Strategic Thinking is Required to Get Your Ideas Heard at Work
By: Mick, April 12th, 2007
Most employees feel that they might be just a little smarter than the people above them at work. And in many cases, employees have great ideas for improving the overall performance of their company. Unfortunately, the ideas of employees rarely get beyond their initial introduction to management because their presentations are incomplete - they do not contain a comprehensive plan for implementing their idea and they rarely address the likely obstacles to implementation that decision-makers will be quick to identify. The Brazen Careerist has a great post about How to Get Your Company to Listen to Your Ideas. In it, she presents a quick guide to presenting ideas in the workplace and how you can give your idea the best opportunity to impress the management and decision-makers enough to make it a reality.
1. Solve a problem
The person who needs to give you approval has issues of her own. Everyone does. Getting someone to pay attention to your ideas is a sales issue. You are sellling your idea. And the only way to sell something to someone is to solve a problem for them. You need to really understand the needs of the person you are trying to get approval from. And if you cannot figure out how you are helping that person, then you can’t really sell your idea to her.2. Package your idea
You’ll get higher level people involved if your idea is aligned with the strategic ideas of the organization. In order to get people to buy in to your idea, you have to know what ideas they are focusing on themselves. You need to show them that you are presenting a plan to further their strategic goals.3. Understand funding processes
Each organization has a different system for funding projects. But it’s safe to say that every system is arcane in it’s own way. You need to ask a lot of people in a lot of departments to find out the best way to get funding for your idea. If you rely on someone else to get funding, then you run the risk of not getting approval, because someone doesn’t want to deal with the financial implications of your idea. Taking care of a lot of this legwork and office politics yourself can go a long way toward getting approval.
Thinking strategically and pre-navigating the path of your new idea will greatly improve its chances of reaching implementation. At that point, much of the credit (or much of the blame) will fall back to that enterprising employee who presented that Big Idea in the first place.
Tags: career advancement, climbing the corporate ladder, introducing ideas, work presentations
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