S3 Ep2: More "Good Vibes" is Not a Culture Strategy

You can build a retreat around laughter, bonding, and a packed schedule and still come back to the exact same tension. That is the problem Jen names here. When teams keep asking how to make the retreat fun before they name what is actually off, fun starts doing work it was never built to do.

Jen gets into the difference between feeling good together and being able to work well together. Those are not the same thing. A few shared activities might make people more relaxed, but they will not explain why someone avoids a coworker, hesitates to speak honestly with a boss, or keeps sidestepping a hard conversation.

She also pushes on a belief that quietly causes problems in a lot of teams: the idea that if people are not close friends, they cannot work together well. That is not true. Sometimes the goal is not closeness. Sometimes the goal is a solid working relationship with clearer expectations, more honesty, and less avoidance.

Fun can support the room, but it cannot repair the culture for you. If the retreat is going to matter, the team has to name the real issue, make space for honest conversation, and leave with something more useful than a few good photos and a lighter mood.

Transcript

Season Focus: Retreats & Teams

Dr. Jen Fry 0:00

Hi, welcome back to Five with Fry. I'm Dr. Jen Fry. This season is all about retreats and team dynamics. Because most retreats don't fail during the retreat. They fail long before anyone walks into the room. Organizations spend thousands hoping for alignment, better communication, stronger culture. But too often teams leave and return to the same problems on Monday. This season is about changing that. We'll talk about what actually makes a retreat worth the investment, how conflict and communication shape team dynamics, and how retreats can become real turning points instead of temporary resets. If you're planning a retreat, leading a team, or wondering why your culture feels stuck, this season is for you. Let's get into it. Hey friends, it's Dr. Jen Fry, and we're going to talk about how fun doesn't fix culture. And I see this a lot and some of the parallels with organizations and youth sports. You see a lot of parents who are like, what are team bonding exercises? What are team bonding exercises we see with organizational retreats? What are the fun stuff we can do? What we have to make sure it's fun. And the problem is that you can do all the fun stuff, the quote-unquote team bonding, but it's not going to put your team in alignment. It's not going to get your team to trust anymore. It's not going to get retention to help. It's none of those things are going to occur. Because, yeah, it makes everyone feel good in the moment. Everyone's getting to feel fun. You feel like you're getting to know each other more. But it's not going to resolve tensions. It's not going to resolve patterns. It's not going to help each other. Start to wonder why do I avoid conversations with this person? Why is it I'm hesitant to work with this person on a project? Why do I not want to have conversations with my boss? It's not going to have the conversation about any of that. It's just positivity that's going to be disguising avoidance. And you'll be able to talk all about the fun you had, but not be able to say, I've figured now why I don't want to work with this person. And not only that you figure it out, but you can name it and you can start figuring ways to smooth that out. And it might not be that this is a person you're going to want to 100% work with and this is your work bestie and all that. No, but it might be that you're able to figure out enough that you can have a solid work environment. And sometimes that is all that you need is a solid work environment. I think the problem is so many times people have this belief that if you are not amazing friends with your coworkers, you can't work together. And that's inherently not true. You can have a really solid working relationship with someone that you're like, I don't know how I feel about them, but we can work really well together. And that's something that can happen. And so if we only focus during the retreat on the fun things, right when you get back to the office, everything is going to regress right back to the way it was. And so you really have to sit and be thoughtful and ask, how much fun am I adding to the agenda? And is it too much fun that is actually replacing the things we need to do and the things more importantly that we need to talk about? And so when you're going to have those honest conversations, you have to cultivate an environment at that retreat so that those honest conversations can occur. Because if the employees don't feel safe in those environments, it doesn't matter if it's in Cancun or Houston or down the street from your office. Nothing is going to change. And so that's why it's really important to get to the heart of the matter of what problem are we fixing? Because then we can start actively taking the opportunities to create the culture at the retreat that allows us to have the hard and honest conversations and find ways to start stepping out of that gully that will occur. Because if all you do is have really hard conversations, people aren't going to enjoy being there. It's going to be this heavy blanket over everyone. But if you're able to create a culture, an environment where we have these hard conversations at this retreat, knowing that people are still going to be taken care of, that people can be honest, and that we have a pathway for them emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to get out of this gully to go out and be successful. Well, now you've done your job with the retreat. And so the thing I want you to take away is that fun supports culture. It does not repair it. It cannot be a band-aid because it's going to be one that's going to bust open at the scenes, at the seams. You need to make sure you're doing the things that need to repair the culture, and fun won't be that thing. If this episode resonated with you, take a second to follow, rate, and share it wherever you listen. And if this conversation hits closer to home in your work, I also do keynotes, workshops, and facilitation. My goal is to help one million people have a better relationship with conflict. And it starts with you. Well, that's this episode of Five with Fry. Y'all, take what you heard, sit with it, and use it. Remember, growth lives on the other side of that conversation. Don't waste the conflict, and thanks for listening.