How to speak at the meeting, let the other party accept your plan, and promote cross-sector cooperation?

Editor’s note: This article comes from Everyone is a product manager , author Stella.

Four-story conference speech structure helps promote cross-sector cooperation < / p>

Let me describe the next scene, you are the main character:

You are a data analyst at the company. Your work is very busy, but people from other business units always come to you to ask for temporary needs. As a result, you often fail to complete the scheduled work on time, which seriously affects the work efficiency. So, you came up with a countermeasure and formulated the “Process and Specification for Business Units to Demand Data Teams.”

On this day, you have a meeting with the heads of various business departments, asking them to follow their data requirements in the future, otherwise they will not accept it. But their business department is often the boss, they have good performance and great credit, they don’t pay attention to your requirements. At this time, how do you state your plan at the meeting so that this matter can go on?

Of course, I simplified this case. In the actual work scene, you need to communicate clearly with some spurs one-to-one in advance and get their approval before you can hold the meeting, otherwise you will definitely be killed by yourself.

I believe that many people have similar experiences. When you want colleagues in other departments to cooperate with you, you will always encounter various evasions and obstacles. You need to continue to advance your work. This “advancement” is actually a very difficult communication scenario.

Many companies now have project systems that require cross-departmental and cross-team collaboration. However, once other departments are involved, there will often be various contradictions in scheduling, role division and resource allocation. And if you can’t speak well in communication, it is likely to affect the relationship between the team and the project progress.

Why is it so difficult to collaborate and communicate across teams?

There are two main reasons:

First, the priorities of each department are different; second, there is a bias in the understanding of all parties.

First, each department has different priorities, and I think you should understand. In the above scenario, although standardizing data processes is important to the data department, it is not so important to the business department. It is absolutely unacceptable if their sales performance and time are delayed because they have to go through the data process.

The second point of “understanding deviation” refers to the inconsistent understanding of the parties on cooperation matters. For example, the two parties have different understandings of task difficulty. The data team thinks it’s not as simple as filling in a system form to raise the demand. But the business team felt that it was particularly troublesome to fill out the application, and they had something else to do. For another example, the two parties have different understandings of the time required for the task to be delivered. The data team believes that “as soon as possible” is completed on the same day, while the business team feels that “one week” is also fast.

Understanding these two backgrounds, we will be able to accept the challenge of cross-team communication with our mentality, and thus be able to do better.

What can I do in this situation?

Today’s lesson, let’s simplify this question to: In a communication meeting of cross-department cooperation, how to present a plan to avoid these two kinds of deviations to the greatest extent and smoothly promote cooperation?

First, you need to clarify a principle for cross-team communication in the workplace, that is, who is responsible for who is responsible, and who is responsible for who is the solution. In the above case, if the temporary data requirements have seriously affected your work, then you must take the initiative to promote cooperation as a responsible person, because others do not have this motivation.

Second, you need to state your thoughts clearly at the beginning of the meeting. Many people have the misunderstanding that they think they have made it clear, but the other team colleagues participating in the meeting are still confused.

Here I provide you with a framework for presenting the plan, you can refer to it.

Because the purpose of the statement plan is to solve problems and sell your own ideas, this shelf is actually a flexible combination of the “problem solving structure” and “FAB structure” (attribute-advantage-benefits) mentioned in the previous article.

The structure of this presentation plan has 4 layers, which are:

  • Why?

  • What

  • What are the benefits?

  • Action.

    At first glance, it looks complicated, but it’s actually tightly linked. Let me explain to you first what to say in each part.

    The first step is to say why and why departments need to cooperate to advance something. In this part you can talk about the background and the seriousness of the problem. Its core purpose is to arouse the attention of each other and let them generate “This is indeed the case, we have something to do “idea.

    The second step is to say what to do, that is, what departments you want to participate in do something in the project. Here is the core part of the statement claim. It’s important to note that the statement you give must be clear to show that you are indeed well thought out, or it will be easy for others to refute you.

    The third step is to talk about the benefits to various departments of advancing this matter. This step is important, but it is easy to be ignored. After all, they are still not thinking from the perspective of the other party. If you can create a good reason for the other person’s actions, the chances of this going forward are at least 30% higher.

    The fourth and final step, you have to talk about actions that everyone can complete right away. In sales discourse, this is called “kick in the door”, urging everyone to switch from a stand-by state to a state of preparation for upcoming action. I guess many people feel this way: Well said at the meeting, once the meeting is over, everyone still has no action. In fact, this is the lack of a proactive approach, splitting out the fastest achievable part first, and let the cooperation run first.

    So how can you use this structure to express the case at the beginning of the course?

    You can say this:

    • In the future, the data requirements of each team must pass the prescribed process, otherwise we will not accept the requirements. I understand that every data requirement you put forward is important and may be related to hundreds of thousands of revenues (recognition).

    • But the temporary demand severely disrupted the processing progress of the original data requirements, causing the delivery time to be delayed again and again, affecting those departments that raised demand according to the process, and also affecting the efficiency of our department (Why).

    • So, based on the actual situation, I formulated the “process and specifications for the business department to provide requirements to the data team.” I hope that each department will organize colleagues to learn and follow the process strictly (What).

    • In this way, our work efficiency will be improved, and we can provide more data support for everyone. In addition, this will improve the overall consideration and project management ability of colleagues in all departments.

    • I suggest that you look at this specification now. If you have any questions, you can directly confirm with me at the meeting. If there is no problem, I will mail the whole company, even if it is a formal notification (Action).

      How about using the shelf? Is the overall expression more logical and the thinking clearer?