For this year’s annual staff retreat, the Magnolia Consulting team gathered at a beautiful lake house nestled along Lake Anna in Central Virginia. The theme of this year’s retreat was “Work Smarter, Not Harder,” with the intention of coming together to refine Magnolia’s mission, values, and goals as we continue to move forward in cultivating learning and positive change.
Our retreat involved a great deal of strategic and tactical planning. An external consultant helped guide our team through a series of sessions that involved revisiting our company mission and vision, identifying our personal and company core values, and from this, developing clear goals to work toward. Through stimulating discussion among team members, we worked our way through “SOAR,” which stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. Our team found this strengths-based strategic planning approach to be extremely insightful and productive. To think about how we can work in alignment with our strengths and aspirations we discussed current and possible new lines of work. It was an engaging dialogue that concluded in a collective agreement to build our expertise, connections, and focus in community college and workforce development, girls and woman’s education, infographic design for evaluation and research, and capacity building for our clients.
Through our core values of Abundance, Cultivation, Excellence, Integrity, Utilization-Focused and Results-Oriented, Heart-Centered, and Service, we look forward to increasing our own capacity to continue our mission of providing innovative and customized evaluation and research services that improve individual and organizational capacity for positive change.
