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The Advisor’s Corner – How Do You Sell a Major Change?
Question:
Feedback indicates my company’s current leadership training program, though inexpensive, yields little to no value. My research shows that an alternative training program has produced superior, measurable results at other organizations. How should I go about selling my manager and the organization on the need to change from our current training program to this alternative one?
StrategyDriven Response:
Decisions to make significant changes are not often made quickly. Rather, these decisions are made after receiving input from affected stakeholders and subjecting each available option to a thoughtful cost versus benefit evaluation. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why organizations often use business cases to facilitate the decision-making process.
Well constructed business cases often require significant personnel and financial resources to develop. Considering the complexity and significance of the circumstance presented, we believe your first step should be to gain authorization to expend the resources necessary to research and develop the business case for the proposed change in the leadership training program. Once developed, your well structured business case, clearly presenting the costs and benefits associated with each alternative, will help you secure the management decision you seek to revise the organization’s leadership and training program.
Final Thought…
We suggest your business case include not only the two options presented in the initial question but also any additional alternatives presented by the responsible manager or other members of the organization. Leveraging their knowledge and experience may help you identify other worthwhile alternatives that would otherwise not be considered.
The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].
Standardized activity resource assumptions enable decision-makers to anticipate the quantity and type of resources needed to perform approved work; facilitating selection between competing alternatives, long-term resource planning, day-to-day scheduling, and performance measurement. Over time however, personnel, process, and business environment changes will necessitate reevaluation and alteration of the organization’s standardized activity assumptions. To accommodate these changes and maintain the benefits of using standardized assumptions requires establishment and use of a change control process.
Decision-makers and implementers must clearly understand the desired opportunity or problem outcomes in order to effectively select and execute appropriate actions. Without a well defined focal point, decision-makers and implementers risk selecting and performing either inefficient or inappropriate actions; expending resources on low value adding activities thereby diminishing an opportunity’s benefits or increasing a problem’s adverse impacts. Clear, concise opportunity and problem statements enable decision-makers to more readily identify the appropriate solution alternative and give implementers a target against which they can judge the effectiveness of their actions.
While it might sound cliche, there exists a significant truth to the phrase, actions speak louder than words. As individuals, we all hold certain values, beliefs, and biases which guide our decisions and subsequently our actions. So strong and yet so unperceivable are these convictions that on a day-to-day basis our reactions and responses to hundreds of seemingly benign situations are defined by them. Therefore, an individual’s values, the beliefs, and biases can be interpreted and understood by observing the individual’s actions.
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