Would you like to buy some peas?

So, imagine that you’re the Brand Manager for Frozen Peas at Edgells.

And imagine that you have to increase market share from 31.1% to 32.4% by the end of the year in order to receive your bonus.

What to do? What to do?!

I know! Let’s advertise!

‘Buy Edgells Frozen Peas so I can get my bonus’.

Gonna rush out and buy them peas? No, thought not.

How about if the ad said:

‘Buy Edgells Frozen Peas because they’re grown locally, nutritious and on special this week’.

Ahh, now you’re talking. The customer might pick up a bag of your peas!

But when the customer goes home to the consumer – a five year old boy – will it work if the message is ‘Eat these peas because they’re locally grown, nutritious and they were on special’?

Probably not, right?

Maybe something more like ‘If you want to have muscles like Daddy, you can eat these peas’. Hmm, okay, maybe that might work!

So each party in that chain wanted to achieve their objective, but how different were their ways of influencing others to help them?

Same at the Big Table.

If I’m the CEO, should I care how many people were away sick last month? Or do I want to know the revenue per employee that we lose due to illness?

Should I care about the number of vacancy days in the call centre?

Or do I want to hear how much profit we had to redirect to replace a lost team leader?

Should I fret about having an engagement score of 62%? Or should you show me that each 1% of disengagement equals $3100 lost profit per employee per year?

Maybe HR doesn’t get invited to the Big Table because we’re not talking the same language as everyone else. We think we’re giving cogent reasons for the CEO to buy our peas, but we’re not focused on ‘what’s in this for the CEO?’

What have you done differently that really helps you communicate to your senior leader peers? How have you changed your language so that your message is received loud and clear? What works?