Right now you should be deep into your annual planning or already have completed it. In preparing our coaching clients for annual planning we always ask the company to complete a short five question employee survey to gather information. Questions include what the company should start, stop and keep doing. (Send me an email Employee Survey if you’d like these five questions.) Discovery like this is important for the business in looking ahead. Remember the movie “Titanic?” “Iceberg dead ahead?” 
Many times the people at the tactical level of our business know much more than we give them credit for, and frequently they see the obstacles, challenges and opportunities far better than we or our mangers and departments heads can.
At the Phoenix Growth Summit Todd Klein, “Built for Change” suggested that the successful companies he identified went deeper in their discovery process for their planning then companies in their peer group. The companies that were most successful went three layers deeper than their competition for gathering information.
These companies also asked their employees for ideas for innovation. And in addition to asking for their ideas they asked their employees what role they wanted to play.
These ideas are eerily similar to a recent weekly meeting one of my clients had where he asked his employees to contribute what he called “the next small thing.” We’ll explore this in my next blog.
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