The Secret Button for Getting Your Ideas Approved

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Alternative Selection ArticleGetting your idea approved requires a clear recommendation that’s paired with a compelling reason for your stakeholder to approve your idea. If you can combine that idea with a powerful rationale, you’ll get to “yes” before you know it.

Make Your Audience Care

At the heart of getting your pitch approved is making your audience care about it. The best way to make them care is to explain how your idea advances their agenda. Show them how your recommendation drives a result they’re interested in. The way you make this linkage is through the creation of the Core Idea.

A Core Idea is sometimes referred to as an “elevator pitch.” The reason it’s called an “elevator pitch” is because you have approximately 30 seconds to deliver your message. That’s the amount of time you’d be on the elevator with the stakeholder going from one floor to another. Imagine you get on an elevator and a senior stakeholder boards your elevator on the next floor. They proceed to ask you what you’re working on. You can either ramble on about all the data you’re gathering and the analysis you’re doing or you can give them a brief yet powerful explanation of the idea you’re pursuing and why it’s exciting. Ideally the reason it’s exciting is related to a metric or objective that stakeholder cares about. The latter approach is obviously preferable. By the time you finish your elevator ride together, the stakeholder knows what you’re working on and they’re supportive of you pursuing the idea.

A Core Idea is composed of two elements. The first half entails you explaining the “what we should do” part of your recommendation. The second half is the “why we should do it” part of your pitch. The “what we should do” component is your hypothesis as to what your best answer is. The “why we should do it” component depends upon your stakeholder. I refer to this component as “the button” – that metric or objective that makes your stakeholder sit up and take notice. Let’s look at a hypothesis about expanding our business into Italy and Germany. Let’s turn that hypothesis into a Core Idea. Below I’ve listed a few stakeholders and corresponding Core Ideas to pitch to them regarding the European market entry:

  • VP of Sales: “We should enter the Italian and German markets because we can generate $XMM in sales.”
  • Chief Financial Officer: “We should enter the Italian and German markets because we can generate $XMM in incremental profits.”
  • Chief Marketing Officer: “We should enter the Italian and German markets because we can increase our European market share by X%.”
  • VP of Human Resources: “We should enter the Italian and German markets because we can get access to a large, diverse talent pool.”

Notice the hypothesis is the same every time. I’m making a pitch for entering the Italian and German markets no matter who my stakeholder is. But the button changes depending upon who I’m trying to influence. The VP of Sales will care about sales. The CFO will care about profits. The Chief Marketing Officer will care about market share. The VP of HR will care about talent. I’m not pitching a one size fits all Core Idea. I’m tailoring it based upon who I’m trying to influence.

The odds of me getting their support go up when I target my communications this way. Imagine if I pitched the same Core Idea of “We should enter the Italian and German markets because we can generate $19MM to $23MM in sales” to all those stakeholders. The VP of Sales would be excited because the idea drives sales. The CFO might be interested but would wonder how profitable those sales will be. The CMO would ask how much of a market share increase those sales translate to and wouldn’t approve the idea until she had that answer. The VP of HR might feel frustrated because I didn’t explain the idea’s talent implications. That Core Idea would get some support from this crowd but it wouldn’t be unanimous and I would have questions I’d still need to answer.

Building a Core Idea: Hypothesis + Button

A good Core Idea combines an easily understood hypothesis with a button relevant to the stakeholder. First, get clear on your hypothesis. When you write down this part of your Core Idea, be specific and tell your audience what you want them to do. Write the hypothesis portion of your Core Idea in simple yet precise language. Saying “We should pilot a test of the new marketing model on our IT system” is more likely to be understood by everyone in the room – more so than “leverage our IT system.” If stakeholders understand your recommendation, they’ll know what you’re asking them to approve.

The second component of the Core Idea is the button. The button is the one metric or objective that your stakeholder cares about more than any other. Sometimes the button is obvious – the VP of Sales would like to drive sales. For other stakeholders the button might not be self-evident. In those situations you have a few choices for how to figure out the stakeholder’s button. You can get a copy of their goals or strategic plan. The metric they emphasize the most in those documents is their button. You can ask a member of their team what the stakeholder cares most about. You can ask the stakeholder what their objective is. If you can’t access any of those sources, think through which metric matters the most to them and start with that.

Once you’ve settled on a metric to use for the button, quantify it if possible. You may only have a rough value estimate. In many cases you won’t have an estimate at all. For now include whatever you have as a placeholder that will be refined later. In the examples I provided earlier I wrote “$XMM” or “X%” to serve as a placeholder. That’s acceptable – and encouraged – at this stage. The placeholder will serve as a reminder in future steps that you’ll need to do the analysis to solve for “X.”

If you use this “X” approach, think through X’s unit of measure. This process is about making it easy for your stakeholder to say “yes” to your pitch. If they think in percentages and you give them “$X,” you’re asking them to do math. The same holds true if they think in dollars and you give them “X%.” These extra steps aren’t required if you do the math for them. Small points like this may not seem to matter but these are the details that differentiate a rough pitch from an elegant one. Elegance is about simplicity and smoothness. These small changes are ways you can smooth the rough spots in your pitch.

About the Author

Mike Figliuolo is the author of The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, and Get it Approved. He’s also the co-author of Lead Inside the Box and the author of One Piece of Paper. He’s the managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC – a leadership development training firm. An Honor Graduate from West Point, he served in the U.S. Army as a combat arms officer. Before founding his own company, he was an assistant professor at Duke University, a consultant at McKinsey & Co., and an executive at Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro. He regularly writes about leadership on the thoughtLEADERS Blog.

The attack of the Yabuts!

/in /by

Nothing sucks the blood out of a great idea faster than the dreaded “Yabut…” In fact, the “Yabut” may be the No. 1 killer of collaboration, cooperation, great ideas and innovation in organizations.

You know what “Yabuts” are, don’t you? They are those prickly little creatures that make noises like; “Yabut, the banks will never back us on this one… Yabut, the market is totally unpredictable… Yabut, we’ve never done that before…”

Let’s take Stephen, for example. Stephen is a recently promoted Director in the Business Development division of a large financial services company. During a strategic planning meeting, he suggested that they should explore how to be more effective in how they manage certain new initiative assignments. Although several of his colleagues looked at him with faces of interest, the Committee Leader quickly replied, “Yabut, we really don’t have time to be playing around with our management process at this point, even if we all do feel a little pressure” And that was that.

Stephen had made several suggestions about new ideas and opportunities since his appointment to the Strategic Planning Committee, and it seemed that every one of them was answered with some form of the same species of “Yabut…” It was not just Stephen of course; in fact, his colleagues had received that same sort of response with such frequency that the meetings had slowly become a routine of simply answering the questions and listening for your new task. Any meaningful conversation and debate had really just died.

So how do we kill the “Yabuts” before they suck the blood out of our potential growth and prosperity? Replace them forever with a whole new species of “Yesands…”! A much nicer animal in fact, not prickly at all, it makes nurturing noises like: “Yes, and with a more promising corporate strategy, we could negotiate with our banks for better overall conditions… Yes, and we can leverage the market study to include a long needed loyalty review of our most profitable accounts… Yes, and we could learn more about that idea’s potentially positive impact on our current business lines…”

A particularly articulate form of the animal has been heard in creativity dialogues using the phrase structure: “Yes, what I like about what you are saying is [identify anything positive inside the person’s comment that you can, even if you do not agree with the entire thought]… And, [build on top of the point with a positive idea of your own]…” Used consecutively during the dialogue, team members build on top of each other’s thinking, and the results are quite amazing! People feel more confident, become more cooperative, open up and think, put more ideas on the table, nourish those ideas, and as a result, creativity and innovation soar!

I encourage you to do a little self-listening. How frequently do you encounter “Yabuts” in your own yard? Make sure you are not breeding them without even realizing it. Kill them off quickly and replace them with a good healthy herd of “Yesands”. In fact, you can take it a step further and replace nearly every use of the word “but” with “and”, and the results are guaranteed to surprise you, delight your audience, and foster a remarkable outcome.

Every time you hear yourself say, “but,” change it to “and.” In that moment, you’re breaking the habit of closed thinking. The more you do it, the more open you’re thinking will become, and the more open your counterpart’s thinking will become. As with any habit, it takes time to break. And it’s worth it.

About the Author

Scott CochraneScott Cochrane is the author of Your Creative Mind: How to Disrupt Your Thinking, Abandon Your Comfort Zone, and Develop Bold New Strategies (Career Press, 2016). Scott’s The Bold Mind Group helps clients grow to higher levels of success through implementing revolutionary thinking.

Seven Lessons American Manufacturing’s Decline Can Teach Any Company

/in /by

The United States destroyed its enemies in World War II because it out-produced them. Its manufacturing capacity was enormous and efficient. Its workforce was inspired and committed. The government, suppliers, and competitors all collaborated to produce the biggest manufacturing juggernaut the world had ever known. It seemed there was no end to America’s manufacturing might.

But there was.

The end to America being a manufacturing powerhouse began during the recession of 2008. Millions of middle-class manufacturing jobs were lost. And they never came back. In fact, since 1979, manufacturing employment has plummeted by over 33%. That is worse than the job losses during the Great Depression.

So what happened? How did the world’s mightiest manufacturing machine end up as the equivalent of room service to China? How did the nation with the workforce that won the war end up with a workforce outsourced to India? How did the most motivated, inspired, and productive workforce on the planet end up caring more about their bowling scores than their production numbers?

There is no shortage of explanations. Some experts claim China is to blame. Others cite United States trade policies. And still others say it is because of the rise of the Millennials.

However, very few people point to the real reason. And that is a failure of American leadership on an epic scale; a failure of government to work with manufacturing instead of against it; a failure of business to adapt to the global marketplace instead of running from it. But most of all, it is a failure of leadership to harness and unleash the remarkable potential of the American worker.

You can’t unleash this massive potential without creating a “culture by design, not default”. A culture by design has a bedrock of carefully selected company-wide values that motivates employees, delights customers, serves their communities and sparks innovation and creativity. But most companies have cultures “by default, not design”. They have what I call “bumper sticker” values. Bumper sticker values are created in boardrooms because they sound cool. But they don’t reflect the real, underlying values of the organization.

One has to look no further than the Wells Fargo bogus accounts debacle to illustrate this. Two of Wells Fargo’s key values are “ethics” and “what’s right for their customers”. And yet what they did was clearly neither. How can a company with those supposed ethics commit such an act? It can only be because while those values look good on a bumper sticker, the real, underlying values at Wells Fargo are “profit above all else”. Now don’t misunderstand me, profit has to be the number one goal. The problem with that as a core value, above all else is people will act that way. And when they do, relationships between employees and customers suffer, quality suffers, the books get cooked, and all other manner of bad outcomes.

That is why it is so important to build a culture by design. Cultures by design contain foundational values that drive organizational behavior toward remarkable outcomes. Cultures by default contain foundational values that drive organizational behavior toward bad outcomes.

The key point here is that you should choose values and not let values choose you. Here are some simple steps to get started:

1. Understand the values your organization currently has. Some, perhaps all, the values may be perfectly appropriate. Some may not be. But remember, the underlying values are probably different than the bumper sticker values. Conduct an anonymous survey of every single employee and ask them. Don’t make this a human resource exercise. It has to come right from the top to be taken seriously.

2. Once you know the underlying values of the organization, decide which ones are worth keeping, nourishing, and promoting and which ones need to be discarded. And then you and your senior leadership team can decide which new values need to be implemented. This is not a slogan exercise. It is a gut-wrenching soul-searching mission. Which values should you choose? It will be different in every company but you should choose values that drive organizational behavior toward remarkable outcomes. Don’t choose values that sound cool in the C-suite but stupid to employees. Choose values that everyone in the organization can get behind and feel good about. Sound like a tough job? It is. The last time I did this it took a year.

3. Declare to the organization the new values that have been chosen and why. If you have chosen well, people will applaud you when you tell them. If you have chosen poorly, you’ll be a water cooler joke. Be very deliberate and comprehensive when you announce the new values. Explain completely what each value means, why it was chosen, and what you expect from employees in terms of behavior to support the values.

4. Now comes the most crucial part. You must be certain your senior executives live these values day by day. You can’t expect “people from below to do what the top does not”. Some of your executives won’t go along with the new values. Ask them to leave the company. Yes, you read that right. One loose cannon on the values ship can scuttle the whole effort.

5. Align all organization policies and practices to support the new values. Make them part of performance appraisals, standards for promotions, and compensation increases. Don’t let this become a “check the box to keep human resources happy” exercise.

6. Once the values are firmly entrenched, don’t let anybody in the front door that doesn’t believe in them. Do a “values check” as part of the interview process.

7. And finally, this has to be a CEO initiative or it will fail. Think of this as a strategic culture plan, requiring years to execute, not months. And give it the same time, importance, attention, and resources as you do the strategic operating plan.

About the Author

CEO Miller IngenuitySteven L. Blue is the President & CEO of Miller Ingenuity, a global supplier of mission-critical solutions in the transportation industry and author of the new book, American Manufacturing 2.0: What Went Wrong and How to Make It Right. For more information, please visit www.StevenLBlue.com, www.milleringenuity.com and connect with Blue on Twitter, @SteveBlueCEO.

The Three Keys to Employee and Company Fulfillment

/in /by

Who wouldn’t like to be more fulfilled? If you’re not feeling totally fulfilled, you’re not alone. Even if you are fulfilled, the odds are that many of your managers and employees are not, according to new study conducted by Metrus Institute. In fact, few Millennials and only some Gen Xers describe their lives as fulfilled.

In the study, life fulfillment is defined as achieving one’s dreams and creating a lifestyle that brings exceptional happiness and inner peace. The good news is that you can control a good deal of this, and even more importantly, you can positively influence the fulfillment, productivity and retention of people in your organization. Bottom line, there are three big factors that drive fulfillment: actions aligned with vision; the right capabilities and engagement or passion.

Aligned Vision

First, do your employees see a vision and a sense of purpose for your organization, and most importantly, is it synced with their own vision and values? Fulfilled people not only have a purpose or vision of the future, but it is also aligned with their job and employer. They have a clear sense of where they are headed (or would like to head) in life, and how their current job fits into that broader framework. Unfulfilled people struggle with misalignment between who they are and what they do every day. People who are not aligned with your organization’s purpose or vision are either biding their time or actually working at cross-purposes.

Most people I have coached can actually articulate such a vision when they take a little time out of busy, programmed lives to think about it. Goals could include discovering the next great drug, having a large loving family, becoming a vice president, achieving financial security, having great friendships, finding a life partner, and yes, even becoming a CEO. When those goals are aligned with the organization, we see higher productivity and business results.

Leaders do themselves a disservice when they don’t understand people’s personal vision and values and how they jibe with the company’s vision and core values or culture. When the two are highly aligned, we see that spark where employees are rowing hard in the same direction to execute the business strategies quickly and effectively. When that happens, you don’t need a lot of rules because people make judgments that are in sync with what the business needs and how the business operates to get there.

In hiring talent at any level, especially senior managers and executives, this ‘fit’ is critical. When fit is low, it is like a rowing team in which every person in rowing at a different pace or even in a different direction. A good test of this is to ask about priorities. In survey research that we do at the Metrus Institute, one of the telling questions is how people view different priorities. Highly aligned organizations execute their strategies rapidly, with little waste, while others look like they are rowing in gelatin.

Capabilities

The second key ingredient is Capabilities. It asks the question, who are you and what do you need to succeed? What are your skills, experiences, knowledge and abilities? And, are those capabilities sufficient to succeed in your current and desired roles? While it is great having life goals, without the building blocks, they are unlikely to be achieved. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had skills and interests in both piano and political science. Despite an ability that allowed her, later in life, to play on stage with Yo-Yo Ma at a televised event in Washington, she realized early on that she could not make a career as a virtuoso pianist. But she could be a virtuoso political figure. She had all the building blocks for that with the right education, credentials and experience.
Amazingly, one of the paradoxes of the corporate world is that mature organizations often choke off the capabilities needed to succeed. Today, the most important resource for most organizations is the right talent to get the job done. And yet over four-fifths of CEOs I talk to decry their talent pipeline—they don’t have the people in place for succession or critical backup for key roles.

Talent fit is also important. Here is where fulfillment becomes important. People who are being asked to learn new skills or knowledge in areas that are not very interesting to them or don’t fit into their life or career plan will find excuses to avoid the training or not absorb it in a meaningful way. It you are not a technology geek, picture being asked to sit in a software class. You could do it if you were being pushed to do it, but you wouldn’t love it or retain much. The same holds for great leadership skills. People who accept promotions to managers primarily for pay or position, but not because they like bringing out the best in people, usually fail in the long run. They need to be good leaders that others will follow, not just because they have a title.

Engagement

The third component of fulfillment is Engagement. Have you ever met a successful person who didn’t seem to be totally absorbed in what he or she does? All of the highly fulfilled people that I researched had a passion for their mission and purpose in life, along with the actions needed to get there. They loved what they did and continuously learned from it.

What doesn’t work is having a dream, but not enjoying the journey. I interviewed a Millennial who said he wanted to be rich and that he could have taken a job on Wall Street. I asked why he didn’t and he said he didn’t want to work 90 hours a week. He was still looking (unsuccessfully) for other ways to “get rich”. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers quotes the research of Anders Ericsson that shows that many of the champions we admire have become successful through hours and hours of practice – 10,000 in fact. That’s a lot of time invested in something if you don’t enjoy it. It’s hard to picture tennis great Roger Federer or Olympian gold medalist Michael Phelps being successful if they didn’t enjoy tennis or swimming and were just doing it to be famous.

Optimizing Your Talent Investments

One of the continuing gaps for most companies is strong people optimization skills—obtaining the most benefit from the investments in finding and developing people and their talent. In tests we do of leadership, fewer than 20% of leaders have highly aligned, capable and engaged employees, resulting in not only sub-par performance, but often poorer quality, lower customer satisfaction and higher turnover. And, this finding occurs in nearly every organization. The best managers hire people with goals and values that are aligned with the organization, help them develop skills that are in sync with both career and organizational needs, and bringing out the passion in their people. Keep in mind that most new talent in your organization is 100% engaged on the day they are hired, but if you are like most businesses, engagement drops significantly in the first two years, often sooner. Managers who cannot optimize the people investments they are given need to be retooled or replaced.

Here are a couple of things you can do to find out if your people are being fulfilled and as a result performing at their best in your organization:

  • Conduct a survey or audit of all of your managerial units on alignment, capabilities and engagement. Engagement alone is not enough if people’s priorities, values and capabilities are not aligned.
  • Do a quick check survey or pulse across your organization to see how many people understand the 2-4 key business priorities or imperative. You may be shocked at gaps in this understanding, even at very senior levels.
  • Invest in hiring the right people—those capable of being aligned and engaged in your culture in addition to having the right skills. It is better to wait longer to hire someone who meets these criteria than to spend your life correcting misfits.

Now go optimize your talent — it’s the engine that drives strategy execution. And don’t forget about your own fulfillment!

About the Author

William A. SchiemannWilliam A. Schiemann, Ph.D. is CEO of Metrus Group. He is a thought leader in human resources, employee engagement, and fulfillment and author of Fulfilled! Critical Choices: Work, Home, Life, scheduled to be released October 1, 2016. For more information follow Dr. Schiemann on Twitter, @wschiemann and connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/wmschiemann.

4 Fundamental Lessons for Leaders

/in , /by

The first lesson of leadership: it is not about you.

The essence of leadership is the ability to influence others. And all successful leaders realize what Dale Carnegie explained: “The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”

Being a leader means understanding what others desire. You won’t figure that out by self-analysis. What motivates people to follow you is not something within you. It is something within them.

It’s difficult to get people to want something they don’t already want. But people, of course, want all sorts of things. They want healthy children, an attractive appearance, security, recognition, adventure, etc. It is much easier to focus people on one particular desire that can be fulfilled by doing what the leader suggests.

People will follow you because they see in you the easiest path to get where they want to go.

The second lesson of leadership: debate facts, not feelings.

The most motivating of desires are feelings. Effective leaders show people how to feel the way they would like to feel. Feelings motivate at a more basic level. Feeling smart is more motivating than saving a little money. Feeling sexy is more motivating than losing some weight. Feeling like a good parent is more motivating than serving oatmeal.

Feelings have the advantage of being immediate. While drinking milk may lead to strong bones eventually, you can feel healthy with the first glass. People pursue an immediate feeling more enthusiastically than a delayed fact.

Feelings also have the advantage of being certain. While the politician you support may or may not be able to accomplish what you hope, casting a vote will certainly make you feel like you’re doing your part. People pursue what’s certain more passionately than what’s likely.

Leaders elevate their promise, and show people how to feel the way they would like to feel.

The third lesson of leadership: actions matter, reasons don’t.

People pay little attention to what would-be leaders say, believing they will say most anything to get ahead. But people are convinced what would-be leaders do reveals their true selves. In fact, people pay close attention to how others act and ignore why they act that way.

Leaders can’t persuasively claim to be tough, calm, determined, or kind. What leaders say, particularly about themselves, is irrelevant. The only way leaders can convince people that they have those qualities is to act tough, calm, determined, or kind. As far as followers are concerned, leaders are what they do no matter why they do it. If leaders act tough, people will believe they are tough even if, in reality, the leaders are milquetoasts.

By identifying with a leader, followers get to, in a sense, clothe themselves in the character of that leader. People who want to feel confident follow leaders they perceive as confident. People who want to feel smart follow leaders they perceive as smart. In political campaigns, people literally clothe themselves in the apparel of leaders to share in their qualities.

Leaders act the way followers would like to feel.

The fourth lesson of leadership: let followers take small steps.

How do leaders develop loyal, sometimes rabid, followers? It doesn’t happen in one step. People don’t go from 0 to 60 without passing through the speeds in between.

Smart leaders encourage others to begin by taking a small step in the leaders’ direction. People who have taken a small step look at things differently than they did before. Putting a small, discrete sign for a candidate in your window will make you look at that candidate more favorably than before and you will be more willing to accept a large sign on your front lawn. If someone agrees with you on a small issue, they will be more likely to agree with you on a bigger issue. Persuasion experts refer to this as the “Foot in the Door” technique. Getting that first movement in a leader’s direction is the hardest. That step changes the way things look to the follower and subsequent steps come more easily.

Leaders depend completely on followers’ enthusiasm. Lessons in leadership focus on understanding what potential followers want and how they think.

About the Author

James C. CrimminsJames C. Crimmins is the author of 7 Secrets of Persuasion: Leading-Edge Neuromarketing Techniques to Influence Anyone (Career Press, Sept 2016).