Tribal Voice

A planning session where you give all your team a voice is a great opportunity to engage them in building and developing a vision that everyone is passionate about. They can see their role and at the next one can see their contribution (assuming you put measures in place to track contribution).

Tribe Research started having formal planning sessions at the end of 2004, the second was at the end of 2005, and in 2006 they became bi-annual. Our Planning Expeditions have been essential to our development and engaging the team so that they still have a relationship with us years after they have left through our alumni – TRX.

Why give all levels of the team a voice at a planning session?

Every person in your business has an impact and you won’t understand the way they see things, until you give them a voice.

A great story that Linda Hailey tells, goes something like this:

Linda was facilitating a planning session with an organisation.

The owner only wanted the leadership team to be involved and she encouraged him to change that and invite everyone along.

By the time of the planning session, everyone that could make it was there.

The session started with the managers being the only ones speaking up, providing issues and ideas.

Linda kept probing, asking if anyone else had ideas…

After a while, someone up the back of the room puts their hand up and asked: Is it important that the breaks on the forklift truck don’t work?

Yes, that is important. Obviously, it is important from a safety perspective, but there are other reasons that it is important.

• Had they told someone about this issue before and not seen action?
• Had they not felt able to tell anyone else before?
• Will having it raised in front of several people see action to make their job safer and easier?

They felt able to raise an issue that impacts their daily work life in front of several people. People who can solve the problem and peers that can see whether the problem is solved or not after it being raised.

It is easy for management to be so focused on the big picture (which is very important) that they stop seeing the issues that other members of the team have to deal with daily that have an impact on their performance, job satisfaction and the business.

At our last planning session the most junior member of the team said it was great for them to see metrics that showed their impact on the business, because it validated their contribution, how they benefited the business, and gave ideas to improve.

Everyone has an impact. Are you giving everyone a voice in your business?