"Chain" of planning. Refrain from any "quick friendships". What you need to know

16.01.2015 00:31

Many years ago, when I was just starting my career in HR, my boss warned me: "Whatever the candidate says during the interview, multiply that by 10, and you end up with what you see after 90 days at work." ... So, if the candidate admitted that he was embarrassed by something in corporate culture company, this is much more than just a remark: in the process of work, many things in the workplace can be offensive to him. If the candidate gives quiet and monosyllabic answers during the interview, they may find themselves so shy that employees will not be able to communicate well with them. Even worse: he may hide something and simply pursue the goal of getting a job.

If you got a job, then you turned out to be better ...

Some of you may think that the recruiting advice above is discriminatory. And you will be absolutely right. Because hiring itself is discrimination. The employer tries to find the best candidate for the job based on the following factors:

Personality: Will this person fit into the culture of the company and get along with teammates to help improve productivity?

Skills: Will this person be able to adjust to our processes without constantly comparing us to their previous employers?

An experience: Does the person have the skills and knowledge to get to work right away?

Availability: Will the person be satisfied wages and the benefits that are offered to him, or will he be disappointed and perceive the offer as a demotion in career development?

The above factors ultimately determine whether or not you get the job. It is very difficult to win this battle. And if you end up getting a job, it means that your total score was higher than the rest, and this suited the employer.

Congratulations! You are the winner ... at the moment.

NOTE: the rules will change after you get the job

In the process of work, another set of criteria is triggered, determining how large your professional potential is. Unfortunately, many newcomers are blissfully unaware of the changes in the rules of the game, which hinders their success in their new role.

What you need to know

In a new company, you are not best employee... Now you are a part the best company and therefore must act accordingly. In the first 90 days of my stay in the new company I really want to become a “golden child”. You are so desperate to prove that the company made the right decision by choosing you, that you offer your help and advice to everyone in the office. You are proactive in connecting to ideas and projects, it’s easy for you to spend a few extra hours or stay up late to help the company succeed. You openly share everything you've done, so most people know that you work a lot. The problem is that you are acting like a tornado and your actions will have long-term consequences. Here are just a few of them:

You will be perceived as a know-it-all who aspires to be the pet of management.
You run the risk of earning a reputation as a tactless or incompetent employee, questioning everything that was done before he came, and stepping on the heels of colleagues who have been working in the company for more than one year.
You create an image of an employee who is always ready to work overtime.
You give the impression that you can easily take on any unattractive job that no one wants to do.
You give people the opportunity to count on the fact that you are always ready to help them in everything.

Play the long game

How well you integrate into the company in the first three months has great importance for a career. Management loves when hiring exceeds its expectations. And you have to play a long-term game for that to happen.

12 tips for creating a good impression and healthy office relationships

1. Determine your manager's communication style.

Make an appointment with your leader and try to find out how you can help them achieve their goals. Some executives prefer weekly face-to-face meetings, while others discuss work-related matters. e-mail... It is important to determine how to communicate with the leader without taking up too much of their time. You must be able to receive answers and demonstrate that you are capable of doing the assigned tasks. The sooner you find the most appropriate way to stay in touch with your manager, the better.

2. Develop a plan for 30-60-90 days.

This written plan should document what you plan to do each week / month for the next 90 days. Highlight certain stages in the plan so that the manager can see that you are doing everything and are doing your work as efficiently as possible. Show this plan to your supervisor, discuss it with him and agree on the goals defined in it. If the manager feels that they are too bold, you will find out before you start work.

3. Find out the professional program of action for each employee who you come across at work.

Every colleague you work with is interested in your success, and you are interested in it. Therefore, it is important to know the goals of colleagues in the company. What achievements are they aimed at, what is your direct role in their success? Answering these questions will help you provide them with the right support.

4. Refrain from any "quick friendships".

Be wary of coworkers who rush to be your friend to share office gossip. They tend to lash out at newbies for a reason. Be kind, but keep your opinion to yourself, don't let him comment on it. Over time, it may turn out that the reputation of these employees is not the best in the office and it is not in your best interest to contact them.

5. Plan your core work and master the plan in less than 40 hours.

Figure out your tasks and responsibilities to be efficient enough to be easily completed in less than full working week... Such a plan will save you unnecessary difficulties and teach you to work smarter. It also frees up time so you can focus on the next task.

6. Identify the most important project.

This project is a problem that you identify while doing basic work, and that you can solve with an investment of time. It has to be something that saves and / or generates money for the company, justifying a temporary investment. Such important projects also allow you to hone professional skill and make you a more valuable employee.

7. Take your time with any hasty judgments or assessments of colleagues and company policies.

When new colleagues do something that is drastically different from what you are used to, it can make you feel uncomfortable. The worst thing you can say is, "In my previous company, we did it this way ..." So you better take a deep breath and find out why your new employer takes a different approach.

8. Ask, don't tell.

Smart questions are your secret to success in a new company. It is correct to ask questions when something is unclear and you need to understand the situation. For example, if a team is following a process that seems time-consuming, you shouldn't say, "This is a slow and wrong process," but instead ask, "Why are you following this process?" By asking questions, you can get an idea of what is going on. It may surprise you that there are no answers to your questions. It is possible that your questions will lead to a discussion about possible changes.

9. Write emails in simple language, set a vibrating alert on your phone.

Everyone will pay attention to your etiquette. Letters must demonstrate your professionalism. Do not send personal emails from corporate mail. And hide your phone somewhere far away. Colleagues are distracted by phone calls, they do not want to look at how you exchange SMS messages. Strive to produce good impression at work. Information about your hobby for personal gadgets will quickly reach your superiors.

10. In case of doubt, consider all competent persons whose opinion is valid.

Nothing destroys a working relationship more than ignoring the involvement of a colleague on a common project. Better to let him say that he does not participate in it, and then you can safely remove him from the list. Otherwise, he may be offended by you for not realizing his important role in the project.

11. Find a trusted peer mentor.

At first, you will have many small questions about the work. And it is not necessary to go to the boss with all these questions. Instead, find out who is being respected in your department and if that person can be your mentor during your first few months. Explain that you don’t want to interrupt your boss’s work with a lot of stupid questions and that you hope that he can help you. By the way, this good way build relationships with one of the key players on the team.

12. Be a reliable employee.

The biggest fear of every employer is that the candidate, by surprise at the interview, will turn out to be an unreliable employee. Employers expect you to show up for work on time every day. They expect you to get your job done on time and seamlessly. If they feel that negative trends can develop into long-term processes, they would rather stop working with you now than continue to hope for something and invest a lot of resources in you.

The first 90 days on new job can be a turning point in your career. Don't let the misguided ambition of being a “golden child” ruin your prospects!

Translation: Inga Hummi

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This chapter focuses on the planning "chain" that has proven itself in the most better side... For over four years now, my staff and I have been using it.

It starts with annual targets(I don't look further; objectively speaking, none of us knows exactly what will happen tomorrow). Goals should be clear, achievable, and motivating. It is good if they are broken down into quantitative and qualitative ones. Here is an example of a company's goals Lucent Technologies in 2000 financial year, which were delivered by me to the Moscow marketing group.

Qualitative (activity and professionalism):

To become the # 1 marketing team in the telecommunications industry in the CIS.

Become the # 1 marketing team of the companyLucent in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Quantitative:

Support the achievement of the planLucent by sales volumein CIS ($ XXXmln).

According to the results of the annual survey, get an average mark of marketing activity not lower than 4.8 points from the sales team and 4.5 from partners (out of 5 possible).

I divide planning into formal (requested plans, business plans) and informal (plans that you make for yourself).

For work, unofficial plans seem to me to be more effective and important. I almost never went back to official plans. We made them up, “defended” them, and that was where their value ended. With every significant change in the market, with the emergence of a new strategy of competitors, with the emergence of new partners, clients and solutions, any "official" plan became obsolete. Informal planning is more flexible.

It includes (in addition to the annual goals described above) an individual weekly plan, a Top 5 department plan, a 90 days plan and plans for each type of activity / event, if necessary (sample plans

"90 days" and "Top 5" are in the "Annexes with comments").

Several comments on each of the elements of the planning "chain" (for example, companies Lucent Technologies and Avaya).

90 days plan- This is a program of actions that need to be done by a group or a marketing manager within three months (usually corresponds to the quarters according to which sales are planned).

It includes the most important events, grouped into several blocks. It does not include absolutely all actions. It does not include what can be done in one working day.

As a rule, the "90 days" plan consists of complex tasks, programs, events that are expected by management, sales department, and other departments, the solution of which changes or improves something. We called these types of activities "wave making events" (tsunami events). These are key activities that bring immediate and / or great benefit or relieve other departments of headaches.

At the end of the "90 days" period and at the beginning of the new quarter, my employees and I go through all the points of the plan, and we estimate the percentage of the plan (the higher the percentage, the better). We also analyze the reasons why the planned activity was not implemented and decide what to include in the plan for the next 90 days.

Plan of the group or employee "Top 5". This plan is drawn up every Monday, one copy remains with me, and the other (preferably on colored paper) is posted in the premises where the sales managers work. The Top 5 plan helps the marketing manager solve two problems at once.

The first is focusing on short-term results. Admit it to yourself, do you start each work week by planning it? IN best case most of you have a plan for the day. Planning for the week ahead helps to clearly understand what should be the priority for the next five days. A weekly plan can include from two to ten tasks (initially we identified five key tasks, hence the name "Top 5").

The second is visibility for other employees what the marketing is doing and what to expect in the current week. One of the biggest problems for marketing managers is the lack of visibility into the results of painstaking daily work- is solved simply and beautifully. No one has a question: "What is the marketing department doing?" Employees know this to within a week.

And one more advantage of the "Top 5" plan. He is a kind of bridge between daily activities and the "90 days" plan. As soon as in the current week it is possible to do something from the “90 days” plan, then it is crossed out with a bold felt-tip pen in the week and in quarterly plans... All these plans hang in front of your eyes, and you cross out completed activities. Sheer pleasure! This is probably one of the most enjoyable moments in my job - crossing off a completed task, project or activity from the list of "90 days" and "Top 5".

In addition to the "Top 5" plan, each employee has their own personal plan for a week. He leads it individually in an arbitrary manner.

As I said, if necessary, we do plans for each important type of activity / event(program, seminar, exhibition). Such a plan allows you to work clearly, according to the schedule, and if necessary, quickly connect additional employees (“Look at the plan, if you have any questions - ask, help, please, do this and this”). In addition, there is no need to reinvent the wheel, if necessary, you can use the "old" plans for new events.

Your planning chain may be shorter, but don't go without a plan.

And don't keep your plans a secret. Let others see what you are doing for them. Let your plans motivate you - this is your future result.

The bolder the plan, the better the result. The higher the score, the more successful you and your company are.

11.10.2004 02:00

Today I finished writing my detailed plan for this quarter, which includes about ten pages. Every 90 days, I carefully review my goals and plans, and I find that while it can be boring (usually about 10-15 hours of tedious work), it is the main tool for managing not only business, but all life. Sometimes life becomes quite difficult, and then, if you do not know exactly where you are going, then under various external influences it becomes easy to turn off the path. When you are working on a certain project for several days, and then a new opportunity arises in a completely different area, then if you are not able to distract your mind from this project and see the forest behind the trees, it can be difficult to make a clear decision. Having a written plan that you can reread at any time gives you a bird's eye view of the current situation and makes more consistent decisions.

I wrote in 2001 and, aside from some small improvements, I still mostly take the same approach today. What I have now begun to include in my plan is a list of conjectural estimates made by comparing different parts of the plan. Often these are assumptions about how things will go, such as how long it will take to complete a particular project. It happens all the time that after a few weeks of working on a project, I run into some kind of obstacle. Then I go back to my list of guesses and look for which one was wrong. I can then correct those estimates and refine the plan accordingly. But if I find that all of them were accurate, then I can usually be sure that, in fact, everything is fine with the plan - perhaps I only need to change the way I am currently implementing it. Just today, I had to abandon two licensing deals, at first glance they looked potentially profitable, but in the light of my long-term goals, it is clear that they would be a step away from the intended course.

When you create a 90 day plan, you are actually looking much further ahead than three months. Usually, to figure out what I need to do in the next 90 days, I look at least two years ahead. There are many solutions that seem good when you look at them from a three to six month perspective, but they look more dubious when you look two years ahead. This is very similar to a computer chess program - a move may seem best when the player is thinking five moves ahead, but when he is looking 10 moves ahead, he is taking a completely different move. The same is the case with short-term planning. Best plans you will create if you look several years ahead and consider your ultimate goal, and then, using that long-term perspective, you will decide what you need to do right now. For some big decisions, like whether you want to have another child, you might want to look much further. The long-term perspective brings clarity to the day-to-day.

When I was not married, lived alone, and did not have my own business, such detailed planning would probably have been overkill. But now that my life has become much more difficult, it sometimes helps me to get past the quicksand of uncertainty and focus on what is really important. The more difficult my life gets, the more important it becomes for me to devote time to clarifying my goals and planning.

The most important thing that I get from a written plan is a feeling of calmness, I know that I have deliberately thought about everything, that everything is provided. It can be difficult to make choices like: should I spend time with my wife and kids, or play sports, or prepare my next speech, or write an article, or work on a book, or do some marketing tasks, or play poker, or read a book? One thing I realized is that I’m probably doing bad work trying to make these kinds of balancing decisions under the influence of the minute — I end up paying too little attention to certain areas of my life and too much to others, so something important is slipping away from me. I simply don’t have time to think for many years ahead, making every single decision. Only by creating a well-developed long-term plan can I be sure that I can achieve the right balance and implement for real important, while making an informed decision about which areas of life can be given less attention. I can trust this plan because I know I thought about it carefully, so it works as a tool that helps me make my daily decisions easier and faster.

“Greetings, reader of the blog of the marketing manager, I am haunted by the topic of planning in marketing. In this connection, after digging a little on the Internet, this article was born - a 90-day marketing plan. I wrote about building a marketing plan in the last article, but this is a general planning algorithm. How do we usually make plans? For a year, or even five years ahead (the Soviet five-year plans are immediately remembered). But what if it is limited to a quarter? Let's consider this option. "

During a year of activity according to the formed plan, there are moments when we need to assess how well we are working and whether there are opportunities to improve the efficiency of the company. We introduce marketing ideas quite often. Why not introduce such an innovation as well? Plan not for a year, not for five years, but for three months.

Pros of a 90 Day Marketing Plan

First, you can track your performance in the short term.
Second, the data that is collected after 90 days can be used to adjust the ambitious plan for years.
Third, a 90-day marketing plan will allow you to more frequently monitor the rapidly changing conditions of the market environment.
Fourthly, the basic plan, designed for years, will not remain forgotten and postponed to a distant box.

When should you start implementing your 90 day marketing plan? The faster the better. At the very least, this will allow you to look differently at the marketing strategy, consider new marketing ideas. You can start right now. To do this, you just need to sit down and answer yourself a few questions:

What marketing processes have worked well in the past six months and a year?
What can be improved in marketing in the last half of the year?
What has been done in marketing in the past twelve months? And what didn't work out of it? Why didn't it work?
Define marketing goals for the next three months.
What marketing tools will be used in the next 90 days?
What is your marketing budget for the next three months?

After the answers to these questions are received, we set the start and end dates for the implementation of the plan. What and how are we going to do in a given time interval? What responsible persons will we involve to implement the planned? As soon as the action plan for the next 90 days is outlined, you need to start setting priorities, on this topic the article on time control, published earlier, will be useful.

Have you implemented the practice of creating a ninety-day marketing plan? How well does this approach work? Share in the comments.

Creative marketing is good. Marketing genius is great.
But this is not enough for success.
For marketing to bring tangible results - that is, to increase profits - it must also be systematic.
The "90 days" system is a way of organizing marketing work in a company,
allowing you to get maximum consistency, concentration and efficiency.
Checked - it works!

Why buy this book?

With each new iteration of the "90 days" plan, marketing efficiency increases, and great results are achieved.
The level of your marketing competencies will grow significantly.
The method works great when the first results are needed very quickly.

Reader Reviews

Briefly, succinctly and to the point. Each section focuses on different elements of quarterly planning: preparing a plan, defining priority directions and tasks, calculation of efficiency, presentation and protection of the plan. All this is accompanied by practical templates and screenshots, easily adaptable to any field.
Review in full

Andrey Zinkevich, Customer Acquisition and Retention Specialist, http://azinkevich.com/

Great book! Not even a book, but a battle marketing plan. As the creator of the systemic promotion technology, who has been practicing it for the last 15 years, I testify that only a systematic approach works and earns money and clients. In the book, not only strategy is deployed, but also tactics at the case level. Using practical examples, the book builds a 3D model of system marketing, which appears before the reader in a volumetric and understandable way. Recommended for brain acceptance for both advanced and beginners.
Review in full

Iya Imshinetskaya, business trainer, creator of systemic promotion technology, http://iyapro.ru/

The book "90 Days" appeared in my life at the right time - I was just working out a plan for the development of the company for the coming months. It was very curious to learn from fellow marketers how they plan their activities and achieve outstanding results(and I must admit, I'm a fan of efficiency techniques). The book turned out to be capacious and as practical as possible. I really liked the fact that the marketing activities included in the 90-day plan do not come out of nowhere - you first need to conduct a survey of employees of various departments to understand how marketing can help the company sell more and perform better. It will not be possible not to make 90 days - the authors describe to the smallest detail the process of drawing up, protecting, monitoring the implementation and presentation of the results of the plan and provide all the materials for self-preparation. My 90-day plan is ready, now the main task is to implement it. And although the authors claim that it is unrealistic to fulfill the plan 100%, I will try very hard 😉