Getting Change Right: Element #2

Energizing your most valuable players. Your MVPs are your key stakeholders. In essence, they are the people—both internally and externally—who can make or break your bold initiative. Key employees, leaders, and colleagues as well as policy makers, partners and clients (just to name a few) can directly affect the success of your change movement. Kahan offers a couple of groups that can lead to high impact: Champions and Ambassadors—who can spread the word internally and externally respectively and make a huge difference in accelerating change by the buzz they create. He also offers two great sections focused on techniques for engaging difficult people and options for working with toxic and unredeemable people! For example, when working with difficult people, he suggests telling them that you want to understand their point of view; making an attempt to hear them out, asking them how you can work together; and being honest about where there is genuine disagreement.