SPI 535: How to Craft a Team Retreat That Achieves Great Things with Matt Gartland

Our vision every year is to bring Team SPI together in the fall to think about the following year, source ideas, have conversations, and arrive at a strategic plan the whole team feels empowered by.

We lost the opportunity to do that last year at the height of COVID, but 2021 provided an opportunity to “reboot” our in-person team summit—especially since there were some new folks on the team that many of us hadn't even met in person yet.

I shared a lot of the behind-the-scenes of our trip on Instagram and on Twitter, pictures of the conference room that we were in, and some of the fun things we did together. But we weren't there just for fun and games, obviously. We were there to get down to business.

In today's episode, I wanted to take you behind the scenes to help you understand more about exactly what we did in Denver, and how it's guiding the direction of SPI in 2022. To help with that, I invited my co-CEO and chief operating and financial officer, Matt Gartland, back on the show. Matt has been on the podcast a few times before, and he's here to give us the lowdown on how we approached this trip.

There were a lot of hands involved with helping put it together, but Matt was the one who constructed it and rallied the troops. He got us together and he developed this retreat in a way that was so helpful and so valuable for our company, and I wanted to bring him on to share exactly how this all went down.

If you have a remote team but have yet to meet them—or maybe you do meet every once in a while and are planning on getting together soon—this will be a hugely helpful episode for you. It will hopefully provide some structure, motivation, and inspiration for what you can create and achieve in your next in-person team meeting.

And if you don't have a team yet, well, this episode will give you something to think about and maybe even strive toward.

Today's Guest

Matt Gartland

Matt is a partner at SPI, as well as COO, CFO, and head of innovation. He is a servant leader whose greatest joy comes from empowering other leaders, teams, and organizations to achieve their potential through sustainable growth. Above all, he’s a father and husband who will never relinquish his Pittsburgh roots.

You'll Learn

• What the summit meant for SPI and how we'll be serving our audience in 2022
• How the whole team got involved in presenting
• Why every meeting needs a social contract
• The “divergence and convergence” model that helped us make a bunch of decisions in two days
• Why “disagree and commit” is better than “agree to disagree”
• How we're going to be improving the SPI website experience

Resources

• The Five Keys to a Successful Team Retreat in the Age of COVID (blog post by Sara Jane Hess)
• SPI 530: The Dos and Don’ts of Team Retreats
• “Disagree and commit” (Wikipedia)