Case Study: Facilitating strategic alignment for service excellence
Retreats create a vital space for teams to pause, connect, and align around shared goals, especially within large institutions where daily demands often limit meaningful collaboration.
Partnering with a large public university, Vaden Consulting designed and facilitated a leadership retreat to unify a core division around their strategic priorities and to build a clear, actionable roadmap for strengthening service excellence for students, staff, and faculty.
Challenge
The university’s VP of Auxiliary and Business Services identified three core strategic priorities for its diverse units, ranging from transportation to carding services.
To build the necessary alignment among leaders and teams – as well as create actionable outcomes – they needed dedicated time away from their day-to-day functions and space to reconnect and think collaboratively about the future of their organization.
Objective
To create a collaborative, structured, and positive experience that aligned leaders around the division’s strategic priorities and to produce a clear content framework that enabled unit leaders to build outcomes in line with their shared vision.
Solution
Vaden Consulting aimed to help the leaders clearly express their strategic priorities in an actionable, accessible, and meaningful way.
To create an experience that aligned and energized the team, we conducted a multi-step facilitation process, including:
Conducting one-on-one discovery conversations with retreat participants to co-create the agenda and the flow of the sessions
Designing a retreat that would create playful opportunities for defining their shared mission, building collaborative definitions for each priority, and exploring actionable items for how their individual units would enact the priorities.
Delivering a cohesive and concise guide for leaders to cascade their vision, priorities, and strategic outcomes throughout the division and across the university.
Results
The retreat produced a clear mission statement and gave the division leadership the language and structure they needed to communicate their vision effectively.
Beyond the immediate outcomes, the work created opportunities to:
Share the strategic pillars through divisional town hall sessions
Develop monthly communications that reinforce the mission and strategic themes
Build employee tools and engagement committees to foster support and feedback around these priorities
Provide leadership with shared frameworks to communicate their mission across the division.
“Jen is a fantastic facilitator—reliable, organized, and truly a pleasure to work with. Her thoughtful guidance helped us clearly define our mission and establish a strong foundation for our strategic plan. I highly recommend her to any organization in need of a skilled and engaging facilitator.”