CHAPTER 2

Stop Selling, Start Aligning

Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.

—Jason Buchanan

Gretchen was full of enthusiasm.

In 2011, the digital arm of a global medical device manufacturer was slogging through business as usual. They needed a new jolt of energy to drive more innovation out the door and into the hands of medical providers and patients. Gretchen Swecker was hired as the leader of the project management office (PMO) to make that happen.

To get a head start, she attended a workshop on Scrum, a popular innovation framework with a funny name that comes from rugby. It describes the extreme teamwork that comes with empowering a small team to focus on a single common goal for a few weeks at a time, and removing anything that gets in the way of that goal.¹ Gretchen was inspired and set forth to install Scrum back at the office.

Her role allowed her to get an audience with key influencers, where she explained how changing some policies could yield a faster delivery of a stronger product. But some of her new coworkers didn’t see it that way:

“This won’t work for us.”

“Working that fast doesn’t fit regulated industries like medical devices.”

“We’ve been doing things our way for a long time. Why change?”

“My managers are very concerned about delegating too much control to individual contributors, and I have to listen to my people.”

That was the beginning of what would be a multiyear slog. Even with the group’s executive leader offering his vocal public support, a number of Gretchen’s peers were deeply skeptical and hesitant to jump on board. She reflects on the journey this way:

Our broader leadership team was not unified and supportive of the transformation. It was very divided at that time. I personally learned from that experience that any kind of transformation of that degree has to begin with leadership awareness and buy-in before trying to move to the teams. Otherwise, you end up with these really difficult mixed messages to the team. They’re trying to do the right thing and support the initiative, but at the same time, they hear all the murmuring on the sidelines and sidebar conversations that are undermining the whole initiative. That is probably my biggest scar.²

The Problem of Getting Buy-In

Gretchen is not alone.

Over and over, we hear transformation champions struggle to get support for their initiatives. What’s obvious to you is not only confusing to others but often represents a threat, which in turn inspires overt resistance, backstabbing, grumbling, and all other sorts of negativity. This frustration afflicts leaders at all levels, and it follows a predictable pattern:

• The Boost. Yes, it was good you leveraged your role to get started.

• The Barrier. And yet, they’re not on board.

• The Rebound. So now, stop selling and start aligning.

The Pattern of Untapped Buy-In

Leaders Leverage Their Role

The Boost: Yes, It Was Good to Leverage Your Role

The best way to get started is to get started. No matter your title, you can exert influence with those around you. It makes sense, so you did something to get things moving.

The Barrier: And Yet, They’re Not on Board

Despite your best efforts, you’re still very much alone. As champions for better ways of working, more collaboration, more innovation, more alignment, we can see the urgency around the change. We explain it again and again, and yet we’re not getting through.

Leaders Struggle with Buy-In

The Rebound: So Now, Stop Selling and Start Aligning

The field of organizational change management has established a full body of literature over the last half-century. Although research continues, three descriptive models have emerged as the most commonly referenced and leveraged frameworks for describing successful change.

• Jeffrey Hiatt’s ADKAR model is deeply popular among the project management community. It advocates that the first thing we do is (1) raise awareness of the need for change and (2) create desire to support the change on a personal level.³

• John Kotter’s 8-Step Process has evolved over twenty years. Today’s version encourages concurrent and continuous pursuit of several critical steps. The first one? Create a sense of urgency for the change.⁴

• Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book Switch was a 2010 New York Times best seller that detailed nine techniques across three categories. The first step in the category of “Motivation” is to find the feeling. Specifically, “Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something.”⁵

Do you see the pattern? These leading change models all assert that successful change is launched with focused attention on motivators.

Change starts with “why.” But that’s not usually what we do. Our normal approach to change looks more like this:

1. Learn the modern way of doing things.

2. Install our favorite framework or technique.

3. Complain how everyone does it wrong.

I know because I’ve done it. We share our super-amazing strategy, and we wonder why people aren’t as excited as we are.

Here’s another one: A mid-manager believes more collaboration and creativity are needed. He buys a lot of training, sends his team to the workshops, where invariably one employee kicks off the day with an honest question: “Uh, nobody told me why I’m here. Can you, the training vendor, tell us what’s going on?”

I’ve personally trained and coached thousands of professionals on modern management practices over the last ten years. I can tell you this happens all the time. Too many times, trainers go straight to the techniques, to the knowledge of what the change will entail. We explain these cool new things, and everyone’s looking at us like we’re from Mars. They’re wondering, “Why do we need to change at all?”

It turns out that people are already equipped with their own motivations—and they’re really powerful, at that. In order to generate the buy-in we’re looking for, we want to pursue the motivators that are already latent inside the people around us. Before was the right time to leverage your role to mobilize your own motivations for moving forward. Now is the time to do the opposite and tap into their motivations.

In this chapter, we’ll explore what it means to generate alignment.

• Point to broader forces. Rather than talking about short-term goals, tell the bigger story.

• Stop explaining, start asking. Rather than relying on the logic of doing things a better way, work to figure out what matters to the people you’re influencing.

• Stop pulling rank, start repeating the message. Rather than relying on your positional power to carry the message, get ready to repeat yourself over and over.

Point to Broader Forces

What does Hiatt mean by “awareness of the need for change”? What does Kotter mean by “create a sense of urgency”? It means emphasizing the driver behind the change—the “so what?” and the “who cares?”

In one of most popular TED talks of all time,⁶ Simon Sinek walks through the drivers for brand loyalty, purchasing, voting, and any kind of choice-driven behavior. In short, he asserts that “Nobody buys what you do; they buy why you do it.” His message went viral, because it just makes sense.

People don’t buy thousand-dollar iPhones because of the features. They buy them for the aspirational association with a luxury technology. Similarly, the Apple Watch is galactically more expensive than the Timex I can buy at the local superstore; it’s not about telling the time. Apple has become the world’s largest watchmaker because people want to wear the most sophisticated upper-middle-class accessory. People don’t buy Harley-Davidson motorcycles because they’re the fastest or most fuel efficient. They buy them because they identify with the attitude they convey. If you want to use the carpool lanes to get to work, just buy any motorcycle. If you want to connect with your inner badass, buy a Harley.

In fact, Harvard business professor Gerald Zaltman tells us that 95 percent of all decisions people make are subconscious.⁷ That isn’t to say we don’t value logic. We do value the logical, quantitative substance in different choices in front of us. However, all that substance gets mushed into our brain with other cognitive forces.

Sinek also describes it this way. Have you ever been in a meeting where you explain an obvious opportunity where there’s a clear ROI and the leader says, “Yeah, I get your facts and figures, but it just doesn’t feel right.” What do you mean it doesn’t feel right? Who makes decisions based on their gut? As it turns out, 95 percent of everyone who makes a decision. Now, we do make those subconscious decisions with the influence of data, with the influence of return and reward that our rational mind bakes into the subconscious. It’s there, it’s just not as explicit; it’s not cause and effect. It’s much more nuanced.

Sinek challenges us that explaining the value of something on its own doesn’t cut it. So, if that’s true, then what do I tell people about my transformation? Good question. Here are three messages that are very real drivers for change in the way work gets done.

Message 1: Your Product Is Old News

Go to a leader, go to a manager, go to the tech lead, and ask them, “What are you most concerned about?” It’s a future-oriented question, outside of the immediate context. At the organizational level, a lot of people might not be aware that they need to be concerned about the fact that your product is old news.

According to the U.S. Census, products are hitting adoption rates in faster and faster time frames.⁸ It took more than four decades for electricity to hit critical mass. Television only took twenty-five years to achieve the same milestone. The smartphone hit 25 percent adoption in only four years. The trend is clear: products gain adoption faster than ever. As a correlation, their life spans are shorter than ever before. Just look at the world of home movies: the cathode ray tube is dead, then DVD is dead, then Blu-ray is dead.

So what we’re seeing is that whatever you’ve done as a senior leader, department manager, product manager, or innovator, whatever you’ve built is about to be obsolete.

Message 2: The Workplace Has Forever Changed

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that the workplace is different than it was in our parents’ time. The U.K. government’s Chartered Institute for Professional Development summarized these changes in their landmark Megatrends reports.⁹ Here are some of the key points:

• The workforce is older. Since 1992, the percentage of employees aged fifty and over has increased from 21 percent to 29 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of workers in younger age groups has decreased. From baby boomers to Generation Z, we have more age diversity in the office than ever before.

• Workers are more educated. In 1993, 11 percent of the working-age population had a degree. By 2011, that had shifted to 24 percent. We have more talent in the office than ever before.

• Companies are smaller. Since the beginning of the century, large-company jobs (250 or more people) decreased from 49 percent to 40 percent of all jobs. Meanwhile, small-company jobs (four or fewer people) increased from 11 percent to 22 percent of all jobs. We have a more decentralized economy than ever before.

• There are more women in the office, finally. In forty-two years, women went from 37 percent of the workforce to 47 percent. We have more gender diversity at the office than ever before.

This is happening not just in some industries but in every industrialized country in the world. The workplace is changing. Mr. Leader or Ms. Manager, the workforce is not interested in working for your company as much as they used to be, unless you adapt and respond to the dynamics in the market. For example, many are willing to give up some of their salary so they can work from home. Therefore, your message to managers could be like “It might be time to transform our organization to be more compatible with the modern workforce reality.”

Message 3: The Competition Is Out for Everyone, Including You

The competition is real. I know a lot of people who like to say, “Well, we’re government based, so we don’t have competition.” Oh, really—except Amazon. Amazon’s original stated mission was “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Amazon’s literal goal is to help offices bypass official procurement and supply chains in favor of Amazon as a cheaper and faster option.

The commercial world is even worse. Since the mid-twentieth century, the average age of a company on the S&P 500 has shrunk from nearly sixty years to less than twenty years.¹⁰ Profitable companies are getting younger. In fact, between 2013 and 2017 some very big names were pushed out of the S&P 500, including Yahoo!, DuPont, Staples, Dun & Bradstreet, DirecTV, Dell EMC, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Safeway.¹¹

In order to compete, we need more of those organizational capabilities we saw in chapter 1: more speed, more adaptability, more productivity, more morale, more alignment with customers, and so on. Therefore, your pitch to an executive could be something like, “It might be time for our organization to transform to a more modern, competitive version of ourselves.”

Average Age of an S&P 500 Company

These three messages can align your transformation to larger, credible industry trends. This will help you connect your move to something bigger. Something real and tangible. Something more than just “because I said so.”

Stop Explaining, Start Asking

It’s one thing to justify a transformation at a macro scale. It’s another thing to make it appealing to individuals. The way to do it is to stop selling and start aligning.

Selling is where I’m trying to get you to my perspective. It goes like this, “Maria, I believe in my bones that Lean Startup is the answer to better innovation. If you just understood what I understand, then you’d be with me. You’ll be where I’m at and it will be awesome.” That’s selling. The problem with selling your strategy is sometimes people don’t buy.

What if we tried something different? What if we sat down and shared thoughts? “So from your perspective, what do you see? Here’s what I see from my perspective.” What’s in common? How can two opposing things be simultaneously true? We need to be efficient, but we also need to be innovative. Can we be both of those things? How do we do that? That dialogue requires you to ask first and tell second. Stop selling, start aligning. Selling is getting you to my perspective. Aligning is getting us to our perspective.

Approaching Team Leads

Most senior contributors just want to do good work. They’re good at their jobs, and it’s rewarding to take pride in the work they do every day. Whether it’s writing specifications that are detailed, complete, and accurate, or building products that are high quality with few defects, or something that’s truly new and innovative and adds value, they want to do good work. They want their work to have an impact. They want to be able to see how the work they do can impact their customers and stakeholders and maybe add value for them. That’s what’s on their mind. Then here comes the transformation champion, ready to sell a new approach:

Here, the champion mentioned the principle of “people over process,” but then spent the bulk of his breath explaining the framework. As a result, it didn’t connect. What if the conversation went a little bit differently? What if you ask first about the pain points the team leader is suffering? What if you tell me how to sell to you?

Now you have an invitation to explain one or two new techniques. I recommend you don’t avalanche them with all the possible practices or DevOps tool sets. Instead, you say, “Here’s two or three things that I think might help.” And then, boom, you’ve got a shared understanding. You’re coming to alignment.

Approaching Managers

As transformation champions, we’ve got this vision about building high-performance organizations and wonderful places to work. And then we’ve got to deal with people in authority: program managers, PMO managers, department managers, and project managers. Given that they are the curators of the current organization, how could we ever bring them on board?

Well, it turns out they’re actually people, and these people tend to be in the positions they’re in because they’re very results oriented. These are leaders who’ve gotten ahead in their careers by getting results, by coordinating people toward a goal and getting it done. So what’s generally on their minds is: “I want those results, and I want a good track record of how we’ve been able to do it.” Often they’re less interested in the details and expect the talent—team leads and senior contributors—to get the job done. But they are very, very passionate about making sure the right things get done. Here comes our transformation champion again.

What do you think she’s going to say? Will she like letting go of having input and influence on the work the team does? Not so much. What if we ask Maria questions instead: What are your pain points? What worries you? What would motivate you to make any kind of change at all?

Approaching Executives

I know what you’re thinking: Okay, that sounds pretty interesting. I can see there’s some potential there. But you know what, it doesn’t work on executives. They’ve already made up their minds about things and are too busy to approach.

But it turns out they are people too. I work with senior leaders a lot, and most senior leaders are interested in building a differentiating organization. They want to have a legacy that sticks, they want to have an imprint on the organization they’ve been given, and so there’s very real pressure to drive some momentum around that.

Granted, the seniority of a title amplifies the impact of a given leader’s style. A busy executive can seem more unapproachable than a busy manager, and an opinionated senior leader can feel more close-minded than a similarly vocal junior manager. But almost every person I talk to in a senior role is thinking about how to build a better organization.

With that in mind, here is how a well-intentioned buy-in conversation might go between the transformation champion and an internal executive.

Not pretty, is it? Catchphrases like “command and control” and “self-organized” sound great in theory but may not connect to where a given leader is thinking at the moment. So what if instead we stop explaining and we start asking?

At this point, you have an invitation to recommend one or two meaningful changes. Perhaps we authorize exactly half the number of projects this year relative to the number we authorized last year and nothing else. That way, we focus all of our resources, all of our people, on getting just those done. What if that’s the only change we made an organizational level? We can double our focus, and by doubling our focus, we might double our speed to market. Now, that’s a good conversation.

In each scenario—the team lead, the manager, and the executive—we want to stop selling and start aligning, stop telling and start asking, to build a shared understanding. Meet your audience where they are, don’t demand them to come where you are if they’re not ready. The question of getting buy-in is not them buying into you, but you buying into them. That’s the key thrust of what we’re talking about. Start first by asking, find an agile outcome that resonates with them, and then begin trickling in techniques that fit.

Stop Pulling Rank, Start Repeating the Message

Remember what your parents used to say? “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times.” The explicit message was that you couldn’t be bothered to communicate effectively. The onus for understanding was on the receiver of the message, not the sender. But we’ve always known that kind of attitude is a copout. The role of parent is not enough to be heard the first time, and neither is your job title at the office sufficient to get your message across. Instead, there’s a simple way to be more influential.

In a joint Harvard and Northwestern study,¹² groups of middle managers were analyzed on their communications strategies. The researchers wondered how often project managers used multiple channels (email, instant messaging, text, one-on-one conversations, group meetings) to convey the same request or message. Interestingly, the researchers found “managers who are deliberately redundant as communicators move their projects forward more quickly and smoothly than those who are not.” In fact, those without formal title or reporting relationships were twice as likely to use redundant communication strategies. Harvard business professor Tsedal Neeley summarized the point, “Those without power were much more strategic, much more thoughtful about greasing the wheel.”

How many times have you sent off an email and been frustrated that nobody read it? Email is our primary means of organizational communication, and it is fundamentally unreliable. The secret is to follow up, follow up, follow up.

Beware of Misnamed Motivators

When you ask these questions about leader anxieties and pain points, you might get some funny answers. I’ve heard a few of these, and they can be very subtle.

“We Need More Consistency”

One of the more insidious motivators is the seductive appeal of consistency. When asked why we need a transformation effort, I often hear, “We had some good pilots in various departments. Now we need to standardize our processes and scale that across the organization. We need more consistency.” I challenge these team leads, managers, and executives by saying, “So what I hear you saying is that you want your legacy and your imprint on the organization to be that everyone is exactly the same and we’re all working like robots without creativity or individuality.”

This immediately evokes the intended reaction: “No, no, no, we’re really talking about repeatability, scalability, sustainability.”

There we go. These are indeed high-performance organizational outcomes. The word “consistency” is sometimes misused, and it has connotations that might bring negative side effects. When you hear it, probe on that a bit more.

“We Need More Efficiency”

Another one I hear goes something like “We can innovate a little bit, but we need to be more efficient.” Again, I probe more deeply by asking, “What do you mean by that? Do you mean ROI and cost cutting and headcount reduction?” Almost always, that sparks the intended defensive reaction: “No, no, we’re not laying off anyone. We just want them to do better.”

Aha! They’re really talking about efficiency as a synonym for high performance, for technical excellence, for just good work. When leaders advocate for “efficiency,” it often means they want to come into the office and see the place humming like a well-oiled machine. Many times, that is what’s desired, even if it costs a little more money. The goal is less about the textbook definition of ROI as much as productivity, quality, and excellence.

“We’re Not Sure Why, We Just Know We Need To”

Finally, one of my favorites is when the answer to the “why” question is a non-answer:

Here they’re feeling the need to be relevant, to be competitive. They’re hearing that there’s change in the industry and that there’s a more modern way of doing work—more collaboration, more iteration. They want to be a part of that instead of being left behind.

That is a much more coherent transformation driver that others can get behind. In fact, you actually can use an assessment tool to measure the maturity of your practices against industry benchmarks.¹³ Ask all your teams, “How are you doing with automating your most mundane tasks?” You’ll get data that says, “You’re actually right about the level of maturity for your industry.” That would be a successful agile story that would get some support and interest, because now you know where you are, and you have the opportunity to get ahead.

Gretchen’s Second Chance

Let’s go back to Gretchen, our change leader from the beginning of the chapter. Recall she wanted to install an agile method called Scrum and got a lot of pushback. Despite that, she continued to push forward. She used the reinforcement and repetition we discussed earlier, hunkering down for the long haul. Over time, Scrum was used here and there. It was slow going, with occasional but meaningful improvements. Meanwhile, the skeptical, resistant leaders gradually left the firm or shifted their roles, which in turn created space for more improvements.

Eventually, a full five years after she started, a new conversation began to emerge. There was a growing consensus that a new digital platform was needed, and to make it a viable option, the group needed to scale the few innovation practices already in place.

The change had reached an inflection point, offering a fresh new opportunity. This time, Gretchen held back from leveraging her role. She waited. Granted, she did her own research on which additional techniques could help with the next phase of evolution. But she also listened to other voices, letting the chatter grow on its own. Soon other senior executives started emphasizing the need for the new platform. Finally, in 2016, the group had the green light to launch a second, more pervasive transformation effort spanning 150 people across twenty teams. Gretchen describes her journey this way:

When I reflect on our second transformation many years later, that transformation was so much easier. I think we had at that point a critical mass of people who appreciated the value of agile methods. They realized that to scale, we needed to adopt the next level of management framework.

You can’t do it alone. You’ve got to lift and empower other people to be evangelists for the process. Trying to do it somewhat more in isolation back during our first transformation was just a painful and troubled approach for us. By comparison, when I look across the program today, any number of program leaders, it’s not to say that they don’t have criticisms and ideas of ways to improve, but they are invested in the approach. So find yourself those peers and those leaders who really can evangelize to help bring life to the program.

Summary

In this chapter, we’ve defined the problem of buy-in. By leveraging our positional authority as leaders, we’ve learned:

• They’re not connected to the “why.” Change is hard, and people need a reason to go through the struggle. Issuing a mandate will only get you so far.

• Point to the broader forces. Industry trends may be obvious to you but are not necessarily obvious to them. Be ready to explain the bigger picture and how it relates to your situation.

• Stop explaining, start asking. Our motivators are not their motivators.

• Stop pulling rank, start repeating the message. Once you have a context that resonates with people, repeat it again and again. It’s easy for us to get distracted by the daily grind, and research shows that effective leadership involves reinforcement.

To get past the lack of buy-in, stop selling and start aligning.