post responses

Read a selection of your colleagues' postings.

Respond to at least two of your colleagues in one or more of the following ways:

• Expand upon or suggest alternative approaches to your colleague's plan by drawing upon the resources and materials from this course. Justify your contributions with an explanation as to why you think your suggestions will improve the plan.
• Share a professional experience that would be relevant and helpful to the plan presented by your colleague. Explain how your experience is relevant and helpful.
• Share an insight you gained from your colleague's presentation that you would like to use in your workplace and describe how you would envision using it.

POST 1

     In order to develop a fresh new innovative way to implement a loyalty program at Kendrick auto sales, I would take a very close look at all of the resources available at my disposal. I would start with my most valuable resources, which will be the current employees. I would like to talk to all of the employees in order to get a feel for all of the available loyalty programs, in order to see what type of programs are currently being used at other dealerships. I would talk to all of the current employees to get a better feel for their individual weakness and strengths. I would try to pay closer attention to what the older and more experienced team member would have to say. As the newly appointed leader of this task force to come up with a newly innovative loyalty plan, I will start with the feedback from the current employees because I believe this is where I can get the most valuable information as to where to start. I will also use this time to build up trust and relationships with the workers. I will make sure that I come off as a respectable leaders as to avoid all of the 10 most common leadership short comings (Zenger, 2009). Then I will use the trust and relations ship established to further the progress towards coming up with the new loyalty program.

            As a result, there are specific ways in which I would like to use the personal skills of the various members of the teams in order to come up with the best and most innovation new loyalty program. I would want to ensure that I have a collective group which will be able to represent the four different types of thinking styles which are the ideators, clarifiers, developers and implementers. I will make sure that they overall group of people who will contribute the ideas will be very diverse. I will make sure that each group will have equal say in the process. I will make sure that one group does not over compete or compensate their portion of work to the overall group. I will encourage each group to be respectful to its members and the members of other groups. In order to make sure the groups are creative as possible I will make sure that I avoid the four traps which are mediocrity signals, strategic ‘attention deficit disorder’, corporate keystone kops and misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals (Amible, 2012). These are just some of the ways in which I would use all of the skills of the various teams for the advantage of establishing a new loyalty program.

In addition, these are the various ways of which I would use the team members and how I would strategically utilize them to develop a new innovative loyalty program. I would use the sales team associates in the capacity of the ideators. The sales teams would act collectively as the ideates because they are the people are going to spend the most time face to face with the actually customers. This would allow for them to get an inside look at what the customers would actually want and what they would like to get from a innovative loyalty reward program. I would believe that since the spend most of their time on the spot coming up with different ideas to convince the customer to purchase an automobile, they will be able to use this highly developed skill to come up with new ideas for the loyalty program. I would use the financial staff to act collectively as the clarifiers. I would use them as the clarifiers because this is a skill which they utilize on their daily activities. They would be in charge to make sure they have the proper information from the ideators in order to further develop those ideas. I would use the parts and service technicians as the developers. I would like to think that the parts and service technicians would be naturally adept at looking at the whole picture because they are the ones who fix the many parts of the automobile. Since they are specially equipped to look at the big picture and get a better understanding from the smaller parts, I am sure they would be able to develop the ideas in order to make them work as best as possible. As for the role of the implementer of this program I would establish myself at the implementer. I would be the implementer because I have the necessary skill and experience to take the ideas that could work and make try them out at the dealership. I would be able to take the viable ideas and implement them at the work place. I would also encourage design thinking in order to stimulate the creative process with all of the employees (Brown, 2008). This is how I would use the team members to come up with a new innovative loyalty program.

I would be able to use a few different tactics in order to get the employees together and working effectively. I would use various incentives to get them to work together. I would have a reward system implemented to get the workers more encouraged to get the customers involved with the program. If the store does well on a quarterly basis, I would give all of the workers monetary compensation, which would be a percentage to the overall gains, when compared to the gains before the program was established. I would further encourage the employees to get more customers involved with the loyalty program by allowing to the customers to report on who encouraged them to sign up and stay with the loyalty program and that worker or their team would get something for their excellence. I would encourage the employees to utilize divergent thinking at the beginning of the idea generating process (Puccio, 2012). Then I would encourage the teams to use convergent thinking towards the end of the idea generating process.

POST 2

In creating this new pilot loyalty program for our dealership, I will seek to draw on the diverse skills, experience, and ideas of all types of team members, and seek to collaboratively develop an amazing program (Zenger & Folkman, 2009). We will start by establishing a clear question that needs to be answered in the form of a statement starter, such as “How might we leverage customers’ desire to be rewarded for their loyalty and patronage?”

Team Composition

The first step would be to assemble the team who will be responsible for leading the program’s development. I will pull together an experienced individual from the finance department as well as the parts and service department, and two of my sales consultants - ideally one who typically deals with individual buyers and one who handles commercial purchases. I will also bring on a marketing consultant who can assist as our program designer and will be involved in assisting the team to flesh out the program (Brown, 2008).

Clarification

When I pull the team together for the initial briefing, I will first strive to clarify the timeline and goals of the program so that they understand what their objectives should be seeking to achieve, and so that they can establish cohesive targets, as offering clear vision and direction will be key to the team’s success (Zenger et al., 2009). I will also explain to them why they were selected - not just because they are experienced and bring a wealth of knowledge to the team, though this is true, but also because they are highly creative! I will explain to them that creativity is not only reserved for children or artists, but that everyone has the capacity to be creative, and that they succeed at their jobs every day by finding creative solutions to challenges that arise.

Ideation and Evaluation

Next will be the ideation stage. I will give each of them time after the initial meeting for them to think about objections to repeat business that they currently face in order for them to draw inspiration from these situations and spur new ideas through association and questioning (Brown, 2008; Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2009). For example, the maintenance employee may have some insight into what makes certain customers come to our dealership for service, versus why some customers prefer to go to a mechanic’s shop for vehicle maintenance. I will encourage them all to use the mind mapping framework to sort their thoughts in a logical way.

When it comes time to ideate, I will enable divergent thinking by running a brainstorming session in which all ideas are accepted without criticism (Puccio, Mance, Switalski, & Reali, 2012). Once we have a solid list of possibilities (at least ten) we can begin evaluating them using convergent thinking, and seeing if perhaps any of them complement each other and can live under the same program (Puccio et al., 2012). For example, perhaps there is an incentive for commercial purchasers to buy additional vehicles through us, while also earning them maintenance perks such as preferred service.

Execution and Testing

Once a preliminary program prototype has been devised, we can test it by putting ourselves in the shoes of our main customer demographics to determine whether or not the program is attractive to them, and perhaps send a survey to a group of our customers to obtain feedback on program implementation (Brown, 2008). If we gain inspiration from this survey, further ideation and prototyping can occur followed by another round of concept testing. When we have a program that we feel is suitable to implement, the program designer can flesh out the specifics of how to launch and communicate the program to customers. As the program is running and metrics are tracked, further inspiration can be gained about what is working well or what needs to change (Brown, 2008). In the end, as long as we are learning from experience if things don’t go as planned, we will eventually find the formula for a program that is successful (Zenger et al., 2009).