Facilitation
Two retreats that realigned the Office of Minority Health
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
The challenge
The Office of Minority Health at CMS needed to refresh its strategic goals, objectives and priority areas for the coming year.
Leadership and staff were working in a newly hybrid environment without shared norms, and leadership wanted honest input from the wider organization before locking priorities.
The solution
Working as a subcontractor to Human Technology Inc, MTI partnered with the retreat organizer to define goals and objectives for each session, drafted agendas, and refined them against feedback.
MTI also scoped logistics — room setup, materials, timing — then finalized the plan for a one-day leadership retreat and a one-and-a-half-day full-team retreat.
In the leadership retreat, the five-person leadership team reviewed strategic goals and priority areas, adding, updating and removing items; documented working norms for the leadership group and each of their teams; and received a report-out of focus-group findings MTI had gathered, then brainstormed responses.
In the full-team retreat, MTI reported leadership's thinking back to the whole organization, built buy-in, gathered additional input on day-to-day work supporting the strategic goals, and led a brainstorm on implementing the working norms in a hybrid setting.
Results
- An updated set of strategic goals, objectives and priority areas for the year
- Documented working norms for the leadership team and each sub-team
- Focus-group findings surfaced and addressed with concrete ideas
- Organization-wide buy-in to the priorities set by leadership
- Practical agreements for working the norms in a hybrid environment
- Post-session evaluations collected and reported back to leadership
Relevant service
Team Effectiveness & Facilitation
High-impact team retreats and facilitation for alignment and conflict resolution.
Related courses
- Five Behaviors of a Team3 hours
- Managing a Hybrid Team3 hours
- Six Thinking Hats Process Improvement2 hours