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HOW TO PLAN AN EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP AWAY DAy that leads to lasting change (AND WHY THEY FAIL)

Writer: Liz Hamlet
Liz Hamlet
3 hours ago
7 min read

Your leadership off-site was great, so why has nothing changed?


Liz Hamlet, Business Growth Strategist & Strategic Leadership Facilitator



Hidden Treasure Retreat (Photo Credit: Elmbridge Media)


I want to unpick some of the reasons that leadership off-sites and away days fail.

These are the themes that I’m hearing in conversations with corporate leaders and execs over the past month particularly.

As you know, if you’ve ever been to an off-site, your company will spend some serious money getting everyone in the room. It’s usually in a nice venue with some nice food, flip charts, post-it notes everywhere.

Everyone leaves feeling like something’s happened. There’s been some really good agreement in the room, some great ideas thrown around.

But then three weeks later, very little has actually changed.

And a leadership off-site doesn’t fail because the venue’s wrong. It usually fails because the room and the structure of the day were never designed to create movement.

Often, the question we ask ourselves is, “Did we have a productive day?”

But what I really think we should ask ourselves is, “What is different because we had that day?”

PROBLEM ONE I SEE IS THE VENUE: Hopefully you’re not holding offsites in the office, but often the venue that we choose is basically just the office...just somewhere else.

I’ve seen and heard about off-sites that are essentially just Tuesday’s leadership meeting, but with better sandwiches. They’re often looking at the same type of agenda. It’s often the same people dominating the conversation with the same problems. It’s just held in a different postcode.

If the main objective is just taking people out of the office, you’re not actually changing how they think. You’ve just moved the location of the meeting.

Here's some interesting UK data... Microsoft research found that 71% of UK workers who were surveyed said that they were doing emails every single time they went into the office.

So, what you’ve probably seen when you’re running these off-sites , well "on site"... is, during the break, people run off to check up on their emails, catch up on what’s been going on, and their brain is suddenly switched into the day-to-day, the operational.

In the same survey, 36% said that they felt they’d achieved less by being in the office than when they’re working remotely. And that applies not only to the day-to-day work, but also to offsites too. Because I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you’re in a strategic planning meeting that’s held on-site in the office, there are often interruptions.

People being pulled out of the meeting for so-called emergencies... and it just breaks the flow. So the fact that for off-sites we’re getting people physically together isn’t automatically creating better collaboration. The real ROI and value of getting everyone together has to be designed properly.

If you've just chanced upon this blog, I'm Liz Hamlet, I'm a business growth strategist and coach, and I work with corporate leadership teams and founders to help them find the hidden treasure already there in themselves, their teams, and their business... not just chase the new shiny objects when it comes to strategy or designing the service they’re providing for their customers.

THE SECOND PROBLEM I SEE in why leadership offsites fail is that the offsite AGENDA IS OVERLOADED. They’re often trying to do multiple different things at the same time.

Strategy, perhaps they’re also trying to bring in an element of team building. They’re looking at the culture, they’re trying to look at performance data. They’re looking at how we’re communicating change. They’re also looking at the vision and probably another 14 other things that someone thought would be really good to cover because everyone’s in the same room.

And you’ve probably identified by reading that really long list: you spend the whole day flitting between everything and actually changing nothing.

The best off-sites have one really sharp question, perhaps only one that you’re looking at, and not this huge, "War and Peace-length", massive agenda.

THE THIRD PROBLEM is something that’s come up a lot in the conversations I’m having with corporate leaders, particularly when the job market feels a bit unstable. There’s no job for life anymore. And so no one’s prepared to have the real conversation. Often when you’re discussing problems, you’re getting the polite version of the problem in these off-sites and away days.

This means you don’t actually get to the root cause of the problem because when you’re talking about it, everyone’s contributing really lovely, positive things towards the topic. And everyone leaves feeling positive... because the difficult conversation has been avoided.

If your very leadership team can’t have those difficult conversations and they can’t say what’s working in that safe place, in that off-site, when you’re amongst other leaders, then how can you expect the business to change when you leave the room?

PROBLEM NUMBER 4 of why leadership offsites fail is that these offsites and away days are often designed around the activities rather than designing around the outcomes.
Everyone comes with different ideas of what activities to do, like, “Let’s do a SWOT analysis,” or, “Let’s get everyone to write three words down or three thoughts down on a post-it note,” or, “Let’s include a team-building exercise.”

But the activities themselves aren’t the outcomes.

For offsites, because you want to use this time really well and get the ROI from the time and money that you’ve invested in these days, the activity only really matters if it actually changes the quality of the thinking.

Research done into more than 650 strategy workshops found that goal clarity, stakeholder involvement, cognitive effort, and other design characteristics were linked to different workshop outcomes.

I think this is a really helpful distinction.

The best offsites... the ones that really change the quality of thinking amongst the group - aren’t always the ones that are most entertaining. The success factor in the ones that work is that the design of the day makes better thinking more likely.

PROBLEM 5, which is probably the biggest one I’ve heard in my conversations this very month with corporate leaders, and why offsites fail: nobody owns what happens next.

"So we’ve created a really great plan and we’re going to pick this up at the next leadership meeting". Then they leave the offsite, and that’s where it dies a death because they go straight back into business as usual, into the day-to-day.

Often the plans that are thought up during these offsites, everyone owns every single action. Every single action is assigned to the team, the leadership team, as its owner. And that means that nobody truly owns it.

For these types of plans to be implemented, every single major decision needs to have one really clear, named owner, a really clearly defined outcome.

  • What does success look like?
  • A deadline ...
  • and a first viable action.

I always talk about this as being, “What’s our first viable action to get this started?” Because we’re humans, we love a quick win. That first action often is the one that builds momentum, that forward motion.

And most importantly, what’s the mechanism that you’re going to check progress against?

Tied to this is PROBLEM NUMBER 6, which is that follow-up from offsites is often an afterthought.

You might be planning the offsite for several months beforehand, especially in the run-up. But the follow-up, the accountability, and what happens afterwards often only gets a few minutes.

I think we’ve got this backwards because the real test of your offsite isn’t that you’re out of the office for a Thursday. It’s what happens as a result of it on Monday morning and onwards, and also six weeks later and so on.

If these commitments, these really good plans and ideas that come up in the offsite, aren’t revisited, measured, or challenged, they’re probably just really good ideas... really good intentions that fall flat afterwards.

And here’s the uncomfortable bit that you probably need to hear about off-sites: often a leadership team can leave an off-site feeling really aligned but still not be aligned.
The definition of alignment isn’t that everyone in the room is agreeing and nodding and being positive. Alignment from an offsite is about everyone knowing exactly what we’ve decided, why we’ve decided it, who’s responsible for it, what I’m responsible for, and what happens next.

The reason this matters so much right now is that Gallup’s latest data for the UK puts employee engagement at just 10% in 2026, compared to 20% globally.

Of course, an off-site isn’t just going to magically fix engagement. But what it does tell us is that leadership teams can’t afford to treat off-sites, away days and strategy days just as moments together. If you’re spending all this money and bringing all those leaders together, you want to use that time to create clarity, really clear ownership, and forward movement.

I want to flip on its head the question that leaders ask about off-sites. I don’t want them to ask, “Was the offsite successful?” What’s even more valuable is, “What will be different in six weeks because we’ve had this offsite?”
When you’re planning offsites, if you can’t answer that before you start planning the day, you probably aren’t ready to book that venue and facilitate it yet.

Here’s my take: having run many board off-sites, leadership offsites, and corporate away days, I want you to stop measuring your off-site by how good it FELT. I want you to instead look at how you can measure it by WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED as a result of doing it... as a result of going to this off-site.

Of course, your choice of venue matters, and what food you eat - you’ve got to feed everyone, and the experience matters - but they’re not the strategy. The venue in the room is simply the container. The real work is actually what you do in the room.

So if you're reading this and you’re planning your off-site, here are a few questions that you can ask yourself:
What genuinely needs to change as a result of us going on this offsite?
What is the conversation or conversations that we’re currently avoiding?
Who owns what happens when we leave the room?

I think it’s great to have an overall owner for that plan, but you also need to designate each specific action to an owner as well.

Once you get these three things right, then you can start worrying about flip charts and post-it notes and what you’re going to eat at the off-site. If you’re planning a leadership or team off-site and want to create some actual movement rather than just another day of corporate box-ticking, that’s exactly what I help leadership teams design and facilitate with my Hidden Treasure Team Retreat.

This is my strategically designed framework and day to get the right people in the room, have the conversations that matter, and leave with some real clarity, ownership, and your treasure map to move forward. I think there’s a better way.



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