Las Vegas, February 2023 — a few days of leadership meetings.
Leadership meetings are hard. A few days of them back to back is exhausting — more than it looks from the outside. But they're also bonding experiences. You get time to actually talk, to get beyond the basic business stuff.
I know what it looks like from the outside. A group of people in Las Vegas for a few days, and the assumption is they're screwing off. Here's the thing: we're working too hard every day, and on rare occasion, we get a chance to blow off some steam.
That's not a break from the work. That's part of the work. The off-hours — the dinner that runs long, the conversation that drifts past the agenda — is where the trust gets built. And trust is what makes group decisions possible.
That's how we get to group think. Not groupthink — the bad kind, where everyone nods along. Group think — the ability to actually think together, to find the right way to do things as a team. You don't get there through status meetings. You get there through time spent together.
So the next time you see leaders on a trip and think "must be nice" — maybe it is. But it's also work. The kind you can't put on a calendar.
Until the next run out — work hard, play hard.