Being a leader means driving change. Being influential means persuading colleagues, teams, suppliers, and senior stakeholders to do things large and small, risky and less risky, expensive and not so much, in order to drive results. This month I have been working with a business that is challenged with the concept of onboarding. Often new leaders joining this business complain about an insufficient onboarding process which leads to unnecessary duplication, lack of productivity, reduced employee engagement, and in a complex, high value sales environment, a disproportionately high number of people attending client meetings. In addition, many of those who attend these meetings are not effective, and missed sales opportunities and a sub-optimal customer experience are the result. Despite this painful reality, the problem has persisted and little has changed over the past few years.
So, why is it that no matter how concise our message, no matter how clear our slide deck and explicit our request, we don’t always drive the change that we seek?
My time with clients this month has caused me to reflect on the answer to this question by considering the concept of ’the ask’, one element of which is to be clear on whether we seek a decision, action or some sort of commitment (time, money, people etc.) However, we also need to have thought through
our strategy around the ask, and there are a number of elements to this:
- Doing our research to understand our audience’s current awareness and sense of urgency around the issue
- Linking the ‘ask’ explicitly to an impact on the stakeholders’ key priorities
- Pre-briefing certain people in advance to get them onside
- Ensuring no ‘nasty surprises’, because that’s the quickest way to alienate others
- Demonstrating alignment with communities most impacted by the ask
- Garnering support from others to demonstrate how easy it would be to get started and make a difference
These matter - a lot. And there is something else too. We need to
beware of asking too much, too soon. In other words, we have to get the
scale of the request just right and it has caused me to evolve the concept of ‘
the iterative ask.’ In the onboarding example I’ve cited, asking for a wholesale change to the onboarding process won’t work. It’s too big, too complicated, it involves too many stakeholders and will elicit the most common response - which is to do nothing. We need to break this down into a number of smaller asks which, one by one we get approval for, deliver a result against, prove the value to relevant commercial metrics, and then go back to ask for more.
The ‘iterative ask’ forces us to think through our strategy for what we want and the
order in which we want it. It forces us to consider our audience, prove the concept, develop its application, reinforce its business value and over time, get the bigger scale change delivered.
So what’s change that you’ve been trying to lead which has stalled, or failed to get the traction you seek? How might your strategy be improved by focusing on the clarity of and strategy for a series of asks that you might need to iterate?
