Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/826827
32 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine Hone your brand, believability and style deepen your knowledge and skills. As we do that over time, our expert base of power grows and our reputation, our brand and our competencies build our credibility. By doing what we say we will do and doing it well and by living up to our promises and focusing on serving the higher good, we build trust while building our knowledge and skills. Over time that grows our credibility. Causing other people to believe helps build your believabil- ity team. None of us are as smart as all of us, as the saying goes. Most are up against things bigger than we are. We don't know enough. We need a team. Picking good mentors (trusted ad- visors) and collaborators (our team) and using both groups of individuals well expands our believability by creating our be- lievability team. Assembling a team for a critical improvement project con- fronts us with the Jim Collins opportunity of "First who, then what." Often we can't do first who, then what. Instead, we've got "what" first, and we have to learn to work with the team we inherit or have. That's the real test of leadership and management: how to get the most out of the people you have. This is often where our biggest persuasion challenges lurk. The flexibility of style Brand and believability are critical, but being able to deploy those to the right stakeholder groups and individuals is where the payoff takes place. All improvement projects have various stakeholders that you have to work with and gain buy-in from. Each stakeholder has unique needs, expectations and hot buttons. Being able to tailor your words and actions is the key to persuading stake- holders. Often, we get into a "push" rather than a "pull" mode. Like in lean, we aren't pulling from the customer, we're pushing like a provider. Just like in lean, learning to cre- ate pull rather than push will yield better results. This requires that we truly understand the voice of the stakeholder, or what drives that person. Figure 5 is created from the project level perspective: typical core team members and roles on a leanSigma project. Each core team member has a different life and experience than you, so each person may have different interpretations about what needs change, not to mention the process of implementation. Great brand and great believability have to be coupled with tailored, situational, stakeholder-specific tactics of persuasion. The science of persuasion is a lot about human factors engi- neering and "use cases." Every situation with an opportunity to sell, persuade, influence, gain buy-in or get people con- nected has a slightly different use case (users/players, context and desired outputs and outcomes). The successful change agent must first size up the opportunity and situations with the group of stakeholders. Remember, as a change agent you are being paid to be in "role," not in "self." You are an actor every time you interact with stakeholders. This is the style flexibility component. At times you must be an expert solution provider, at other times just an accepting listener. The art of persuasion is to read the stakeholders, the situation and match your style and tactics to them. That 'aha' moment Many young professionals haven't learned how to create "aha" moments – a wow, an insight, a connection to the stakehold- ers. These moments often indicate how successfully you have extracted information from data and created visualizations that speak to them and depict new information and knowl- FIGURE 4 Believability comes in time Building trust and credibility over time enhances your believability quotient, an important component of your personal brand. Figure copyright Gold Group Enterprises Inc.