I know that sharing strategic plans with employees is encouraged, but do we really need to?

Last week I wrote about the benefits of sharing goals. This week it’s about sharing strategic plans.

If you’ve ever shared your strategic or annual plan with a large group of employees you may well have wondered whether you were wasting your time. Were your employees interested? Did they really care? Did the sharing of the plan actually make a difference to the organisation or is it, really, just a fluffy waste of time?

Actually there are good neurological reasons for sharing your plans.

The human brain is happiest when it’s operating in a familiar environment. When it sees a situation as “certain” the brain moves into auto pilot mode and saves energy. This is not necessarily a good thing. While it enables you to do two things at once (drive a car while talking on the phone) it means you’re not really engaging your brain. So in business a “certain” environment lets your employees coast – they do the job but aren’t attentive to it and they are present but not energized.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a very uncertain environment puts the human brain into a state of alarm. When this happens the brain diverts energy from other useful tasks to worry on the “problem”, gets into fight or flight mode and releases a swathe of stress related hormones. The result of this is poor performance, a lack of focus, panic and bad decisions.

There is a middle ground though which is a great place to be. It’s when our brains perceive mild uncertainty; and when this happens we become energized, curious and great problem solvers.

In business then, our best place to be is in the position of mild uncertainty.

Uncertainty itself is not hard to find – there is a fair amount in most growing businesses; growth means change means uncertainty. But in the unlikely event that you do have employees in “coasting” mode, a little change to their environment will probably move them into the mild uncertainty zone and unleash their usefulness.

More concerning is that many businesses are facing significant uncertainty. No one knows, for example, how the European situation will unfold, nor its ramifications on local business. It may be a major uncertainty for your business but it’s not going to help you at all if everyone perceives it like that.

One of the best ways to move the perception of uncertainty from major to mild is to share strategic and annual plans with employees and to articulate how the decisions contained within have been made.

Of course employees know that things rarely go according to plan, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It seems that simply knowing that there is a plan in place creates enough certainty to get the brain into optimum mode for this uncertain world.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).