#FCGTakesMiami for Annual Agency Retreat
Experts say that by mid- to late January, people start abandoning their New Year’s resolutions and goals and fall back into their comfortable routines. To help combat this fall back and to kick off the year in a meaningful way, FCG’s founder and CEO, Michelle Flowers Welch, has long been a proponent of an annual agency retreat. While we have a company retreat every year, this was the first time we took our entire staff out of town – to the beautiful sunny beaches of Miami – to rededicate ourselves to the passion of our work and get geared up for the year. Michelle strongly believes that retreats help set the tone for the year, and this year, the Executive Leadership Team wanted to remove staff from the daily grind environment (and Chicago’s winter) and challenge them to shift their mindset to get excited about the work, projects and changes that are coming our way in 2019. Besides the weather, Miami was the perfect location because it is a key market for a lot of the work that we do in the multicultural space.
I had the opportunity to give a couple of presentations during the retreat and chose to kick it off with a discussion about mindset. Having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset was the foundation of my remarks which I’ve shared here. It all helped to set up our theme for the year: PowerFLOW. Flow is embedded in our agency’s name – Flowers – and we combined it with the word power to communicate the essence of what we want our teams to embody for 2019. To us, PowerFLOW is FCG’s active movement towards being better, growing stronger, nurturing talent and representing the voice of the multicultural audience. This is what helps set the pace for the work that we do on behalf of our clients. How we’ll be more creative, more disruptive, more innovative, and more representative in the marketplace.
Over the course of two days, we invited our employees to think outside of the confines of FCG’s day-to-day and think more broadly about how their individual brands, personalities, and skills can contribute to the success of the agency. We completed DISC profiles before heading down to Miami and had a lot of discussion around how we can communicate more effectively when we know where someone is coming from in terms of their personal communications style.
Empowering our employees in ways that help FCG continue to be a powerhouse agency with power players making power moves is how we are able to continue being competitive with nearly 30 years in the game.
Our sessions included a deep dive into our agency’s seven core values, a discussion around the growth areas for our industry, an engaging discussion and outside perspective from Michelle Talbert of Her Power Moves in Miami, and a fun team building activity where we literally built sand castles on the beach based on our personality traits. We also took time to recognize the hard work and creativity of our team members with the fourth annual SuperBad Awards with several categories, from Best Use of an Influencer to Iconic Branding to Best Media Relations Campaign.
This year’s retreat, #FCGTakesMiami, definitely set a high bar for next year, and we are all looking forward to how we will win in 2019. Check out some of the snaps from our retreat below.
Christina Steed is an Executive Vice President at FCG.
