Team Retreat to Build Norms, Rituals, and Routines
Background
As Empower enters a new phase of growth, the leadership made a strategic investment to build out a Development team. Recognizing that strong outcomes for teams are rooted in trust, clarity, and healthy team dynamics, Empower engaged us to support the Development team at a critical moment of formation. The goal was not simply to align on strategy, but to intentionally shape how this team would work together from the start.
The Challenge
Like many newly assembled teams, and especially those working remotely, the Development team faced a familiar set of tensions:
New team members were hired to step into new roles while still learning one another’s strengths, preferences, and needs.
Expectations around roles, workflows, and decision-making had not yet been fully articulated - it was only the second week on the job for 2 members of the team.
The team needed to translate Empower’s broader mission into a clear, shared vision for development work in the year ahead.
There was a strong desire to build trust and sustainability early, rather than retrofitting norms after challenges emerged.
Leadership understood that without an intentional pause to build shared understanding, the team risked misalignment, duplicated effort, and unnecessary strain at a moment when focus and cohesion matter.
Our Approach
We designed and facilitated a one-day, in-person retreat to serve as a foundational launch point for the Development team. The retreat was structured to balance relationship-building and practical clarity, anchoring the team in both purpose and practice.
Creating a Shared Container
The day opened by acknowledging the significance of this moment of transition and formation. We worked together to set the tone for honest conversation and collective ownership.
Humanizing the Team
Team members shared formative experiences, strengths they bring to the team, and areas in which they anticipate needing support. This exercise was framed not as storytelling for its own sake, but as a way to become better collaborators. The result was early trust and empathy building, and a clearer understanding of how individuals show up at work.
Surfacing Values through Experience
Rather than prescribing team values, we invited reflection on participants’ most impactful past team experiences. By identifying behaviors and conditions that made those teams successful, the group surfaced a set of emergent values - clear communication, accountability, and assuming positive intent - that was revisited and formalized over the course of the day.
Anchoring to Mission and Leadership Expectations
The retreat intentionally connected team formation to organizational purpose. Empower’s senior leaders joined to share the organization’s mission and vision, clarify how development work advances impact, and name what effective managing up looks like in practice. The Development Director then articulated the team’s priorities, success metrics, and how individual roles contribute to shared outcomes.
Clarifying Roles and Interdependence
Using visual mapping and facilitated dialogue, we guided the team through a detailed exploration of roles, responsibilities, decision ownership, and handoffs. This work is meant to reduce ambiguity, highlight interdependencies, and reinforce shared accountability for how work flows across the team.
Establishing Habits for Sustainability
The final working block focused on the day-to-day habits that enable strong performance over time. Together, the team aligned on norms, routines, and rituals. They talked through meeting rhythms, communication norms, feedback and conflict practices, workload management, and burnout prevention, and ensured that expectations were explicit and shared.
Outcomes & Impact
By the end of the retreat, the Development team had made a deliberate shift: from focusing solely on what needed to get done to paying equal attention to how the team works together as the engine that makes strong results possible.
Specifically, the team left with:
A shared understanding that team effectiveness is a strategic lever. One team member wrote, "I walked out of the session feeling impressed about my new organization's investment in team effectiveness and positive team dynamics."
Clear alignment between Empower’s organizational mission and strategy and the Development team’s own vision, priorities, and ways of working.
Increased trust and relational depth, allowing team members to collaborate more openly, surface challenges earlier, and rely on one another with confidence. One team member reflected that, "Understanding each other's strengths, motivations, and blind spots is going to be so much easier now, which will unlock our ability to collaborate with understanding, patience, and pride in our teammates and ourselves."
Defined roles, decision-making authority, and interdependencies that reduce friction and support efficient, coordinated execution. A team member wrote, in reflection, "Had we not done this retreat, we might have been in danger of failing to see how each of us can fit into and contribute to our team's goals."
Explicitly stated team habits and routines around communication, feedback, meetings, and workload management.
By grounding day-to-day ways of working in shared purpose and strategy, the team positioned itself to move forward with greater clarity, cohesion, and momentum, ensuring that how the work gets done actively advances what the organization is trying to achieve.
Reflection
This engagement reinforced a core belief for us: investing early in team formation is not a detour, it is the critical setup to enable results. By slowing down to build trust, alignment, and shared ownership, Empower’s Development team positioned itself to move faster, smarter, and more sustainably in service of the organization’s mission.