Doug Eadie is president and CEO of Doug Eadie & Company, a firm specializing in building strong board-superintendent partnerships. You can reach him at Doug@DougEadie.com or 800-209-7652.
[Editor's note: "Suspending the rules" and "meeting as far away as feasible," as referenced in "Boards are well advised to advance by 'retreating,'" does not mean that the requirements of the Illinois Open Meetings Act can be suspended as well. A retreat does not fall under the allowable exceptions for a closed meeting. The Open Meetings Act does permit a board to hold a closed session to consider "self-evaluation practices and procedures or professional ethics, when meeting with a representative of a statewide association of which the public body is a member." Even if the board follows a different agenda structure, the requirements in the Open Meetings Act still apply. This means that notice of the retreat must be posted and minutes must be prepared. Each open meeting must be in a location that is "convenient and open to the public." In addition, any person may record or broadcast an open meeting and must be "permitted an opportunity to address" the board. Finally, each board committee, including an ad hoc committee as suggested in the article, must comply with the Open Meetings Act.]
Many school districts, along with other nonprofit and public organizations, have found that involving their boards, superintendents and senior administrators in a retreat can produce powerful results. The term "retreat" is typically used to describe a special work session lasting at least a full day, and often 1½ to two days (anything less than a day is a meeting, not a retreat), that is held away from the office and that focuses on accomplishing work that cannot feasibly be done in regular board meetings.
Because the normal rules of the game are suspended, boards are able to do such extraordinary jobs as updating district values and vision statements, identifying critical issues facing the district, brainstorming possible change targets to address the identified issues, thinking through improvements in school board structure and process to strengthen governing performance, and coming up with ways to enhance the board-superintendent working partnership, to name a few powerful outcomes that retreats can produce.
Although retreats are potentially powerful vehicles for producing critical results for the school district, they are also high-risk endeavors, primarily because of the board’s involvement in a far less structured session than a typical board meeting. Everyone can come up with at least one “retreat from hell” story to prove that point: from everyone’s being bored to tears to far more damaging outcomes, such as visceral debate that ends up fracturing, rather than cementing, consensus and produces oodles of bad feeling to boot.
Experience has taught me that if the board doesn’t take steps to minimize the risk, it will be better off skipping the retreat. Fortunately, five practical steps can help a superintendent and board ensure that a retreat produces powerful results — with minimum risk for everyone involved:
(1) Make sure the board is actively involved in designing the retreat;
(2) Set precise objectives;
(3) Build in active participation;
(4) Program in systematic follow-through; and
(5) Meet away from the district office/board room.
Involving the boardTwo very important reasons exist for involving board members in designing the retreat: having the benefit of their experience and wisdom, and building board ownership of the upcoming retreat.
A very simple approach that I’ve seen work well countless times is to create an ad hoc retreat design committee involving board leadership and the superintendent to put together a detailed design for the retreat: its objectives, structure and the blow-by-blow agenda. If a professional facilitator is employed, this group would work directly with that person to prepare for the retreat.
The board of a mid-size suburban district in the Midwest, for example, involved their board president, vice president, secretary/treasurer, and chair of the policy and planning committee, along with the superintendent in their retreat design committee. This ad hoc committee not only worked out a detailed retreat design, but also signed the six-page retreat description that was sent to all participants three weeks before the retreat.
Set precise objectivesOf course, there’s no way to come up with a workable structure and process for the retreat if the board doesn’t specify what they want the event to achieve. This is one of the key responsibilities of the ad hoc retreat design committee.
For example, among the retreat objectives set by the design committee mentioned above were: “to clarify our district’s strategic framework — its values, vision and strategic directions; to understand the implications for our district of national, state and local conditions and trends; to identify strategic issues facing our district.”
Retreat objectives of another district I worked with a few years ago included: “to fashion a detailed board leadership mission; to flesh out the roles, responsibilities, work plans and operating procedures of our new standing committees; to identify practical ways to strengthen the board as a human resource; to clarify the board-superintendent partnership and identify ways to enhance it.”
Active participationCommitment to following through on the results of a retreat heavily depends on the ownership that participants — especially school board members — feel for the results. Feeling like an owner comes from participating actively in producing the results.
One of the best ways to achieve participation is to use breakout groups led by board members to generate information and ideas at the retreat. For example, one school district used nine different breakout groups led by board members at one of its retreats, including groups titled “vision,” “values/culture,” “strategic issues” and “characteristics of a sound board-superintendent partnership.”
Of course, breakout groups can bomb badly if they aren’t meticulously designed to produce specific results through well-defined methodology … and if the board members who lead them aren’t well prepared to play the facilitator role.
Formal follow-throughSpending only a day or two together dealing with really complex, high-stakes matters isn’t enough time to come up with final answers about anything. If this is the plan, the whole thing is likely to come unraveled by the next Monday, when board members and staff return to the proverbial salt mine.
Many school districts have reached agreement as part of the retreat design process on how follow-through will be handled. One district, for example, required that the professional facilitator it retained for the retreat prepare a detailed set of action recommendations, and created a steering committee for the express purpose of reviewing the recommendations and taking them to the full board for decision making.
Without building in such follow-through, the district’s return on its investment in a retreat is likely to be paltry.
Get awayIt’s really important to hold a retreat in a comfortable setting as far away from district headquarters as feasible, since a different location will help participants rise above the “business-as-usual” mentality, freeing their minds for “out-of-the-box” work.
They don’t need a luxurious resort, although an attractive resort location would be an asset. I’ve seen modestly priced, nearby hotel meeting rooms work well, and districts might even be able to arrange for donated space, such as the boardroom of a local corporation. The point is to avoid holding a “suspend the rules” meeting in the boardroom, where the rules come all too easily to mind.
Retreats are probably the best way to involve a board creatively in generating critical products that can’t be handled in regular board meetings. If a district hasn’t made use of retreats as a board involvement tool, it is well advised to begin.
They should keep the above tips in mind as they put their retreat together.