Meetings.

Does anyone really like meetings?

All-day meetings, with a facilitator?

I'm not big on meetings, but then again, most of the people I work with on a day-to-day basis don't, either. (We're a team of individuals, an incredibly flat organizational chart, but it works well for us.)

Impressively, though, we came together for a day-long meeting about where we are now and, more importantly, where we think we're headed in the near (3-5 years) future and how to get there.

We'd had a retreat a number of years ago - just after I started in this position - and it was a disaster. "Better communication, more teamwork" seemed to be the goal of that retreat and it just didn't work. At all.

This one worked much better. Yes, we talked about communication a bit, but more about what we do and how we do it and recognized that we do work together as a team.

A team, that is, of individuals.

(I overstate that a bit; there are subsets that work together as a team more frequently, but we all have our specialities and there's not as much overlap as you might think.)

Of course, having an all-day meeting meant that the other work that needed to be done today - and there was work that did need to be done today - got done after the kids were in bed. That's why it's 11:46pm and I'm still awake and online.

G'night!