How to Run an Executive Team Offsite When You Have Multiple New Exec Team Members

Last updated: June 2026

When an executive team has multiple new members, the offsite that worked last year will not work this year. The agenda needs to be resequenced, the objectives need to be reframed, and the pre-work needs to be redesigned. Trust-building comes before strategy. Foundation comes before execution. Getting this right is not complicated, but it requires the courage to resist the temptation to run the same session you ran when the team was stable.

As of June 2025, the research on this is unambiguous. Companies whose top executive teams are aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance (a confirmed result from Scott Keller and Mary Meaney's "Leading Organizations," cited in McKinsey's October 2025 analysis of top-team performance). The stakes of running a new-team offsite poorly are not just one bad day. They are months of misalignment that compounds quietly until it breaks into the open. I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out, and what follows comes from real work with leadership teams, not just theory.

In this guide, I will walk you through why this situation is structurally different from a regular executive offsite, how to diagnose where your team actually is, how to reframe the objective so the offsite produces something durable, and how to design the agenda, the pre-work, and the 90 days after to give the new configuration the best possible start.

Why a New-Team Offsite Is Not a Regular Offsite

The most important thing to understand about running an executive offsite when you have multiple new team members is that a new configuration resets the team's development stage. This is not a personality problem, a culture problem, or a reflection of anyone's capability. It is a predictable reality that applies to every group of humans, including groups of senior executives who are excellent at their individual jobs.

Bruce Tuckman's foundational model of team development, first proposed in 1965, describes four stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Teams move through these stages over time, and they move back through them when their composition changes. The research is clear on this: when a new member joins, the team can regress to an earlier stage, often from Norming back to Storming. When multiple new members join in a short period, the team effectively returns to Forming. The existing members have history, shorthand, and ways of operating that the new members cannot yet see. The new members are watching rather than contributing, trying to decode unwritten rules while simultaneously presenting their best professional selves. The team is not dysfunctional. It is in formation.

The conventional executive offsite agenda assumes a team in the Norming or Performing stage. It front-loads strategic priorities, performance reviews, and decision-making. It treats the interpersonal dimension as ambient, something that will sort itself out over lunch or during the evening activity. This approach fails a new team not because the strategy content is wrong but because the team has not yet built the relational infrastructure to do strategy work together. McKinsey's research across more than 5,000 executives consistently identifies three dimensions of great teamwork: alignment on direction, high-quality interaction marked by trust and open communication, and a strong sense of renewal and psychological safety. All three of these require the relational foundation. A team in Forming or early Storming does not yet have it.

The cost of ignoring this is the offsite that produces polite agreement and evaporating commitments. McKinsey documented a version of this failure precisely: five executives from the same top team were asked to list their organisation's ten highest priorities. Together, they named twenty-three. The misalignment was not a strategy problem. It was a team coherence problem that strategy sessions had never addressed because nobody had done the foundational work first.

Diagnosing Where Your Team Actually Is

Before you design anything, be honest about where the team currently sits. An accurate diagnosis of your team's stage is the most useful thing you can do before you book a venue.

Start by asking these questions. How many of the executive team members are new to the role, and how new are they? What relationships already exist between members, and which are yet to form? Are there veterans who have been on the team through multiple configuration changes and who carry unspoken anxiety about another one? Are the new members coming from inside the organisation (where they know the culture but not the team) or from outside (where they are learning both at the same time)? Has there been any open friction or awkward silence in executive meetings since the changes were made?

The mixed-composition scenario, where some team members have deep history together and others are brand new, is often harder to navigate than a fully new team. The difficulty is not obvious from the outside. On paper, experienced members provide continuity. In practice, they carry an established way of working, inside references, and embedded assumptions that create an invisible gap between those who know and those who do not. New members pick up this gap immediately. They feel it in the meetings where jokes land for some and not others, in the shorthand that everyone except them seems to understand, and in the weight of historical decisions that they were not part of but are now expected to honour.

An honest pre-offsite diagnosis names this gap explicitly rather than hoping it will disappear. The CEO needs to look at the team as it actually is, not as they wish it to be. A useful diagnostic question is this: if you asked every member of your executive team to write down the three things that are currently most uncertain about how this team works, what would they write? If you do not know the answer to that question, you are not ready to design the offsite agenda.

Reframe the Objective of This Offsite

Most executive offsite objectives look like this: align on strategic priorities, review performance against targets, agree on the 12-month plan, and build team cohesion. The sequence matters, and it is usually wrong for a new team. Strategic alignment is the product of a functioning team, not a shortcut to building one.

For an executive team with multiple new members, the primary objective of the first offsite should be relational and structural clarity. That means: every member of the team understands how every other member is wired, what they bring, and how they prefer to operate; the team has explicit working agreements rather than inherited assumptions; role clarity and decision rights are surfaced and agreed, not assumed; and the team has a shared language for navigating difference before difference becomes conflict. Strategic priorities appear in the offsite, but as a second output that is only possible because the first objective has been met.

This reframing requires clarity of communication from the CEO before the offsite begins. If team members arrive expecting a strategy session and find themselves doing personal storytelling and team charter work in the first three hours, they will feel like the time is being wasted. The explicit briefing is not soft; it is essential. The message is straightforward: this offsite is different from our regular strategy sessions because we are a different team than we were six months ago. Our job in the next two days is to build the foundation that makes our strategic conversations productive rather than performative.

Design the Pre-Work Differently

Standard pre-work for an established executive team focuses on strategic context, performance data, and alignment surveys. For a new-team offsite, the emphasis needs to shift toward individual understanding before the group convenes.

The pre-work I consider non-negotiable for this situation is a one-on-one conversation with every member of the executive team, including the most senior leader. Not a five-minute check-in, and not a survey that goes into a summary document nobody reads. A genuine conversation, thirty to sixty minutes, that covers what each person brings to the team, what they are excited about, what they are uncertain about, and what they need from their peers to do their best work. For new members specifically, the conversation should include what they have observed so far, what they are still trying to understand, and where they feel uncertain about expectations. For veterans, it should include what the changes mean for them, what they want to preserve from how the team has operated, and what they are willing to let go of.

The output of this pre-work is not a data pack. It is the facilitator's understanding of where this specific group of humans is, what the unspoken tensions are, what the genuine areas of enthusiasm look like, and where the agenda needs to go deep rather than glide across the surface. A facilitator who has not done this work is designing blind. They will build a session that looks professional and lands flat because it was not built for this team.

There is a practical scheduling point worth stating plainly. Do not try to do the pre-work in the week before the offsite. The conversations need space to breathe and to be processed before the agenda is finalised. Run the pre-work interviews two to four weeks before the offsite, and then use the findings to design the specific session elements rather than importing a template.

Sequence the Agenda to Build Foundation Before Strategy

The sequencing principle for a new-team offsite is this: trust before tasks, foundation before strategy, personal before professional. This is not a soft principle. It is an engineering decision about what makes subsequent conversations possible.

For a two-day offsite with a team that has multiple new members, day one should be heavily weighted toward foundation work. The day opens with a structured session in which each member shares something about their leadership background, not a formal biography and not a casual icebreaker, but a guided reflection on what shaped how they lead, what their working style looks like at its best, and what they personally need from a team to do their best work. This session, done well, does more trust-building in two hours than six months of regular meetings because it makes visible the things that usually stay invisible.

Following the personal sharing, a Working Genius or equivalent assessment debrief gives the team a shared language for understanding why people are energised by different kinds of work. Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius model, which maps six types of work that every team must do well, is particularly useful in this context because it explains capability differences in terms of energy rather than effort, which immediately reduces the personal attribution that new teams fall into when they see different people engaging differently with the same problem. This is not about labelling people. It is about building a map that the team can use for the next twelve months.

The afternoon of day one addresses role clarity and decision rights in the new configuration. Who owns what decisions outright? Which decisions require the team? Where are the overlaps and gaps that the new composition creates? This conversation is often the most practically valuable of the entire offsite, and it is almost always skipped in conventional offsite formats. Teams operate for months with unclear decision rights and attribute the resulting friction to personality conflict when the real issue is structural ambiguity that nobody ever resolved.

The evening of day one, if the offsite includes an overnight element, should be genuinely social. Not a team-building event, not facilitated conversation over dinner, just time for people to talk without an agenda. This unstructured time does important work precisely because it has no objectives.

Day two opens with team norms and working agreements. What are the explicit commitments this team is making about how it will operate? How will it handle disagreement? What does accountability look like between meetings? What are the communication expectations? This is the team charter conversation, and it needs to happen at the start of day two rather than the end of day one because the personal sharing and the assessment debrief from day one are what make it real rather than generic. Teams that do this in the first fifteen minutes of an offsite produce generic commitments. Teams that do it after a day of genuine sharing produce working agreements they will actually use.

Strategic priorities occupy the second half of day two. By this point, the team has the relational context to have a strategic conversation that is genuinely collective rather than a series of individual perspectives delivered in sequence. The strategic session should be designed to surface assumptions and test alignment, not to produce a finished strategy document. The output is a shared understanding of the one to three priorities that matter most in the next ninety days and a clear ownership structure for each one.

The offsite closes with the 90-day accountability structure: who owns what, what the check-in rhythm looks like, and what the team will do in the first two weeks back to signal that the commitments from the offsite are real. Closing without this is one of the most common failures in any offsite, and it is even more costly for a new team that does not yet have established trust in each other's follow-through.

How to Handle the Veterans-vs-Newcomers Dynamic

The mixed-composition dynamic is the most consistently underestimated challenge in a new-team offsite. When some members have worked together for years and others are brand new, the social dynamics are asymmetric in ways that are invisible to the veterans and acutely visible to the newcomers.

Veterans have shared language, shared decisions, and shared history. They know which topics are sensitive, which norms are informal, and which things the group has tried before. This knowledge makes them more efficient in conversation but more opaque to anyone who was not part of creating it. Newcomers arrive without this context and face a choice: ask questions and risk looking uninformed, or stay quiet and learn by observation. Most senior people choose the second option, which means their most important contributions are not visible in the early sessions.

What can go wrong in the room if this is not addressed explicitly: veterans talk to each other in ways that exclude newcomers without meaning to, and newcomers perform engagement without actually engaging. The offsite becomes two parallel experiences sharing a conference room. Months later, the CEO wonders why the new team is not yet functioning as a unit.

What good facilitation does is create an explicit shared starting point. Early in the offsite, the facilitator names the dynamic directly, without accusation: this team has people with different amounts of history together, and our job over the next two days is to create a shared foundation rather than assume one already exists. The working agreements session becomes particularly important in this context because it gives every member, veterans and newcomers equally, the opportunity to shape how the team will operate going forward. Veterans who feel their history is being discarded are often the ones who did not have the opportunity to say which parts of that history they want to preserve. Giving them that opportunity, explicitly, resolves most of the resistance before it hardens.

There is a facilitation technique worth naming for the role-clarity and decision-rights session. Ask everyone, including the longest-serving member, to describe their role as they currently understand it. Veterans often carry assumptions about their own authority that have never been formally established. Newcomers often carry assumptions from their previous organisations that do not apply here. Mapping these assumptions openly, without blame, is one of the most practically valuable hours an executive team can spend.

The Role of Assessments and Diagnostics

Assessments serve a particularly important function for a new executive team. They give people a shared, objective language for understanding differences that would otherwise remain invisible or become friction points that look like personality conflict.

The Working Genius model, created by Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group, is the assessment I use most consistently in executive offsite contexts. It maps six types of work that every team must perform: Wonder (questioning and imagining possibilities), Invention (creating new ideas), Discernment (evaluating and refining), Galvanising (rallying people to action), Enablement (supporting and assisting), and Tenacity (completing and following through). Every person has two areas of genius (energising), two areas of competency (functional but draining), and two areas of frustration (genuinely depleting). A team profile reveals immediately where energy pools and where it drains, and why projects stall at particular points. For a new team, this visibility is not just interesting: it is practically useful in the first week back.

The critical thing about any assessment in a new-team context is that it must be debriefed together, in the room, with facilitation that moves from individual results to team implications. Running assessments as pre-work and emailing a summary report does almost nothing. The value is in the conversation the results generate: why does it make sense that this person lights up in the Wonder phase but loses energy in Tenacity? How does that explain the dynamic we have already started to notice in our meetings? This is the conversation that turns an assessment from a personality quiz into a practical map.

What the CEO Needs to Do

The CEO's role in a new-team offsite is different from their role in a strategy session, and most CEOs underestimate this difference.

Before the offsite, the CEO needs to be interviewed like every other team member. Not to brief the facilitator on what outcomes they want, but to participate in the same pre-work process everyone else goes through. This sends a signal that the offsite is about the team, not about the CEO's agenda. It also gives the facilitator the most important data point: what is the CEO's own working style, where is their influence strongest in the team, and where might their presence be creating silence rather than conversation?

During the offsite, the CEO's most important role is to model the behaviour the team needs to match. This means speaking authentically about their own uncertainties and challenges, not to perform vulnerability but to demonstrate that this is a space where honest engagement is expected. It means staying genuinely curious rather than arriving with settled views on the strategic priorities. And it means resisting the urge to fill the silences that come when the real conversations begin. Those silences are the team working. Breaking them with commentary or reassurance is a way of avoiding the productive discomfort that the offsite is designed to create.

After the offsite, the CEO's behaviour in the first two weeks matters more than anything that happened in the room. If the team charter includes a commitment to raising concerns directly rather than talking around them, the CEO needs to model this in the first meeting back. If the accountability structure includes check-in conversations between members, the CEO needs to have theirs promptly and not in the abstract. The new team is watching to see whether the offsite was real or performative. The CEO's behaviour in the following fortnight answers that question.

What Not to Do: Common Mistakes in This Type of Offsite

Understanding what fails most often is as useful as knowing what works. These are the patterns that derail new-team offsites most repeatedly.

The first and most damaging mistake is front-loading the strategy. Arriving at day one with a full agenda of strategic priorities, performance reviews, and decision-making sessions communicates to new team members that their job is to catch up rather than contribute. It forces the team to produce decisions without the relational foundation that makes those decisions stick. The output looks productive in the room. Three months later, the commitments have dissolved.

The second mistake is treating new members as the integration challenge rather than seeing the whole team as reconfiguring. When an organisation adds multiple new executives, the veterans are also in a changed team. Their relationships with each other exist in a new context. The team norms that worked before may need updating. Treating this as purely an onboarding problem for the new arrivals misses the full scope of the change and produces an offsite that helps the newcomers but ignores the veterans.

The third mistake is skipping pre-work. Senior people are busy. Scheduling thirty-minute conversations with every member of the executive team before an offsite requires effort. But pre-work interviews are the difference between a facilitated session and a genuinely useful one. A facilitator who walks in without pre-work knowledge is improvising. They can produce a session that feels good in the moment and has no lasting impact because it was not designed for this team's specific situation.

The fourth mistake is ending without explicit commitments. Energised conversations in an offsite setting produce genuine enthusiasm that evaporates on return to the building unless it is anchored to specific commitments, named owners, and agreed check-in points. For a new team especially, the momentum from the offsite is fragile because the operating rhythm is not yet established. The accountability structure is what makes the offsite durable.

The fifth mistake is using the same agenda as last year. This year's team is not last year's team. Even if the strategic priorities are the same, the team that is going to execute them is different. Design for the team you have, not the team you had.

Building In Post-Offsite Accountability

What happens in the 90 days after the offsite determines whether it was a turning point or a distraction. For a new-team offsite specifically, the team needs an agreed operating rhythm: meeting cadence, decision-making forums, and how they communicate between meetings. Someone needs to own the team charter and revisit it at the 30-day mark. The CEO needs a check-in mechanism that allows team members to raise concerns before they calcify into problems.

The practical post-offsite structure that works for a new team looks like this. In the first two weeks back, the team has a brief check-in meeting focused specifically on how the working agreements from the offsite are holding up, not on strategy or operations. At 30 days, the team charter is reviewed and any agreements that are not working are refined rather than abandoned. At 60 days, the CEO has individual conversations with each member focused on how they are experiencing the team and what they would change. At 90 days, the team does a brief retrospective on the first quarter and identifies what to take forward and what to adjust before the next offsite.

The 90-day structure is not bureaucratic. It is the mechanism by which a new team learns to self-correct before the patterns that were not working have become entrenched. Teams that skip this structure and rely on goodwill from the offsite consistently report that the gains from the offsite had faded within six to eight weeks. The accountability structure is what makes the foundation last.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should an executive offsite be when the team has multiple new members?

Two days is the minimum for a team with significant membership changes, and three days is appropriate when the team is largely new, when there has been a major restructure, or when the post-offsite plan needs to include deep relationship building alongside strategic work. A single day is not enough time to do the foundation work and the strategic work without creating a rushed session that does neither well. The time investment up front saves months of misalignment later.

Should we do strategy work at the offsite if the team is new?

Yes, but as a second output, not a first. The offsite should include strategic content because the team needs to leave with a shared understanding of priorities and clear accountability for the next ninety days. The key is sequencing: do the relational and structural work first so that the strategic conversations are genuinely collective. Strategy discussions with a team that has not yet built relational trust tend to produce polite agreement that no one is actually committed to.

Who should facilitate this type of offsite?

For a team with multiple new members, the CEO should not facilitate their own offsite. The CEO needs to participate as a member, which they cannot do effectively while also managing the process. An external facilitator with specific experience in new-team dynamics brings two things an internal facilitator cannot: the ability to hold the whole room without a stake in the outcome, and the credibility to surface difficult dynamics without the politics that come with seniority. Look for a facilitator who does substantive pre-work rather than arriving with a generic agenda.

What assessments are most useful for a new executive team?

Working Genius is particularly useful because it explains energy and motivation in ways that are immediately practical for team design and task allocation. DISC profiles add useful information about communication and conflict styles. The key is not which assessment you use but how you use it: run it before the offsite, debrief it in the room together, and connect it directly to how the team will operate from this point. An assessment that sits in a folder two weeks after the offsite has done nothing useful.

How do we handle it if veterans resist the start-fresh approach?

Name the resistance explicitly and treat it as legitimate information rather than something to be managed away. Veterans who resist the reframing often do so because they feel their history is being dismissed or their way of operating is being criticised. The most effective response is to ask them what they most want to preserve from how the team has worked. That question almost always reveals something specific that can be incorporated into the new team charter, and it transforms resistance into contribution.

Final Thoughts

The temptation when running an executive offsite with multiple new team members is to run the offsite that everyone expects. A two-day strategy session with full agendas, priority-setting sessions, and a polished execution plan. This version of the offsite feels productive. It ticks all the boxes. And it frequently produces nothing durable, because it was designed for a different team than the one that showed up.

The courage this situation actually requires is to slow down at the start so that the strategic momentum at the end is real. Teams that build the foundation, who spend genuine time on trust, on shared language, on working agreements and role clarity before they get to strategy, are the ones that produce execution rather than agreement theater. The McKinsey research says it plainly: companies whose top executive teams are aligned and working effectively are almost twice as likely to outperform financially. That alignment is not the product of a strategy session. It is the product of a team that has done the foundational work that most teams skip.

A new executive team is an opportunity. The norms, the working agreements, and the culture of the leadership team are more malleable in the first few months than they will ever be again. An offsite that uses that window well sets the team up for the next two years. One that squanders it leaves the team to form itself haphazardly, at cost to the organisation and to the people trying to do good work inside it.

The offsite is not the end of the work. It is the beginning of it. Design it accordingly.

If you are wrestling with exactly this inside your own organisation, it is the kind of work I do. If that is you, reach out and I would be glad to help, since helping leadership teams through exactly this is what I specialise in. You can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

About Me

I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. If that is useful for your team, you can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

1. McKinsey, October 2, 2025. Demystifying top-team performance: What every CEO needs to know

2. McKinsey, June 2017. High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic

3. McKinsey, October 2024. Cracking the code of team effectiveness

4. Tuckman, B.W. (1965). "Developmental Sequence in Small Groups," Psychological Bulletin, 63(6).

5. BCG, 2024. Psychological Safety Levels the Playing Field for Employees

Next Read

For the broader guide to executive team offsites, see my 21 tips for executive team offsites. If you are thinking about whether to bring in an external facilitator, see 

how to choose an executive offsite facilitator, which walks you through the twelve questions to ask. For specific session ideas, see 

100 team offsite ideas, which covers the full range of what works and what does not.