that's a pretty good way to do things.

An alumnus facilitated the meeting. Was very productive and I'm pretty sure we'll do it again before the start of Spring Semester.

Thanks.. I think thats what I was leaning towards... I have 2 nights worth of a huge hotel room booked for a weekend... and planned on having one night strictly hanging out and having fun.. the next day and evening being more work and structure...

Any tips for good activities or anything for productive goal setting

This semester was the first time we had an officer retreat. The Exec board went to our chapter advisor's house for some dinner and games and swimming. It went really well.

we're having our exec retreat/training Friday night/saturday all day. I might have some ideas then.

be sure to allow everyone to give thier input. but on the other had don't let people wander off track and let your meeting take forever. because then your boys will get all pissy and quit paying attention.

be sure to take some beer ;)

one of the best officer retreats i hosted, i did a short presentation of the 7 habits of highly effective people. had a big impact on my officer corps

Our sorority usually has a our retreats at a hotel by the beach. It's really nice to be some place where you don't have to be in doors all the time, and when tensions sometimes get high or cabin fever starts it's nice to know you have the freedom to take long walks! Of course living in Florida one has the luxary to do such things so I don't know how I would do it up north. I would also recomend some fun leadership type games that always makes things easier.

Hmmmm . . .

IF I had an officers' retreat I would work backwards from the objective. . .

When you finish the retreat each oficer should know exactly what his goals are and when they need to be completed by . . .

And it should be written down and distributed to the chapter.

Goals themselves are too complex for the average person to understand so you want to think in terms of tasks.

Each task needs to be spelled out exactly and a date given for completion. The tasks need to be written out and dsitributed to the other chapter members. IT keeps everyone honest.

Now you can't trust your officers for normal participation because you don't know what they know.

If you spent a few hours on GC just searching you would realize that there is an immense amount of resources available for Greeks.

Your job as Chapter PResident is to make sure those resources are available to your officers and that they take advantage of them.

So, you want to have resource and idea lists made up and distributed BEFORE the meeting so that they can have some time to process the information, talk intellegently about it, and then incoroporate them into their tasks.

When you are finished it should look like a work sheet.

If you tell us what your basic programming plans are we could help you more. I have read all your manuals and they are better than some but pretty limited.

If you fail to provide resources for your officers before the retreat or you fail to come out with written time sensitive tasks than you have failed and may as well have not wasted everyone's time.

Hey James,

Thanks for your input, as well as everyone elses ideas... I'm actually trying to pull some stuff together tonight.

I've gotten a lot of great input from you guys and from doing some research on the net... Now its time to put it all together.

My main goals is to have everyone bring to the table issues to address as well as where they want to take thier cabinets or areas of responsibility in the next 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and beyond. Not really having mucf of a history or ways to do things we are going to need to put alot of work into this.

Also I want to make sure each officer understands what the other officers are doing so we are all on the same page and working collaboratively to acheive the goals we set.

So ill need some team buiding activities as well as some motivating stuff (maybe basing stuff off of 7 Habits Of...)

Anyways thanks again for the help.

Try role-playing for yourself and then them . . .

What you want to do is envision what an awesome chapter would do in terms of programming and then work backwards (stephen covey) to achieve those programs.

the problem with just allowing them to bring their concerns to the table, is that you don't know how much actual information they have or what skills they possess.

So once you come to the table and ask them for input and to put together programs its now too late.

They will come up with the best ideas they have at that time, but it becomes much harder to raise the bar because its human nature to become a tad resentful if it seems like someone else is disregarding their opinions.

Remember: Opinions are NOT knowledge. But people are in love witht heir own opinions.

So what you want to and need to do, is to develop resource sheets and guidelines for the future that are distributed in advance so they have some time to process it.

For example: Lets talk about fitness. Lets say that we were putting together a fitness program and that each of these people were coordinating officers.

Each person would try and contribute what they know and mean pretty well. but their un-tutored opinions wouldn't outweight expert knowledge would it?

And if you hit them all at once with expert knowledge. Set periodization, time under tension, high intensity interval training . . . food every three hours etc etc . . they are going to feel overwhelmed.

But if you sent them a worksheet first with references, they would know what was up and be more receptive.

ITs really crucial to get things right now. ITs kind of like the alignment in your car, if you can set it right in the beginning you will go straight . . . but even if its a little off that can be a BIg difference as you keep driving.

IF you are interested send shoot me a pm and I'll give you my Cell phone number and we can discuss this at some length.

Good luck. and remember though, if you get this little thing wrong you will be kicking yourself in the ass all year.

Shot you a pm with my contact info... Not sure if it went through

We have our officer retreat in the summer after our chapter retreat. At our chapter retreat we set one big goal for the year, that we would like to work on. At officer retreat we come up with ways to pin point the goal.

This past summer we went to the lake for the weekend and went sking during the day and had officer meetings at night, it was very relaxing and we added sisterhood to it, so it wasnt jsut meetings.

Alyson