Building Extraordinary Relationships

We place a high value on deep, meaningful relationships with our Clients, our community, and our team. We make intentional investments in all of these relationships, and one of the ways we do so with our team is by creating space to meet in-person at our annual staff retreats. This year’s retreat involved a three-day trip to Boulder, CO, and left the team feeling a heightened sense of energy and connection. Here’s a look at how we spent our time together.

Writer, Matt Kahn, has said, “people can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.” We ask our Clients to share some of the deepest, most personal aspects of their lives, and we seek to meet that vulnerability by challenging ourselves to reflect and share deeply, as well. Our day one exercises, led by author and executive coach, Burke Miller, included listening to each others’ intimate and meaningful stories, identifying potential core values, and beginning to explore elements of our life purpose, what we’re built for, and what we stand for. It was a full day, to say the least, and we concluded the evening with a delicious dinner in downtown Boulder.

The next day, our team visited the beautiful Wildsong Ranch for a dose of leadership development… with horses. Through individual and team exercises alongside these stellar animals, we explored:

• Deepening relationships and building trust and cooperation as the foundation of leadership;
• Surfacing difficult team dynamics and developing the versatility to skillfully navigate ambiguous and charged situations;
• Emotional intelligence, decision-making, and collaborative leadership methods;
• Immediate feedback that facilitates real-time adjustments in leadership style and behavior;
• Cultivating tools that facilitate innovation, creative thinking, collective commitment, and alignment around shared purpose.

The team agreed that this work was special, surprising, difficult, eye-opening, and more, and led us to several powerful conversations about how we can better work together to serve our Clients.

We also ended the day with an incredible, unique concert featuring the JACK Quartet.

The final day of our Retreat served as an opportunity to tie together all of the deep reflective work we’d done the previous two days. In what sometimes felt like several rounds of speed dating (HA!), the team met in pairs to further explore how to enhance our communication skills, approach problems with an open mind, make commitments in pursuit of aspirational goals and ways of being, and verbalize our core values and life purpose statement. Easy peasy, right? The work was equally exhausting and rewarding, and the vulnerability shared amongst the team was unparalleled.

We closed out the Retreat with a dinner party at the beautiful home of our dear friend and business consultant, celebrating our hard work, personal learnings, and several team milestones.

We hope you enjoyed getting a glimpse into our time together. No matter if our team is in San Francisco, Vienna, Boulder, or anywhere in between, we hope you feel that we have YOUR best interests at heart. By strengthening our connections to each other and deepening our sense of self (individually and collectively), we believe we can better serve our current Clients, future Clients, and the generations to come.