S3 Ep3: Reset Expectations, Repair Gaps, Rebuild Culture

You can learn a lot about a team from the second after somebody says the thing everybody has been avoiding. That pause tells the truth fast. Somebody usually tries to rescue the room, smooth it over, or move on before anyone has to sit in what just got exposed.

That is the conversation I got into here. Not whether conflict belongs at a retreat. Whether the room can actually hold tension long enough to tell the truth about what is off.

Because a lot of teams confuse silence with maturity. They call it professionalism. They call it protecting the space. But when nobody can stay with a hard moment, trust gets thinner, not stronger. People learn how to manage discomfort, not how to work through conflict.

I talk about why facilitation matters, what makes a hard conversation useful instead of messy, and why the room right after the truth comes out is where real trust either starts getting built or starts getting lost.

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, welcome to the newest episode. Dr. Jen Fry here, and today we're going to be talking about and digging into the real purpose of a retreat. Yes, I wish it was massages and spas and golf and great eating, but there is a real purpose for a retreat, which is why folks are usually pretty specific of when they're going to happen. They're not going to happen during the busiest time. They're not going to happen in the slowest time. They're going to happen at a time that is beneficial for the company or organization to take stock of what they've done in the past and what things do they need to tinker with to move forward in the future. And so we can look at retreat as almost like an interruption point. An interruption point into how we've been doing things and what we actually need to change and why we need to change it. We need to think about that interruption point as talking about resetting expectations, talking about how we do decisions, what are some of the norms around decisions. Really getting alignment into a shared understanding of how we work. What does it look like to work with each other? And what does it look like to be supervised by leadership? It's because many times when you're in the middle of it, you really don't understand and underestimate those clarity gaps. You don't really understand where the blind spots are because you're just running. Everyone's just making the company move, everyone's just making the organization move, everyone's just move making the staff move. And so you want to be able to have this reset on understanding how we work together, what we expect of each other, and to gain clear clarity of the holes and how they got there. It's so important that we have that reset. And again, when we think about past episodes of what are the problems we have, and how do we honestly need to start fixing them? And the main thing that I say in there is honestly, because sometimes the honest thing is what leadership doesn't want to acknowledge. The honest thing and why there are gaps is because the leaders aren't being clear with their expectations. Why there's gaps is because since they're unclear with their expectations, other people don't have clarity on what their roles are and what jobs fall under those roles. And sometimes people think, well, folks have worked there for years, yeah, and there can still be a lack of clarity. And so instead of it being that someone heard that this is what their job is going to do or how they're going to do this operation, it's better that everyone's in the same room and now we can talk about it in real time. Now we can start going from theoretically why John has these jobs and Jen has these jobs, but actually going to the practicalness of who should actually have these jobs or these duties or whatever it is and why should they have them. Well, it's just because that's how it's always been. We we can't live and die by that anymore because how it's been is not going to get you to how it needs to be, nor is it gonna get you to the future. We have to be able to sit down in a room, go through the hard stuff of acknowledging where the grappling has happened, who has potentially been at fault, and not sit there, but really think about what do we need to do to move forward. That's such a key thing. What do we need to do to move forward? And so a takeaway I want to give you is in this retreat, being able to answer, how do we work together now? How do we work together now? And if we can start understanding where some of those blind spots are, we can have a better understanding of that. When we reset those expectations, when we reset those decision-making norms, we have a better understanding of how do we work together now. And that's one of the things that we want to focus on when we have a retreat is how do we work together now? And friends, I want to help you out with that. So if you're planning a retreat or a team session between July and September and want to actually change your culture, email me at bookings at genfrytalks.com or go to my website at genfry talks.com and fill out the form. We want to help you get better with your culture. So retreat is a true reset. 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 and 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.