One Hat or Two? Who Should Really Lead Your Away Day

Prior to commencing facilitating a senior teambuilding day, the sponsor and well-meaning top exec finished his introduction with, ‘Let’s have a great teambuilding day today, let’s really come together as a team… and remember, T.E.A.M. stands for Together Everybody Achieves More!’ For sure, at that moment, the team came together… as they rolled eyes in unison!

In fairness to the leader, he was being super brave handing over his team to what is, in effect, a stranger, an outsider who is to become the ‘stand-in leader.’ A facilitator/group coach who was now about to be let loose with Post-its, flip chart paper, and pens. From this moment onwards, he had taken off his hat as leader and became ‘one of the gang’. Why would anyone do this? Here are some considerations when thinking about away days and whether to wear the hat of participant or try wearing two hats – participant and facilitator.

Two Hats: (Participant and Facilitator)

Pros:

• You can design exactly what you want.
• You know the team and all its quirks and funny
• You know how to push things through…who to shut down before they ‘go off on one!’
• You can chip in whenever you want and move it on when it gets tedious

Cons:

• You design what you want exactly but, it’s based on your perception.
• You know the team and may be unconsciously biased towards and away from certain individuals within your team
• You know how to push things through but, you might be shutting down people, reducing psychological safety, and making it feel less inclusive
• You can chip in whenever you want to but maybe you need to be quiet?! You cannot monitor the hidden dynamic, the unspoken bits that happen if you are an active member yourself.
  

One Hat: (Participant with Internal Facilitator)

Pros:

• You can join in as an ‘equal’ member of the group
• You have someone else worrying about the dynamic, talk ratios, process, and the tea & coffees!
• The facilitator knows you all, knows the company speak, culture and jargon

Cons:

• The facilitator may also have organisational blindness because they know things too well
• The facilitator may suffer from unaware bias away and towards certain members if they are not careful (you might have even given a ‘briefing’ around key people!)
• They may become overly deferential as they are probably several ‘levels’ lower in the food chain (this gets in the way when trying to assert yourself as stand-in leader)
  

One Hat: (Participant with External Facilitator

Pros:

• You can join as an equal member of the group – external facilitator sees people not so much job titles
• They worry about the dynamic, process, talk ratio and everything else
• The facilitator doesn’t know much about the politics, relationships, jargon, history and therefore, can ask curious questions that internal facilitators won’t need to ask
• The external facilitator can be truly neutral and create the right environment for uncontaminated data to come from the group

Cons:

• They must read the room and individuals super quickly to spot ‘sham’ promises of actions
• They don’t know the acronyms, jargon and culture so well – they might miss some important but subtle elements going on in the room
  

Follow up

An important final point that is crucial whichever you option you go with. Hopefully, you had a great day, it was useful and leaves a good memory. However, this can be a bit like going for a nice meal. The memory lasts a few days… a few weeks later, it’s forgotten about.

The same can be true for these types of events as well. Please ensure you make this part of the planning process… How will we hold ourselves to account? What is the impact if we do nothing? Who could we tell that would make it embarrassing and awkward if we don’t do anything about it? Words are cheap. Actions are all that matters.

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