Chapter 11: Building Your Context Plan

In this Chapter:

• Step 9 of the financial value process: plan quarterly context

• Why you have to make sure your value is relevant to the ‚“urgent and important ‚½ of today

• The three lifecycles that enable you to plan your relevance in advance

• When to time your communication to take advantage of fiscal vision, budget setting, implementation, and validation phases

• A method for planning whom you will talk with and when you ‚ ll show them your value and relevance.

Regular, quarterly communication is critical to managing perceptions of your value and keeping the support you need to deliver that value. Yet, even if you have successfully analyzed the financial priorities for your organization or target organization, dealt with perceptions, kept a scorecard, validated results, and made sure that others know how well you can deliver solutions, you may still find it difficult to get the attention of your Senior, Mid, or even 1st/Ops managers on a regular basis. Why?

Although the job description of upper-level managers includes setting visions and looking to the future, the reality for Senior, Mid, and other managers is that they must spend huge proportions of their time managing the ‚“urgent and important ‚½ of today to make sure those visions of the future become reality. As stewards of their organizations, life for many Senior managers means long hours, little sleep, a rapid-fire pace, and a never-ending stream of tasks that these managers could never complete even if they worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One of the first things that successful leadership development programs teach new 1st/Ops and Mid managers is how to prioritize their time and ignore the majority of things that do not have immediate relevance to the urgent and important of today.

Important ‚  

From your audience ‚ s point of view, excellent value communication means that you know how to create relevance between what you are communicating and what is important to them today. If you can connect your value to the current business context, it will be much easier for your audience to see why it is important to pay attention to you now. How do you do that every quarter? You can do it by understanding the three basic lifecycles of an organization: the fiscal lifecycle, the new product lifecycle, and the seasonal lifecycle.