The surprise results of the 2016 Presidential election begs many questions. For leaders, there are meaningful parallels to draw. How vulnerable are you to to detrimental surprises in your company? Your wisdom as a leader is based on what you know. Your decisions and behaviors come from what you know. So, what do you really know?

What is your risk of being blindsided with your business, like so many experts with this election?
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​Correlating with what contributed to the surprises with the election, here are 5 questions to ask yourself.

Why? Simply because it's likely not helping your business. It might even be hurting you.

Now, if I'm wrong and your survey and the process does build trust within the company, result in meaningful actions being identified and performed, and you see employee relations improve, congratulations. Don't bother reading further.

Over and over again I see examples of companies doing engagement surveys that amount to (at best) a wee bit of meaningful discussion at the senior leader level, and the box being checked for having done this. All too often I see businesses do harm with these because they don't report back the data to employees, the senior leaders fail to take ownership of the results, and an action plan that is meaningful and realistic (and one with 25 actions is not realistic) does no emerge. After a couple of rounds of this, employees grow to resent the charade and the relationship between leadership and employees takes a hit.
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No wonder engagement hasn't increased meaningfully even after so much time and money going into surveys!