Ever been on the other side of the Team?

• Not included by the Cool Kids? 
• Left out of the really important front-office activities? 
• Relegated to "those people back in the factory"?

How did not being on the Team feel?  
...Not so good , I expect.

Jack's Team Building Rules

-Always include more than exclude
-Engage! ...even when you don't need to 
-Reach out, include, and you'll empower 
-Above all else, always support & train the Team

And right now-today, this week-there is absolutely no better means or time to do this than by including every VP, Director, Manager and Supervisor in your business and sales planning processes for 2015.   Even, if you don't need to.  Because, you really do need to.

Sales planning, like business planning, is not done in a back room with the green eye-shaded accounting types rattling through 16 cross-synched spreadsheets.  The expense detailing and budget creation are the easy tasks. They really are!  

The hard, very difficult, teeth-gnashing decision making stuff is for the leadership-at all management and supervisory levels-of the business to become thorough drenched in the process of planning.  The tough decisions of absolute long term strategy-setting might need to be left to a smaller group of executives, but the actual process of engagement needs to involve every manager in the business. Without this involvement...

• there will be no opportunity for true empowerment
• there will be no engagement in the decision making process
• there can be no consensus-building
• everything will take longer, since it would need to be translated
• there can be no bench building of the next level leaders
• ...very simply, there won't be any team.

As you're working 15 hour days over the next few weeks chasing down orders, spending weekends working on your 2015 departmental plans and squeezing in all of the meetings and relatated travel that you committed to in the quieter time of October, your guiding principles of management for your 2015 plans need to be the 3 E's...

• engagement
• enablement
• empowerment 

...even when you don't technically need to!

Great article in this week's HBR for a few team tune-up tips: 
  (or just paste: https://hbr.org/2014/08/whos-being-left-out-on-your-team/)

Comments and questions?  

I continue to be an avid student and hopefully an educator of everything about business and sales planning, so if you want to download our Writing the Winning Business Plan ebook, just click HERE.  

As always, if you have questions, comments or just want to talk through your ideas, ping me, and we can either do an "Ask & Answer" by email or set up a phone call to take place during my long commute home every night.

Good Planning for 2015!