Your corporate team is feeling excluded from key discussions. How can you ensure their voices are heard?

One I found helpful is to ask participants to write and submit suggestions ideas to be discussed. People are comfortable putting ideas on paper instead of speaking publicly. People may have useful contributions but are unable to string words together coherently. I also invite the silent ones to share their thoughts on issues with questions like if confronted with such an issue what will be your reaction?

Inclusive meetings start with who's invited to meet: make sure your meeting has good representation from the different groups that touch the topic. Second, publish the agenda with the goal of the meeting beforehand with the expectation that everyone will contribute. Invite participants to provide supporting information beforehand. Third, if you're the leader, it's your job to make sure everyone has time to contribute, is appreciated for their participation, no one dominates the discussion. Meeting leaders need to LEAD. Lastly, leaders talk last. always.

Organize team meeting and courage each role to share Educating sharing culture - contributive, constructive attitude Praise each person when they contribute well

Connecting the team member's contribution to the bigger goals of the corporate is a fantastic way to first reframe their internal narrative about their role in the team. Once they know why their inputs and job is critical, they can speak for their own role with support from a manager and also feel more confident demanding a seat at the table.

Meet for discussion and understanding, so that everyone comprehends the scope, scale and purpose of the work at hand. Kick off the meeting with a Role - Call -- restating the Business Objective, what teams are responsible for and how each team is dependent on others, and how each person's role contributes to the success of the work. Everyone should understand how people and teams all contribute and are dependent on each other. When people grasp that success requires everyone, success is more likely.

This is the linchpin to the whole balance in the association. Leverage training sessions with key stakeholders to position your team members as experts in the field. Allow them to moderate a few segments that showcase their skill sets and command respect from the stakeholder team. I typically use this session to position key members of my team as SME on various verticals and assign them as the POC for specific crisis / activities very clearly. Helps reduce workload, encourages teams to reach out to different people for specific work and also includes the entire team in the communication campaign.

Communication is the heart of all business - without it we can't accomplish anything well. Yet, we don't spend enough time training people to be good listeners, clear communicators, and compelling presenters. Great teams communicate with precision, appreciation, and authority -- which they need to learn and continually improve to ensure that everyone hears what the speaker intends.

Often, other business units aren’t quite sure when to include the communications team in their business planning. Creating and maintaining internal relationships and explaining how we best work as a team is crucial to help prevent this.

The best decisions are made with a wide range of input from different, experienced and informed perspectives. Teams that work with a "high-input, low democracy" framework generally perform the best, as long as the decision maker solicits and considers input, and then, once the decision is made, explain how and why they made the decision they did, acknowledging what input they could not use and why, with a later opportunity to evaluate the results and process and consider how to improve going forward.

Get to know other internal and external stakeholders with the goal of understanding their personal and organizational goals and challenges. Determine and implement ways you can help them with both. In many, but not all, cases, reciprocity will follow. Where it doesn’t, ask for it. At the same time, make sure your team and function have as many business and communications metrics and other data as possible to prove your value. Coach your teammates to speak up and weigh in. After you’ve done all this, your team’s voices should be more consistently heard. If it’s not, you’ll have plenty of things to point to as you ask others to do so.