During a recent coaching session, a client and I recently debriefed a conversation she had had with an executive that hadn’t gone as well as she had expected.  She had intended to gain commitment for her project in the form of sponsorship and reallocation of resources to support the project.  What she got instead was… less than she had hoped.

While she thought the meeting went well and that some progress was made, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she could have done more.  She was disappointed that the conversation didn’t have as big of an impact on the success of her project as she had planned for.  She wondered, if she had been more persuasive, would she have achieved more of her goals for the conversation?

No matter how much you work on your personal influence, things won’t always go your way.  There’s a good reason for that:  There are other people working in your organization!  If things always went your way, it would mean that you were either a) all-knowing or b) steam-rolling over everyone in your path.

Listen to what my client did achieve in this one conversation:

• Learned the truth about the budget for next year
• Received guidance on creating a task force to help get the project funded and implemented
• Gained agreement of the value of her project to the executive’s area of responsibility
• Aligned her project with another high-profile project that she previously didn’t know about.

Wow!  That is definitely nothing to be disappointed about.  In fact, if my client had simply gained a sponsor and a budget from the meeting as she had intended, in the long run, the project would likely not have as lasting an impact as the outcome and next steps that were developed during the meeting.

To achieve big things, you need to set high expectations for what you can accomplish.  When you reach for the sky and then don’t get there, it can seem like perhaps you’ve done something wrong.  If you feel disappointed after a meeting or conversation that you haven’t moved the needle far enough, take stock of the changes that did indeed happen, and consider…

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”
~ The Rolling Stones

Amy*, a Sustainability Manager for a large food and beverage manufacturer, has aspirations to not only change her company, but also to do her part to save the planet.  She is responsible for increasing the environmental responsibility of the organization, which includes initiatives like decreasing energy and water usage, waste reduction, and sustainable agriculture.   I’ve had the privilege of coaching Amy for the last three months, helping her to advance her goals, improve her effectiveness, and boost her confidence.

Amy, like most change agents, is leading change from the middle.  While she is responsible for implementing the sustainability projects, she doesn’t want the initiative to be considered “Amy’s job.”  All the work to incorporate environmentalism into how the company conducts business has to be done by her colleagues as part of their regular jobs.  A major theme underlying our coaching conversations was how to prevent Sustainability from becoming a separate silo within the organization.

One of Amy’s primary objectives was to implement a sustainable manufacturing scorecard across all plants.  When we started coaching, she had developed the draft scorecard and still needed to get engineers in the plants to collect data and complete the scorecard.  It became evident that our first order of business should be to get the Director of Manufacturing to approve and commit to using the scorecard to manage the plants.  We also talked about how she might use incentives to motivate the plants to improve their scorecard numbers in the future.  By the end of our three-month coaching engagement, the scorecard had been approved and the engineers were diligently working toward meeting the deadline for completing it this month.

Another item we tackled was developing a responsible sourcing program, a preemptive move motivated by the activity of the company’s biggest retail customer.  Amy developed another scorecard, this time to monitor the environmental performance of suppliers.  The buyers in the purchasing department would be responsible for communicating the new requirements to their suppliers.  Since sustainability factors are fairly new to buying decisions with the industry, Amy expected a bit of pushback against what will become new criteria for acceptable suppliers.  She knew that without the buyers’ support, the suppliers might refuse to cooperate.  In our coaching conversations, we looked at the buyers’ potential hesitation, brainstormed ideas, and developed a plan to get them on board.  At this time, the supplier scorecard has been rolled out with support from the buyers.

Amy had a lot of irons in the fire and was feeling overwhelmed.  In particular, the recycling team she led had become stalled, but she didn’t have time to follow up or take on the tasks herself.  After discussing possible solutions, she decided to delegate team leadership to a member of the team.  After just one e-mail inviting her to take over and giving her direction, the new team leader took it and ran with it.  Now the recycling team is moving forward, and Amy only needs to check in occasionally. She is spending less time on the recycling program and the team is thriving.

Some of the other issues we worked on were:  getting responses from unresponsive people; knowing when to push back; and influencing people who still have yet to fully understand the value of sustainability.

Now, Amy finds that she is better able to foresee obstacles to the changes she wants to implement.  Using the methods learned in coaching, she figures out what would motivate people to participate in change.  She also uses new approaches to influencing change that she hadn’t previously considered.

Change doesn’t happen overnight.  It happens with many daily steps in the right direction. By taking the time to determine whom to influence and how to do it, like Amy, you can make progress toward improving your own organization.

Interested in working together to influence change in your organization?  Visit www.enclaria.com/coaching to learn how.

* To maintain confidentiality, my client’s name is disguised.

In this episode of The Change Agent’s Dilemma, I spoke with Maria Gamb, founder, CEO and Chief Change Agent of NMS Communications, LLC.  Her new book, Healing the Corporate World, is making its way up the bestseller list.

Maria shared her insights into how to fix what is plaguing organizations today.  We talked about how to become a change agent at work, and how to build your influence no matter where you are in your organization.

You can find Healing the Corporate World at amazon.com.*

Maria has also offered a free audio series to listeners.  Visit www.MariaGamb.com/AudioFreebie.html for a 3 part series with Maria and best selling authors Greg S Reid and Ernest Chu on Creating Success.

Listen to our interview here (30 minutes):

Be sure to visit the radio show page to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show.

* Amazon affiliate link

This morning on The Change Agent’s Dilemma, I interviewed Brian Horgan, Project Management Director at United Illuminating, an electric utility in Connecticut.  Just two weeks ago, Brian presented “PMO as Change Agent” to the PMI Global Congress.  He shares some of the same insights here.

Listen in as Brian talks about his experience making the PMO a strategic change agent for the company.

Click here to read the white paper wrote for the PMI Global Congress.

Listen here (30 minutes):

Be sure to visit the radio show page to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show.