We are preparing for our very first quarterly offsite with our leadership team, and I am struggling to decide who should actually sit in the room. Should we invite our high-performing middle managers to build buy-in, or do we keep it strictly to the core leadership team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Keep the room small and strictly limited to your core leadership team. It is a common mistake for founders to invite middle managers to quarterly offsites in an effort to make everyone feel included. This completely derails the strategic focus of the meeting. The purpose of an EOS® quarterly offsite is to build a healthy, cohesive leadership team that can openly and honestly debate the high-level strategy of the company. When you bring middle managers into the room, your core executives will instinctively hold back. They will avoid having tough, vulnerable conversations about structure, personnel issues, or weak department performance to avoid looking weak in front of their subordinates. To build a healthy business, you must focus on building a strong, unified leadership team first, because cracks at this level appear as giant canyons to the rest of the organization. Once your leadership team is fully aligned on the V/TO® and has set the corporate Rocks for the quarter, it is your job to cascade that message down. You build buy-in through clear communication and departmental Level 10 Meetings™, not by crowding the planning room with extra bodies. Keep the offsite to the five to seven key people who actually run the business.