Our quarterly leadership team offsites have become tense and unproductive because there is deep, unspoken conflict between our sales and technology directors. How do we structure our next offsite to surface this tension and get the team aligned?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A tense offsite is a symptom of a leadership team that lacks vulnerability-based trust. When your leaders are afraid to engage in healthy, unfiltered conflict, they carry unspoken frustrations into your strategic sessions, rendering your quarterly planning useless.

To fix this, you must adjust the structure of your offsite. Do not start with your V/TO or Rocks. Start with building trust. Use a team-building exercise designed to build vulnerability, such as sharing personal histories or conducting a round of trust-building exercises. This breaks down the professional armor and reminds everyone that they are on the same team.

Once the ice is broken, address the elephant in the room. Bring the conflict between sales and technology directly to the table using the IDS tool. Do not let them pass the issue back and forth politely. Force them to identify the root cause of their friction, whether it is misaligned incentives, poor communication, or a lack of clear accountability on the chart. As the facilitator or leader, you must enter the danger and lean into the discomfort. A healthy, cohesive leadership team requires mining for conflict, and the offsite is the perfect, safe environment to resolve these deep-seated issues so you can focus on building your exit superstructure.