Company Retreat

Hong Kong Branch President role

You are the Hong Kong Branch President of Vault Bank. 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 15 years. You started as a department head and moved your way up to Hong Kong branch President. You are actively working to become the APAC CEO and your colleagues don’t know this yet.

Vault Bank is having their annual APAC retreat in 6 months and you’ve been tasked with organizing the entire retreat. At this moment, your first location choice is Phuket, Thailand and your second choice is Bali, Indonesia.

You have the many freedoms and a variety of resources to make this annual retreat successful.  These include:

A) Organizing the retreat committee as you see fit. Ideally you are looking for volunteers, and with your position as Hong Kong branch President, you can assign people to any role you’d like.
B) Choosing the country, city, and resort hotel
C) Planning all formal learning and development activities. These will include workshops and presentations from external consultants as well as from Vault Bank employees. Again, you’d like volunteers and have the ability to assign employees to specific workshops and presentations. 
D) Planning all entertainment. These will be a mixture of day-long events like day trips and evening events at the hotel and in the local area.
E) All restaurant and catering choices for group events.

Because you have a major task ahead of you, you are meeting with a Department Head in the Hong Kong office that recently joined the company. They were previously at a bank in Indonesia. This Department Head reminds you of yourself 15 years ago. The department head has only been with the company for 1 year but has a lot of previous supervisory and management experience before coming to Vault Bank. Your colleagues have been impressed with their work and they are on track to becoming Assistant Branch President within the next 2-5 years.

Organizing the Annual Retreat

You will remain the organizer of the annual retreat because it gives you visibility and shows the board of directors that you are ready to rise to the APAC CEO role. You want to bring in the Department Head as an entertainment and restaurant coordinator for the retreat. Although your primary goal is a retreat in Tokyo, the Department Head’s time in Indonesia could be valuable if Bali becomes a better option. No matter which location is finally chosen, you would trust the Department Head to handle all entertainment and restaurant decisions. You’ve heard from your colleagues that the Department Head loves organizing big social events but NOT formal learning and development coordination. The Department Head might ask to take over the entire organizing role. Personally, you will not allow this to happen. You must remain as the central organizer of the annual retreat for your career goals. On the other hand, you are very flexible with other roles the Department Head might want in addition to entertainment and restaurant coordination.  

You have other employees lined up to take care of other major roles like location research, hotel planning, and learning and development scheduling. Many of the employees have completed these roles in past retreats and did wonderful work.

If the Department Head become too pushy or doesn’t respect your tenure at Vault Bank, you have the freedom to remove them from the project completely.  This is a last resort, though, because the Department Head is popular within your office and the wider APAC region. You want the Department Head to be involved at some level and look forward to working them them on future projects as well.

You will have 10 minutes to discuss plans and roles with the Department Head. Your goal is to try and reach an agreement for the Department Head’s role in the annual retreat.