Building Leadership Buy-in

We all want impact. It is as fundamental to being human as our basic need for comfort and connection. When we’re feeling effective and seeing results, we’re high. Conversely, when our ability to effect change at work ebbs—as it does from time to time—we get restless and even question our fit, our purpose, and whether it’s all worth it.

To have professional impact and see our ideas take off, two essential conditions must exist:

1.       A quality idea

2.       Support from our leadership.

Often, the challenge isn’t hatching the idea. It’s getting it off the ground. Sometimes the greatest hurdle is right in front of us: our boss, our leadership. Our leaders, by definition, question goals and objectives—to approve the time and money to be invested in achieving them and, ultimately, to support or squash the transition from “I have an idea” to its reality.

The interesting part of this challenge is not that our bosses are out-of-touch and intent on defending the status quo as the stereotype might suggest. In fact, they’re often as eager to see positive changes as we are. The decisions on which problems to tackle first and how to solve them are what creates friction in our workplaces.

Because our bosses’ role is to cheer, guide, and control, you’ll need to get them onboard to bring your best ideas forward. Passive approval leading to an “okay, fine” from our bosses is not enough. You want—and ultimately need—more than that knowing that you’ll hit bumps along the way. Instead, you want a “Yes!” backed by enthusiasm that comes from a place of real buy-in.

Because we can’t be the sole developers and implementers of our ideas, convincing leadership to get onboard with our proposed ideas is the first step in making an impact and creating a career with a body of work that matters. Without their support, our good ideas and intentions may be stuffed down further on our “to do” lists, put off, or forgotten.

Many of us work under a broad assumption that if our idea is good enough, it’ll sell itself. Any plans we do make to build senior-level buy-in for that idea tend to be vague and optimistic in terms of the time and effort required to bring key leaders along. We’re then frustrated when fragile new initiatives are squashed or canceled because they lacked needed leadership support.

It is curious to me that we don’t typically treat building leadership buy-in as something that benefits from a defined process. Why not? My guess is that we have traditionally viewed buy-in as something highly specific to the individual leader and the relationship we have with that individual. In other words, the buy-in process is so unique and nuanced that any effort to document it wouldn’t apply to enough people in a broad range of environments and situations to be worth it. Under this view, our ability to convince our boss to follow us is dependent on undefinable, intangible variables, such as how much they like us personally, how much we have in common, how open minded they are as people, or what great sales people we might be.

In my experience and after talking with dozens of colleagues, clients, and leaders on this topic, I have found that we—as a workforce-- have much more common challenges when building leadership buy-in than previously thought. More good news is that most of us have leaders who are highly amenable to being approached—if we approach them in the right way—and who are engaged in finding fresh ideas and new solutions.

To effectively build understanding and gain buy-in to get our leaders to follow us, we have to start with the solution. This might feel a bit backwards because nearly every other workplace process—technology innovation, program development, or conceptual design for example—all start with understanding the problem and end with the solution. This leader followership process picks up precisely where those others leave off.

So, what do you need to do to achieve that seemingly elusive buy-in from your leaders? It turns out that a couple of concrete actions yield a much greater chance of success. Buy-in starts by glancing inward and evaluating your mindset and perspective. In Flock, Getting Leaders to Follow you can read more about how to toss out the generic process prescriptions and instead create an “ask” that focuses on the anticipated greater good. It is this approach that will yield true leadership support and ensure that your best ideas are more than just heard.

Exercises for improving leadership skills

Each individual's leadership skills fall somewhere along a broad spectrum from truly terrible to incredibly inspiring. I believe that wherever we are in our leadership development, there are simple, daily exercises that we can do to improve our skills-- in between courses, trainings, coaching, and just doing the hard work of leading and motivating staff.

Here are 5 exercises with accompanying questions and examples to spark some reflection and self-assessment.

1. Make conscious choices: lead, follow, or watch from the stands. In the very next meeting on your calendar several issues will be raised. Some actions will be agreed to and assigned. And still, there will be a larger or more complicated issue that will go unmentioned or unresolved. This happens in every single meeting- you just have to train yourself to see them. Each of these bigger issues is an opportunity to consciously choose your role. Can you lead your organization out of this bigger problem? Is someone better suited to lead and needs supportive followers? Or, is it best to watch this one play out? All three can be appropriate responses. The important thing is that you choose. You make a choice instead of passively going with the flow. Making a choice, taking a stand is empowering. So, speak up for those you want to take on and lend support to those you want to help. For everything else, make it clear that you’re sitting on the sidelines—because it’s not your leg of the race.
2. Listen closely for other people’s perspectives. Are you able to hear someone’s point of view without assessment or judgement?  It’s difficult for me and I’ve wondered in the past why I should bother. It gets easier, and opens up more productive conversations, if you can reserve judgement and action until after hearing someone else’s point of view. Specifically, listen for times when people start with “I think” or “I feel” or “we should.” These are clues that they’re about to provide some insights into they’re processing the issue. They’re also words that trigger our subconscious and queue up a response of “well…I think, I feel, or we should…”
3. Step up to solve today’s problem today. People I believe and respect* say credentials don’t matter as much as we previously believed. But they must matter, right? It’s a tough belief to shake. It’s been drilled into us since the beginning and the foundation higher education is based on. What matters instead are the results you can produce. This makes sense but putting all of the education and experience stuff on the back burner isn’t easy (at least for me) to do. What is more practical though, is resisting the tendency to not speak up because you presume that you don’t have the right credentials to contribute. There is so much important work to be done in our businesses and so much is going undone because the few in titled leadership roles couldn’t possibly get to all of it. They’re a bottleneck to brilliance—and rarely do they shut down good work intentionally. Never once in the history of all of my professional experience was a good idea turned away when someone offered to actually do the work too.
4. Get the feedback you need—not just what your boss or team is offering. As a leader, you need to know not only if you're hitting targets, but also whether your team is content under your leadership. There's only one way to find out — ask them to tell you how you're doing and if there's anything they wish they could change. They’re likely to be really uncomfortable with this request at first. Reassure them that it’s not a trick and no one is going to get in trouble for speaking about their honest perceptions and experiences. You then back this up by thanking everyone who offers feedback, making adjustments in your approach (if needed), and continuing to enthusiastically lead forward.
5. Pick yourself to be on the team.  Leaders create project teams and assume that everyone knows that they (the leaders) will fill a review and approval role. A more unique approach is to pick yourself for the team and make that clear upfront. State your role and how you’d like to work with everyone else. It's difficult to lead well if you don't consider yourself part of the group hashing through the tough challenges. What makes the project successful and the team look good is all of the same stuff that makes you look good too.  So, being an actual team player first while leading is a pretty novel and effective approach.

knowing the limits creates freedom

This is desirable not to discourage you from stepping out of bounds. On the contrary, knowing the boundaries enables you to step out with intention which is much better and, ultimately more successful, then doing so accidentally or with sheer force.

When you have a great idea, you want to win over your leadership in a way that sparks their imagination and gets the wheels turning on “how to.” Anything short of that kind of deep, resounding support is risks wasting your time in the long run. But winning someone’s support isn’t easy. The sheer force of your personality—even coupled with strong relationships—won’t cut it.

Instead, you need a plan to ensure that your approach reflects your leadership’s interests and concerns—just to be heard—and then is logically structured around the purpose and function of the organization. Two components are essential to planning your approach:

1. knowing your boss and
2. knowing the boundaries, or the organizational “box.”

“Knowing your boss” involves gaining an understanding of your leadership’s strengths, weaknesses, and work style. Unfortunately, we most often have this information about ourselves and our subordinate staff. We don’t often have the conversation with our leadership about what their styles are. What you’re even less likely to have are any insights into the issues they are working on for themselves with their supervisors. Gaining more insight into what issues your boss or leadership are working on might be difficult, but it’s important to understand as much as you can about where they are in their professional journey. 

In addition to knowing your boss, you need to understand the “box” within which you’re working—what are the documented (and less formal) rules of engagement. This step includes understanding the limits by engaging leadership in sketching them out (if they’re unspoken or inferred). Once you know where the boundaries are, you will also better understand where your solution falls—inside or outside of those bounds. Understanding this upfront is critical for building buy-in for your idea. Shedding any self-imposed constraints and determining anything and everything you can do within your current power is also important to fully exploring the organizational box. 

To solve something in a new, innovative way, you first have to know what new is. Only then can you purposefully step off the prescribed path. One of the most compelling things you can do early on to build support is to demonstrate that you have the perspective, vision, and direction to at least get your idea started and implement whatever aspect of it you can in your own work. Your own adoption of the idea will go a long way in gaining buy-in from leadership.

three steps lead down a better path

So, you’ve hatched an idea. That’s great! Now what do you do with it?

The challenge now is figuring out how to share that idea in an interesting, intriguing, or compelling way and start the process of achieving buy-in. To start, you have to get ultra-clear on precisely what problem you’re solving, what the impact will be, who will need to be consulted, and whether it’s an idea even worthy of being said out loud to begin with.

To sort, shape, and validate the idea, ask yourself (or your team) the following questions:

1. Sort the idea by problem solved: What issue does this idea solve? What pain does it eliminate? Is it a total or partial solution? How do you know that this is a problem? Include the supporting the data, trend, or feedback that not only speaks to the existence of the problem but its magnitude.
2. Shape: To shape your idea, examine how known culture, attitudes, resources, spending sensitivities, and anything particularly polarizing should be considered. What about external conditions, such as the economy, public perception, customer/market surveys, industry trends and so on? Will they have an impact? Make adjustments or shape your solution to account for (or acknowledge) these factors.
3. Validate: Do you have a confidante or trusted adviser whom you can safely bounce ideas off of? Ideally, this is someone who isn’t directly affected by the proposed outcome but who has some understanding of the organization and purpose. Someone like this can be invaluable and, such these relationships really blossom when they’re reciprocal. Touch base with a trusted adviser to float your concept and get a gut reaction. Based on their feedback, decide if tweaks are needed, additional people should be pulled in, or if you’re good to go.

Disciplining yourself to take these three early steps for each idea you’re passionate about pursuing helps lay the foundation for success in the future.

this is your career

Available on Amazon!

This is your career. Whether you have your dream job or “just a job,” you owe it to yourself to bring your best ideas forward. If you’re doing work today in exchange for money, it all counts toward the body of work that is your experience, your contributions, your career.

Waiting to do your best work until a better role comes along is a lost opportunity regardless of whether you plan to stay in this line of work in the future.

Once you make the decision to fully participate in your career (and if you’re reading this, my guess is that you made that decision a long time ago), getting leadership buy-in and support for your ideas is essential. Not taking action because you can’t (or because you don’t want to try) to earn your boss’s buy-in is, ultimately, an excuse and one that completely impedes your ability to meaningfully contribute.

Don’t you owe it to yourself—and your ideas—to share them?

Today, I'm launching my first book, Flock: Getting Leaders to Follow. It's the why and how to gain leadership buy-in and support for your ideas so that you can have the kind of impact you want in your career.  Click here to download a copy and let me know what you think!