Posted by Kathleen on May 20, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Influence can make or break your best efforts as a consultant. If you have influence on your side, you can minimize barriers and break down obstacles to understanding and progress. Everyone who works inside a large organization understands the power of influence. But how do you access and plan for positive influence?
We’ve used influence maps to chart a course for success on large-scale projects and smaller, individual coaching efforts. Proactively discussing and planning for positive influence can take time up front. But the rewards of those efforts pay off when you have influential leaders on board who are champions of change.
Every expert acknowledges that executive support is the linchpin to success in organizational effort so why not take time to identify key influence strategies at the beginning of your project?
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The Influence Map outlines a structured process that helps individuals and/or teams:
- Identify key audience groups
- Determine the nature of resistance
- Plan influence strategies to positively impact stakeholders
Using this process early on in a change effort will clarify communication and influence plans, minimize ambiguities, and support the development of broad-based understanding and buy-in. This tool includes a worksheet to help individuals and/or groups identify influence strategies on three levels–personal motivation, social/group motivation and structural motivation. This approach helps leaders influence more efficiently and effectively by addressing the specific needs of their key stakeholder groups.
Posted by Kathleen on April 27, 2009 – 3:37 pm
Experts everywhere agree that in order to create successful, sustainable change, those leading the effort must engage key stakeholders in the planning and execution of activities that will bring about change. And leaders must be change champions, engaging, communicating and collaborating throughout the entire lifecycle of a change implementation to share plans, challenges, and successes along the way.
At Howick Associates we harness the power of leaders influence in the initiation phase of our work with the Influence Map tool. We use the influence mapping activity as an engagement opportunity and work with others to identify all those impacted by a specific change and brainstorm strategies to influence the groups, communicate more effectively and address resistance to minimize obstacles.
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By identifying our stakholder’s commitment to change and clarifying who can influence them proactively, we are more successful in planning for barriers and minimizing obstacles to successful change. Use this tool engage others and to help leaders engage others to strategize and leverage influence to help your change succeed.
Posted by Kathleen on April 6, 2009 – 12:25 pm
In the last couple of years, we have all been doing a lot more consulting “virtually”–Asking questions, clarifying assumptions and expectations, trying to support individuals who live and work in regions and time zones that are different from our own. Learning to manage and support virtual collaboration is critical to success for consultants today.
When we meet and work ”virtually” we lose 60% of the communication signals that we receive if we meet and work face-to-face. We lose facial expressions, eye contact, body language, and some level of verbal intonation and emphasis. In other words, a lot of information gets lost, and that makes collaboration and cooperation more difficult.
Getting clarity and agreement on specific objectives, team roles and responsibilities and progress can help. We have inserted a couple of links here to tools that assist internal consultants capture in clarifying next steps and accountabilities quickly, efficiently and effectively.
- RACI is a Responsibility Matrix that captures ownership and accountabilities for key project tasks raci
- Team Goals/Roles Tool helps teams assess and track progress on role clarity, team cooperation and movement toward goals teams-goals-roles
These tools can easily be adapted to reflect the specific needs and roles of your project. They can also easily be uploaded to share on any virtual meeting platform to enable discussion and consensus-building. Our goal is to provide structured templates to assist internal consultants in capturing, documenting and sharing virtual team responsibilities. Using these simple tools on any size virtual effort can create greater understanding, accountability and ownership for success.
