If someone were to ask you what needs to be fixed or improved on your brand, odds are you could come up with a dozen different answers. Now multiply that by the number of people working on your team. The problem isn’t coming up with issues. It’s picking the best issues from among the many possibilities that will bring you the highest leverage.
To solve this problem, best thing you can do is creating your own “burning platform”.
The origin of this business metaphor comes from a story about a man on an oil platform in the North Sea.“One night, the man is awakened by an explosion. The oil platform is on fire!
Striving to escape the flames, he is able to find his way through the chaos to the edge of the platform. As the fire approaches, his only option seems to be jumping more than 100 feet into the freezing North Atlantic waters. If the dangerous jump doesn’t kill him he will surely die from exposure to the cold waters within minutes. With no other rational alternative, he jumps! Fortunately the man survived the jump and was rescued by a boat shortly thereafter. His philosophy had been: better probable death than certain death.”
Striving to escape the flames, he is able to find his way through the chaos to the edge of the platform. As the fire approaches, his only option seems to be jumping more than 100 feet into the freezing North Atlantic waters. If the dangerous jump doesn’t kill him he will surely die from exposure to the cold waters within minutes. With no other rational alternative, he jumps! Fortunately the man survived the jump and was rescued by a boat shortly thereafter. His philosophy had been: better probable death than certain death.”
COMFORT ZONE!! A great word. People love to seat in their comfortable chairs in the office, in front of their screens, reducing interaction to impersonal emails and reducing their scope of responsibility to their jobs descriptions. They also don’t like surprises or rushes. When confronted with a new project, most people see rather the additional work than the growth opportunities behind. Like it or not, there are a lot of burocrats sitting on their confort zones.
As a brand manager you will have to get people out of their comfort zones. You will have to fight for the extra effort, the extra good idea or the extra taking of responsibilities and time from the organization. Resources are short, and you fight for internal resources. See it like this: every other brand manager has important projects and is recalling the attention of your manager, your manager’s budget, your sales team and your trade marketing. In order to get these resources you need to motivate people, and first step is to transmit a sense of urgency, of survival for your brand. Only if you can do that you will be able to set your project on the agenda of your team.
In order to do that you need COMMUNICATION. Communicate the issues your brand is facing, your vision and the route that needs to be followed. And communicate it again, in every meeting and in every opportunity you have. Goal is that you create your own burning platform story for your brand! Only like this you can achieve radical action. You need to put your brand into the radar screen of the entire organization!
COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE
posted by Ignacio Molins
posted by Ignacio Molins
2 comments:
confort zone: it's easy to detect it in the others but not easy to do so with ourselves!!
one, as a manager, should push the team outside the confort zone but first one have to meet oneself, know oneself.
as a manager and i would better say as a man (father, friend, boss...) one have to listen, see, hear, touch and smell which your confort zone is and then, and only then, you will really reach to push the others (sons, friends or subordinates)
Fully agree Carlos!
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