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When developing your influencing strategy, especially when you are considering your analysis on a stakeholder map, I recommend that you ensure it addresses all of the following guidelines:
- Build Greater Support. Maybe stating the obvious. Just make sure you’ve got this well covered rather than get complacent.
- Convert or Neuralise Opposition. If people are against you, make sure you’ve got something in your strategy to at least remove the risk they pose to your objective.
- Accelerate Progress. This is the whole point of the exercise, how to get things done faster (providing it’s also being done safely with the appropriate quality).
- Proactively Manage Risks/Opportunities. In many ways part of your strategy will fuel future action in each of the previous areas.
- Protect Progress. Remember me saying how important it was about not being complacent about your advocates. Once engaged and on-side, continue to develop their interest and activity on your behalf.
- Keep it Simple. While complex strategies may be fun, simple wins the day in my book. It makes it more memorable, increases impact and maximises the chance that it will stay present in your mind, and other people’s minds too.
Here’s a couple of quick examples to illustrate what I mean.
Strategy Example One
Sue wanted to bring in a new stock ordering process. It was expected to yield big benefits, but she was struggling to get it moving forward positively. When she mapped out her stakeholders and considered what her strategy should be, she realised that many of the Players were also Area Sales Managers. Given their power, she realised she needed to focus her effort on winning them over. If she could do that, everyone else would fall into line. Her headline campaign strategy became:
- Get invited to the next ASM meeting.
- Build a communication pack focusing on how the process would lead to greater sales.
- Influence the IT people to change the process in order to make it more sales friendly.
- Become a champion for the sales teams.
Even simpler:
- Go to ASM meeting.
- Produce Sales Pack.
- IT make friendly Sales
- Champion Sales
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Strategy Example Two
Leroy’s goal was to get the business leaders to really buy into the benefit his change team could bring to the organisation. He realised that some were Advocates, while most were opposing, mainly on account that they viewed his work as excessively bureaucratic and that it got in the way of the real work. He noticed that one of the Critics (Bill) was fairly new to the business and was less powerful than the other leaders, but very ambitious. Leroy’s strategy became:
- Get Bill to recognise how working more closely with the change team could not only help his business, but also help him to become successful and powerful within the organisation.
- Then, advocate Bill at every opportunity to senior management, pointing out his successes linked with adopting change management approaches.
- Influence Peter, the MD, to become more active as an Advocate and to highlight the causes of Bill’s success (process improvement) to the other leaders on his team.
The simple version:
- Make Bill powerful.
- Promote Bill’s achievements.
- Get Peter to promote Bill’s success.
Now, what’s your strategy going to be?
Colin Gautrey
Provocative Coach/Mentor | Specialism: Impact and Influence
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