We’re on the cusp of 2022 planning and many teams are actively looking for resources for the projects that will help their teams move beyond survival mode and towards growth projects beyond the pilot stage.
Of course, ops teams are still stretched thin, so finding time, budget and resources is as challenging as when the pandemic began.
Given this tension, how precisely do you set up a win/win to gain resourcing? In other words, how do you get the energy to flow towards your new project without feeling like you are sneaking around under the radar?
To be effective, your asks need to meet three criteria: they must be relevantly positioned, authentic, and clear.
3 Touch Points to Securing Shared Resources for Your Strategic Initiative
To do the work of helping leaders and team up in this area, we start with a diagnostic workshop, where we illustrate in a general way, how the patterns and predispositions of group members will either help or challenge them as they reach out to their leaders for help.
We unpack these insights with actual team data, showing them exactly where their alignment will work well and which zones will be challenging.
After that, we talk about how to build robust engagements through doing the homework and planning how to develop a mutually beneficial peer interaction.
Once this work is done, we go to work on designing the resource interactions.
Here are three runway-level applications that come from our work.
- Make it emotive
If you are doing something fresh, be sure to frame it in a way that makes it relevant and engages your team member. Why is getting a foothold in this market at this time so important? What will happen if we miss the market window? How will the future of our group, business, or firm look different if we are able to get into this niche, or enhance our products and services in this way?
- Make it anchored
I witnessed a great example of this one the other day. An op’s team member asked what the risks were for what a scout team member was asking them to do. In this case, they were asking to build some prototype units in production and the ops leader asked what the risks were. The project team member enumerated all the risks with the product. Rather, what the ops leader was looking for were the risks of nonstandard materials in the production area and how they would be quarantined. It’s very important to walk a mile in their shoes.
- Make it specific
So often, I see teams make asks that demand a great deal of sorting out before they can be resourced. For example, if you need access to a unique process or piece of equipment, do the prework of knowing its utilization and availability. Talk to the leader who “owns” that part of the process so you have a precise ask and a big step forward toward working as peers.
Getting the Work Done – Efficiently
Bottom line, this is all about finding the truly shared objective between groups and building out the well-researched ask – in the right terminology – that will get results. This is a snapshot into what we do with STRIDE workshops to build robust relationships early in the process that helps reduce resistance and get everyone on the same page.
In this challenging time, we don’t have room for inefficient use of time, money, and resources. If you’d like to talk about your specific challenges, please use this link to put a 20-minute call on the books.
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