Influencing Skills - NetApp

Influencing Skills - NetApp

Influencing Skills

The team turned out to be extremely adept influencers in terms of communication, and if there's one thing we don't do at Impact Factory, it's give clients what they don't need!

What we do is listen to clients and the issues they're facing and pride ourselves on coming up with a programme that delivers.

The issue here was not so much about how to influence people, but more about identifying who to influence in order to raise the profile of emerging products, when to influence them, and developing a strategy to set the influencing ball rolling.

We were impressed with the dynamism and motivation of the team and enjoyed looking at what was already working well. We wanted to see how it might be possible to apply this talent to address some of the difficulties facing NetApp as it looks to promote its emerging products.

We kicked off with some deceptively simple questions:

What is NetApp looking to achieve?
What are the obstacles?
How can they be overcome?

As Stuart Gilks, Director of Systems Engineering in Europe pointed out, "If we knew the answers to these questions we wouldn't need a day's training!" And while that's true, it's also true that solutions can only remain elusive for so long when the room has such a wealth of expertise and creativity within it.

Using Impact factory's Project Buster as a framework we began a lively brainstorming session on all the options available to NetApp. We were then able to whittle those options down to the realistic steps NetApp would like to take to effect the change it is looking for.

Through this process we got a clear sense of where NetApp's energy and effort could be best placed for the biggest impact.

An important step to conclude our work for the day was to invite individuals to take ownership of tasks and set deadlines for each step along the way.

At Impact Factory we firmly believe that the solution to any group challenge lies within the group itself. It is our job to facilitate innovative and creative thinking and allow the participants to come to their own insights and find the right road forward for themselves.

It's about cultivating the kind of environment where delegates feel safe to interrupt patterns of behaviour, explore new ideas, and find new approaches to problem solving.

And within all this, with such a lively group of people, we had a lot of fun along the way!

If you would like to talk to us about an

Influencing Skills Programme

or any of the other professional personal development work we do, call us on

+44 (0)20 7226 1877

or e-mail us at

enquiries@impactfactory.com


Influencing Skills Training