Tompkins Community Bank

Tompkins Community Bank - Offsite Strategy Retreat

Challenge

Tompkins Community Bank, headquartered in Ithaca, NY, is a respected, NYSE-traded financial services company with a comprehensive suite of services offered by its community banks, insurance agencies, and wealth advisors. In order to involve more leaders in strategic planning, the Tompkins senior leadership team (SLT) decided to host its first offsite retreat for approximately 100 officers.

Tompkins had already hired a renowned industry expert as the keynote speaker and asked Westover for a proposal to engage participants in critical strategic topics following the keynote address.

Approach

Westover proposed a five-part process, including:

• Hold individual interviews with the senior leadership and five roundtables with a cross-section of the offsite participants.
• Recommend relevant topics for breakout groups, based on information gleaned from the interviews, roundtables, and market research. Confirm with the keynote speaker that the breakout topics would align with his speech.
• Prepare distribution materials for participants, including agenda, logistics, summaries of breakout topics, and pertinent pre-read.
• Facilitate eight breakout groups and presentations focused on the topics.
• Summarize for the boards of directors the interviews, roundtables, and the offsite purpose and outcomes, including participant feedback.

Results

The event was deemed a great success by all who attended. Participants were thrilled to be invited and excited to discuss critical strategic topics. Relationships were formed and strengthened.The output of the breakout groups reflects useful analysis and suggestions. The SLT agreed that the offsite was a productive use of corporate resources that will be repeated in the future.