In this series of posts, we will dive into the building blocks for a personal TrendMiner Coach Success plan. The topic of this first post is awareness.
Why do I need a Coach Success plan?
A Coach success plan ensures you’re covering the rollout/adoption of TrendMiner with the best practices of change management in mind. The plan helps to avoid pitfalls and to optimize chances of peers achieving TrendMiner value.
Definition of Awareness
Awareness is a person's understanding of the nature of the change, why the change is being made and the risk of not changing.
Planning awareness creation
Building awareness can be much more difficult than it sounds. For example, when you hear about a change, do you trust the sender of the message? Do you believe the reasons given for why the change is needed? Even in our everyday life, we encounter many ideas for change in which we do not agree with the messages we’re given.
As a TrendMiner Coach, you need to understand the activities that drive awareness & consider the restraining forces that prevent the awareness message from taking hold with your audiences. In some cases, the resisting factors are so strong, that even the best communications plan will be insufficient.
Awareness creation: Your plan & best practices
- Identify your target audience
- Choose your target audience based on their role/interests/current projects
- Organizational framing
- Change management works best if there is active involvement from one or multiple levels of authority within your company. To enable success a plant manager (or similar) communicates the strategy and direction with TrendMiner to indicate the larger expectation. This awareness is strengthened by involving the teamlead(s) of your target audience. The teamleads need to follow up the operational expectations and reinforce the message. It is vital that new users know these expectations and realize they can spend time on working with TrendMiner
- Start with why
- Explain why the change is happening and why it is relevant for the company & the receiver of the message. Doing this in a tailored way (by segment, right timing) has a positive impact. Allow receivers to ask questions and raise concerns to understand possible resistance
- Be transparent
- Be as clear and transparant as possible early on when involving users. Being transparant about the TrendMiner trajectory builds trust and negate rumours
- Communicate as early as possible to negate rumours that can built up unnecessary resistance
Stay tuned for part 2 of this series, where we will take about Desire!
Please share your questions and awareness creation experiences below.