Selling Your Ideas to Your Organization

Scharlatt

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781604910254
• eBook ISBN:
  9781604917345
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

If you've got an idea you want to sell, you need to do two things: scan your environment and use effective tactics. This guidebook explains how to scan your environment and provides a collection of tactics you can use to sell your idea. Using this systematic approach will make you more likely to accomplish your objective - solving a problem or making an improvement for the benefit of individuals, groups, and the organization as a whole.

Scanning Your Organization

By assessing your organizational environment, you lay the groundwork for success in getting your ideas accepted and implemented. The several points that follow can provide you with the information you need to get started. It is not essential to assess the points in this order, but this is a logical sequence, in that one thing tends to build on another. Assessing these points will tell you what you know—and don’t know. If you attempt to assess one of the points and don’t come up with an answer, that’s important. You will have to decide whether to proceed with a gap in your knowledge or to try harder to get an answer.

The Fit with Your Organization’s Goals

Your organization’s explicit goals are recorded (and, ideally, well communicated). You can find evidence of them in its vision statement, its mission, its strategic objectives, its structure, and other forms. On the other hand, the implicit goals of your organization are less visible. These are the “what we try to do around here” ideas that people carry with them, believe, and act on. The more closely you can align your ideas with your organization’s spoken and unspoken goals, the better chance you have of getting your ideas accepted and implemented.

For example, let’s assume that your organization places a high value on teamwork across its divisions. That’s a goal it states in its working principles, and it’s a practice that managers throughout the organization strive to achieve. If you tie your idea to a sense of teamwork, if you can present it as supporting and enabling that particular goal, there’s a good chance that people will support it. The opposite also holds true. If your idea goes against any of your organization’s written goals, objectives, or values—or the unwritten ones—or if it goes against the grain of common practice, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for you to get support for your idea, no matter how beneficial it may be. You’re going to have to make a much more difficult push to get your idea sold, and you have to plan for that accordingly. People have to see the benefit right away, and one way to help them see that is to align your ideas with what they want to achieve.

Leadership Task

Gather your organization’s mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan. What are the explicit goals suggested in those documents?

Your Group’s (and Your Own) Position in Your Organization

Make a frank assessment of your group’s position (and your personal position) in the true hierarchy of your organization. To make this assessment, you’ll need to go beyond the official organizational chart and become aware of the unwritten pecking order—the informal power structure, which is often very different from the organizational chart. That order can change with different circumstances, such as increased competition, a new CEO, or some other realignment. Consider your organization. Does the sales force drive your organization’s work, or is it the finance group or the marketing group? Is production the driving force, or does your organization measure itself in the number of grants it receives? What about innovation, research, and development? Do those functions create the heart of your organization? Whatever your answer, how are you positioned in relation to the driving forces in your organization? Are you part of them, or do you work outside of those functions? These are the kinds of relationships that determine the true hierarchy of your organization.

For example, if you’re a group director in the manufacturing end of your organization, and you’ve got an idea for improving a production process, you may realize that you need support from the finance group in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• After the Brainstorm
• Scanning Your Organization
• Tips and Tactics
• Closing the Deal
• Suggested Readings
• Background
• Key Point Summary