Championing Your Ideas at Work: Becoming Your Own Best Advocate

5% Why Advocacy Matters • Why having a good idea is not enough, you also have to “market” that idea 15% Effectively Communicating Your Idea • Ways to organize your message to ensure memorability • How to frame ideas so they are persuasive 15% Building Credibility and Affinity • Why a personal brand matters; why the “brand name” of your team matters • Ways to discover and enhancing your brand name—shaping perceptions of trustworthiness, competence, and social effectiveness 20% Creating Partnerships • Techniques for effective networking within the organization • The importance of “face” sensitivity • The value of narrative—how to successfully tell stories that are persuasive 25% Pre-selling—the more important the issue is, the more it needs “sold” before any formal meeting • Marketing your ideas internally—building the case for your idea • Understanding what motivates decision makers • Successfully handling objections 20% Influencing Skills • How to persuade decision-makers to “buy” your idea • Overcoming resistance to your idea

Seminar Description

Ideas matter. Innovations can change the future of companies. But in any organization, having good ideas is never enough. Those ideas also need to be “marketed” within companies. No matter what their functional role, executives and managers must regularly sell ideas to decision-makers, peers, and subordinates. In this highly interactive program, you’ll learn what it takes to successfully advocate your ideas. Successful advocates know how important it is to clearly communicate their ideas, how their reputations shape how people respond to their ideas, how they need to build partnerships and alliances with others in getting ideas adopted, how they must “pre-sell” any idea long before formal meetings, and how to be persuasive and influential in meetings. We will discuss new research on each of those topics - research that offers you interesting and surprising ways to champion innovations in your organization.

Guide to Participant Selection

Department

Admin

Distrib

Engr

Finc

H.R.

Legal

Mktng

IT

Opr

Plng

Pchsg

R&D

Sales

Senior Executive
(Pres, Exec & Sr VP) 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

Executive
(VP & Gen'l Mgr)
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

Senior Managers
(Div & Reg. Mgrs) 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Middle Managers
& Superintendents 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

APPLICABILITY:
1 indicates primary target audience.
2 indicates a good fit if the level of material is appropriate.
3 indicates (in the opinion of the institute and the faculty) very limited applicability.