By Rod Miller, Bizkinnect Lead Consultant

One of the most powerful things you can do to help your departmental or project team improve their relationships and reputation within your organization is to create clarity.

Creating clarity means getting very clear on your team’s Rallying Cry and your strategy for accomplishing it.

Management attention is a limited resource. By creating clarity, your team will be able to maximize the attention management is able to give to the team. You’ll be helping your own management team to avoid distraction. You’ll also know where to focus your own team’s limited attention.

Read on to discover the four questions you can answer that will help you maximize management’s attention and focus your team’s resources, thus helping them improve relationships with internal users, management and even customers.

1. What does our project do for the larger company or organization?

The larger your company is, the more distant other employees will be from the end product you’re producing. It’s therefore your job to help your end users understand why your team’s project or product is important.

For example, as a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software implementation team, you’re not just installing a data management system. Your team might discover that what you’re really doing is “enabling users to convert data into useful configurations across all disciplines for all consumers, as efficiently as possible.”

This statement becomes a kind of 30-second elevator pitch for your team to share as they’re asked enterprise-wide about the “why” of your team.

2. What previous limitation does our project/product overcome or diminish?

By answering this question, you’re building rationale and justification for the time and resources your team is investing. It will help other internal users, management and customers understand how you are adding value and improving the company’s products and services. Answering this question provides the “why” for everyone whose own work is in some way interrupted by your team’s project.

3. What is our strategy?

Once you have given your team clarity of purpose and a rationale for the priority of your project, you will now be ready to articulate your strategy: “We are building a complete PLM implementation. Our users won’t need to go to any other data source for product configuration information.” This helps develop a customer-service mindset towards other departments within your organization.

4. What are we saying ‘no’ to?

A strategy gives you and your team the power to say “no” when others call for your time and attention in areas outside of your current mandate.

Now that you know why you exist, the problem you’re solving, and the manner in which you want to do that, you have a strong place to stand in relating to other departments. You and your team will now be able to manage both customer and internal user expectations.

(For further reading on this subject, see Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage and Dr. Eli Goldratt’s Necessary but not Sufficient.)

Want to learn more about how you can improve relationships in your workplace? We can help you learn how to create project clarity and other organizational health principles to create project success in your workplace project.

Ready to connect?

• Sign up for the 45-minute webinar, “Conflict and Clarity,” with Bizkinnect’s lead consultant, Rod Miller. In this webinar, Rod shares practical organizational health and change management concepts you can begin to apply today.
• Would you like a free one-hour consultation? Let’s connect!  We would love to help you as you implement these practices within your own organization.
• Please note, we now also offer all of our services remotely via video conferencing.
• If you have any questions, feel free to call us directly.  800-953-8112