Are you grateful? Do you express your gratitude on a regular basis?
Do you think that gratitude can help you boost your business?
No? Not really? Not enough maybe?
Then I have an advise for you:
As a language professional, as terminology expert or as tool provider:
Be grateful that you have clients and customers after all!
Our products and services might not be soooo convincing or
sooooo different from our competitors.
So let us be grateful that our customers come back to us all the time.
Know your customers well and
treat them well: Show them your gratitude.
Why? You can learn a lot from your customers and clients.
You can learn from them how to improve your terminology
products and services or create something new ones.
The same is true for your service providers and your tool providers.
Be grateful that there are crazy people out there
caring for your wording nightmares and your terminology hell.
If you know them and talk to them, they might solve your
terminology problems even if you didn’t know it was about terminology.
Do you know whom you should express your gratitude?
Do you know your statkeholders ?
Here comes what you can win today:
A perfect tool to identify those people who matter most for your
language and terminology work and business:
Let me introduce that deep and easy tool for Stakeholder Analysis:
the Power Grid we introduce in the ECQA Certified
Terminology Manager_advanced courses.
It’s an annex of an International ISO standard .
This grid is designed to dentify groups and individuals who have varying levels of influence (power) and interest in terminology – or in translation, or in any other business or project you want to push forward.
It’s a good and standard tool to analyse stakeholders in general. Depending on where they are placed, strategies are proposed on how best to accomodate them.
High power, high interest (red –top right): offer information to these people on an ongoing and extensive basis, in order to facilitate their full engagement. They are your jokers, be grateful when you have at least 1 person who has high power and high interest in what you are doing or offering.
High power, low interest (orange – top left): Offer information on a regular basis although not excessively. Bear in mind that these orange people can become red people and support you. Be grateful that you have the chance to convince them to invest in terminology – with you good arguments and your great passion for terminology!
Low power, high interest (dark green – on the bottom right): Need to be adequately informed and offered opportunity for feedback to ensure that no major issues are arising. The dark green people are your best friends, be grateful that you found someone equally enthusiastic about language and terminology as your self!
Low power, low interest (light green – on the bottom left): Offer information occasionally and not intensively. Have an eye on them … and be grateful when they do not boycott you and your terminology endavour…
How to involve relevant stakeholders is key to make your language and terminology work and business successful. This is why we are discussing this issue intensively in our online terminology courses and in our International Terminology Summer School – an annual highlight of sharing knowledge and learning from each other in the language and terminology community.
In any case: Don’t complain, be grateful for your stakeholder and clients!
Let me repeat my message of today:
Be grateful that your customers come back to you.
Know your customers well and treat them well.
Show them your gratitude on a regular basis – and your business and your self will flourish.
All the best,
enjoy terminology
Gabriele
Head of the TermNet Group
