Company Retreat

Department Head role

You are a Department Head at Vault Bank in their Hong Kong branch office. Vault Bank is a global bank serving a variety of businesses and individuals with daily banking and investment needs. You’ve been with Vault Bank for one year. You were hired as Department Head and previously worked for 5 years at a bank in Indonesia where you were also a department head. You are actively working to be promoted to Assistant Branch President within the next 2 years. This is bit faster than most promotions occur, yet you feel your previous experience gives you the ability to make it happen quickly.

Vault Bank is having their annual APAC retreat in 6 months and you’ve been invited by Vault Bank’s Hong Kong Branch President to be involved in organizing the retreat. You have a lot of support from your Hong Kong colleagues to be on the organizing team. You have previous experience and insight into:

A) Entertainment organizing. This includes organizing day trip activities, working with travel agencies and local guides in many countries, finding evening entertainment events, and organizing social events like networking events and team-building workshops.
B) Restaurant, food, and beverage coordination. This includes understanding local dishes around the APAC region, global restaurant and catering brands, and on-the-ground experience working with restaurants and hotels during large dining events.
C) Hiring external workshop facilitators. This includes finding and hiring entertaining team-building workshop facilitators. You don’t have formal learning and development coordination experience though as it has always been handled by the HR team or other senior leaders.
D) Because you lived in Indonesia, you would be a valuable resource if the annual retreat was held in Bali. Your local connections would get you trusted services and additional discounts.

Approaching the Annual Retreat

In order to increase your exposure in the Hong Kong branch and across APAC, you would love to organize the entire annual retreat. This is would be a big step towards your eventual promotion to Assistant Branch President. You know the Hong Kong Branch President will need to be convinced of your ability and your motivation to take on this monumental task, and you feel up for it especially if the retreat is in Bali. There any many roles and tasks in the retreat that you could delegate to a team of people you select to work with you. You envision having the Hong Kong Branch President as your co-organizer and are excited to let them relax while you organize the retreat and oversee the retreat committee.  At the same time, you want to work well with the Hong Kong Branch President especially if you will work closely with them in the future if you’re promoted to Assistant Branch President.

You will have 10 minutes to discuss the annual retreat and organizing roles with the Hong Kong Branch President.  Your goal is to try and reach an agreement for your role in the annual retreat.