What if my leader has no interest in involving employees in planning?

In a prior post we talked about the benefits of involving employees in planning. Unfortunately, many employees work for leaders who do not see the need to involve them in planning. These leaders use a command and control approach where goals are set by the senior leaders and communicated to the organization for action. There is little room for people to participate.

Since this is a problem in many organizations, leaving your team for greener pastures is not necessarily a good option. Our research shows you are likely to encounter this at most other companies. Instead we have four tips for getting your current leader interested in the SupportingLines planning approach:

  1. Get some data. All you have to do is invest 5 minutes to complete the assessment. This assessment quickly identifies where your team has opportunities to improve the way leaders help teams align. We would be happy to spend 20 minutes (for free) to debrief your High-Performance IndexTM results.
  2. Identify breakdowns in support. Where are the areas that the team failed to deliver results in the recent past? To what extent did a lack of follow-through on critical commitments of support for the goals make it more challenging to deliver? How would establishing formal supporting lines help your team deliver results in the future? Clear, specific examples will help make the case.
  3. Minimize change. We are more concerned about setting the supporting lines (ie: the commitments to do the important work) than we are about your method of defining outcomes. Sometimes keeping your existing way of setting objectives and adding ‘supporting lines’ to that existing is a good first step when facing resistance.
  4. Run a pilot. One effective strategy to get buy-in and enable change is to run a pilot for one team, one strategic objective or one initiative before rolling this approach out to the entire organization.

As we achieve more goals and engage more people we will cultivate a high-performance team. Let us know how we can help you engage your leaders in this exercise.

High-Performance Index™ Prediction

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Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith

Jeff is the Founder & CEO of SupportingLines. He is also a certified Master Corporate Executive Coach, seasoned C-suite business leader and yoga instructor.

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