Voice Fuels Potential
How to transform disengagement into motivation
“I used to be lazy at work,” Joyce Kettering says. Not because she couldn’t do more, but because nothing about her multi-national organisation suggested her voice mattered.
Meetings came and went without her input, decisions were made without her, and processes rolled on regardless. Over time, she learned the routine: show up, sit through, go home, repeat.
Then she joined a place where power was shared, roles were clear, and decisions were made together. It was her first taste of sociocracy, and for the first time, she felt essential. That trust sparked something. She taught herself to code, played with APIs, and chased ideas late into the night.
No policy or KPI could have done that. It happened because she had a voice, and the space to use it. When people feel that, they don’t just work. They come alive.
What is Sociocracy and why it works?
Sociocracy is a way of running an organisation where power is shared, not stored at the top. Developed in the 1970s by Gerard Endenburg, it organises teams into overlapping circles that make decisions by consent, moving forward unless there’s a reasonable objection.
It works because empowerment is built into the structure. Roles are clear, decisions are shared, and people have safe spaces to speak up. Research shows sociocratic workplaces have higher engagement, lower turnover, and stronger resilience. At 10Pines in Argentina, turnover is under 5% compared to an industry average of 25–30% , a sign of deep belonging.
The stakes are huge, disengaged employees cost the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. But when people feel genuinely involved, they stop going through the motions and start bringing energy, ideas, and ownership that ripple across the organisation.
The stakes are huge, disengaged employees cost the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. But when people feel genuinely involved, they stop going through the motions and start bringing energy, ideas, and ownership that ripple across the organisation.
And here’s the thing: once people have experienced that sense of voice, it’s very hard to go back. The usual hierarchy feels heavy. Top-down decision making feels slow. Meetings without meaning feel like theft. What used to be tolerated starts to look absurd.
That’s why more organisations are quietly experimenting with sociocracy. It isn’t about tearing down hierarchy overnight or pretending structure doesn’t matter. It’s about weaving in small, practical changes that add up, like consent decision-making, rotating roles, or setting up circles around real work rather than fixed departments.
The ripple effect is cultural as much as structural. When power is shared, people trust each other more. When they trust each other, they dare to disagree, to create, to stretch. And when they do that together, the organisation grows in ways no strategic plan could predict.
The question for leaders today is not whether they can afford to give people a voice. It’s whether they can afford not to.
