I started this Blogpost in 2021 — now seven months ago. But I stucked in the final version. Many Projects and unexpected events forced me to take a break from work on Medium. So today on the 1st January in 2022 I finished…
Everyone know this situation. You learn something new and you want to implement a change in your daily work. Or you have a great innovational Idea which means that influence your whole company or your customers experience. The question is how you can be successful in the implementation phase and how you should communicate it. The following steps should give you some meta framework for a success story.
Features and Values
In the first step you should be sure about the features and the values and you should know both of them. Features are helpful when you are talking about the obvious points: what are the key information about the new approach, type of work, technologie or product.
Features of a product for example could be colours of clothes, technical bullit points of a bike or car. But this is not enough to inspire and convince your team or customer to change their minds or buy this product. To inspire them you need values and benefits. Why?
For Teams or whole companies a change in a work approach is a disruption in the first step and not easy to handle. “We are now agile” means for example to implement dailys and weeklys in shorter time schedules. A electric car needs the possibility to charge it at home and to find charging stations. As you can see a disruption is often more pain then happyness because of these changes and the feeling, that everything is different to yesterday. So a good preperation is essential to have a feature and a value list in hand. Because you will need several times to present them and you should check if points are missing or if they are obsolet. Additionaly it is important to know more about your target group and audience. It is crucial to know if you present your Ideas Shareholders or C-Level People or a Domain Expert or the people who work in the Frontlines. So the differents between these kind of interest groups are the key features you want to show — do you need more information about values and cost savings or features and benefits in daily business?
Know your Enemies
Before you start you should think about your target group. In many cases you know who is easy to convice but I am sure everyone know this kind of persons who are opponents and skeptics. To have more success you should know them because in teams espacially these groups are sometimes opinion maker because they argue against change and have solid reasons for that. When you are able to have good values to convince these kind of people it will be easier to get all the other “silent” team members.
Same with customers. Maybe you have in your group of customers one big who is present in the market. These customers are observed and are trend-setters in the market. And these customers are the first you should address to modify the market.
In these cases we speak of real enemies because they have good reasons not to switch to something new at the moment or because they have additional needs. Use these types of stakeholders to help make your ideas better and more meaningful.
Create values and switch real enemies into followers and supporters!
Top down communication
Like a market leader you should search for an opinion leader in your company or team. Search for the most important group or person in your hirachy. Like the real enemies it is helpful to convince the leaders as well, like the middle or top Management up to your company size. Sometimes some discissions have to be steered from top to bottom.
Then the different Teams recognized that is a culture change and they think different about these topics. As you can see the way to the final implementation is not so easy as you might think. And when you think about the different interest groups you might figure out that you need a well prepared communication plan.
Learn from your mistakes
Within all these steps of communication you will make failures and steps back. This is no problem — you should use it. Be open for feedback and better ask for it. Ask a descision maker to talk about your ideas and communication plan to get his feedback. Often those stakeholders can help you where you should set the focus. In my case these personas were my mentors.
Live a failure culture
It goes hand in hand with the learning curve. But it is important to live the failure culture for yourself as well. You should use errors to get better. Failure could be used like vehicle which helps to steer in the right direction. It is the compass on your Roadmap. Don’t hasitate and let failures discourage yourself. It is your personal culture change but it is one of the greatest benefit you can get. Accept that it is normal not to be perfect or that you need more then one start to get to your goal. This leat me to my last but most important aspect
Mindfullness
There are a lot of resources like books, papers, podcasts etc. in the WWW about mindfullness. Some you might already had read or are well known. If or not — mindfullness is a strong weapon to succeed in different parts of life.
My personal experience is, that I learned with mindfullness to accept, that I am not perfect (like my Blog on Medium) and that my opposite has good reasons why he reacts like he reacts in that moment. To listen carefully and learn from the aspects and views of my opposite. This lead me to the right decisions and in the end to the goal behind my ideas.
But there is one other important part: mindfullness helps you not to get burned in this stressful part of communication on different levels to try to convince different players. Remember: there is nothing such important then your health!
Stay healthy and a happy new Year 2022!
