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Keys to Gaining Buy-in and Motivating People to Action
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THE MILITARY HAS been onto something since the days of muskets and keelhauling. It goes like this: The brass says “Jump,” and the troops ask “How high?” Not only do the enlisted masses not have to like it, but the folks with the embroidered hats couldn’t care less whether they do. In fact, if you’re a drill instructor with a bit of a Napoleon complex, the less the grunts like what you say, the better.
The reason this works is obvious: There is no alternative. A soldier can’t resign. Resistance gets the soldier some quality time in the brig. Request a rationale, and you’re cleaning the latrine with a toothbrush—yours—for the next month. The only other situation in modern civilized culture in which this organizational dynamic works is revealed in a memory most of us hold dear: When asked to justify an instruction we found illogical, which was often the case, our parents said, “Because I said so.”
Hence our generational problems with authority figures.
There was a time when corporate managers who wanted to assert their presence and advance through the hierarchy thought that this was the way of the world. And for a time it was, at least until three tough women named Parton, Tomlin, and Fonda rewrote workplace dynamics in the 1980 movie Nine to Five, in which the company head, played by Dabney Coleman, discovers that a title and too much insensitive swagger can get you tied up, literally, in misguided office politics that have significant consequences.
Although the megalomaniacal styles of middle and upper managers continue to pervade the workplace, there’s a new cultural sheriff roaming the corporate campus these days—one who’s been to all the postgraduate leadership seminars that postulate that people, along with the results they deliver, are best optimized from a specific psychological understanding of what makes them tick. This is a strategy designed for long-term success rather than the short-term benefits of carrying a metaphorical big stick and having an impressive title. When it comes to achieving organizational outcomes through others, nothing succeeds more reliably than creating psychological safety, understanding what motivates people, communicating with them clearly and frequently, and spelling out the purpose—the why—of the task. The goal of all this? Aiming for buy-in by the troops.
There are many ways—hundreds, in fact—to get compliance. However, we now know that it’s the time and effort we invest in generating buy-in that makes long-term sustained organizational success possible. The mastery of that concept can help foster respect and honest effort from the members of your greater team—bosses included—while contributing to the executive presence you are learning to build.
Buy-in Beats Compliance
Abraham Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Perhaps this observation originated in the Civil War, in which it’s hard to imagine Confederate soldiers shooting up their northern neighbors without buying into the racially biased belief system that was the crux of the dispute. A belief system is a form of buy-in; if you don’t believe, you aren’t buying in. Imagine giving your all to a company that touts its environmental stewardship and expects employees to give “110 percent” to meet organizational goals, then only to learn that the company has been illegally dumping toxic waste. In that case, you might suddenly find yourself less willing to put in those extra hours to ensure the company’s success. Buy-in, in other words, comprises both the belief in something and the willingness to work in service of those beliefs. If people stop believing, they’ll stop working.
Compliance, on the other hand, doesn’t require belief; it is simply about obedience. This can work in the short term, and might even have you convinced that leadership is primarily about using fear to keep people in line. But compliance never achieves fully sustained commitment and effort. People will bolt at the first glimpse of something better.
Autocratic leaders learn this sobering truth about compliance: When people are no longer afraid, they no longer obey. The protagonists of the corporate tragedy called Enron are a classic example of the breakdown of buy-in. It’s hard to imagine the members of the senior executive team at Enron behaving as they did—and for a time succeeding—without buy-in from lower-ranking executives. And once those who questioned the company’s unusual accounting practices were laid off, those in power, with the help of those whose buy-in they had, ran rampant in their greed.
But the buy-in was not complete, and it was the lack of buy-in from several individuals that helped bring down the corporate giant. They’re called whistleblowers, and one Enron whistler—a vice president of corporate development by the name of Sherron Watkins—blew the whistle in CEO Ken Lay’s ear in a seven-page letter in which she basically worried aloud about Enron’s “funny” accounting practices, likening them to a giant Ponzi scheme. Although Watkins wasn’t the only one who didn’t buy in—other former Enron executives also claimed the title of whistleblower for themselves—she was named person of the week by Time for her significant role in “smelling a rat” at work and documenting it in writing. Watkins and other corporate whistleblowers may have looked the other way here and there—who knows?—but they lacked buy-in to a degree that they sought to remove themselves from the company’s immoral and unethical, not to mention criminal, activities.
A major commitment simply cannot be mandated, even by those with a big title and wielding the hammer of a looming performance review. A major commitment over time requires buy-in, the kind that permeates all levels of the culture. Consider the Cinderella success story of the 1980 American Olympic hockey team. The squad, staffed with college students, beat a team of hard-core professional Soviet players. Coach Herb Brooks was a hard man, not known for backslapping or even smiling, but he knew how to mold his young men into a team that believed it could win it all. The night before the big match with the Russians, Brooks gathered the members of his team and told them, “It’s meant to be. This is your moment and it’s going to happen.” And it did. Then they went out and beat Finland for the gold, believing even when they were down in the third period that, of course, they could win—because Brooks made them believe in themselves. Imagine the improbable victory of that team if it did not buy into Brooks’s vision. Or similarly, imagine a political victory without the buy-in of staff and all the volunteers putting in endless hours knocking on doors and passing out campaign literature and cold-calling voters. Incumbents may not have to be inspiring (although some of them are), but every underdog must reach out to doubters and skeptics and turn them into believers if she or he has any chance of scoring an upset.
In business, too, it is turning employees into believers that makes the difference. The superstars of corporate success have this in common—an across-the-board buy-in to a set of values and values-driven missions from their staffs. The list of CEOs who have achieved this includes Rometty, Welch, Jobs, Winfrey, and Branson. As with the 1980 American Olympic hockey team, it is impossible to imagine these business leaders’ success without full and complete corporate cultural buy-in.
Buy-in, which often is easier to define than to achieve, is at minimum an agreement to support a decision. Ideally, it is the total alignment of a person or group with your beliefs and goals. It is a process of working together with people—not dictating to them—in a manner that leads to their understanding of the goal and its strategic importance to achieve a win-win outcome, all within a common set of values. To secure buy-in means gaining people’s personal commitment to a goal and their willingness to do what it takes to get it done. The more complex and significant the project or organizational objective, the more essential buy-in becomes.
This definition shifts the role of a manager from one of task definer and taskmaster to one of task empowerer. Your first line of managerial offense—indeed, your most powerful strategy—is to strive to create a level of buy-in that makes all stakeholders feel they are part of the process.
As noted above, there are three overlapping elements to creating and maintaining buy-in: psychological safety, clear communication, and motivation and purpose. How you establish and make use of these elements varies with the setting—what works best at the office level differs from what works at the company level—which means you have to exercise judgment in deciding which elements to emphasize. I’ll review each of the elements in the next few pages.
Creating Psychological Safety
Getting the commitment and buy-in of employees (as well as peers and senior management) is never easy, especially when it involves some sort of change that requires a mental and behavioral shift. One way to accomplish such a feat, according to the principles of evolved people management, is to make sure that people feel psychologically safe.
Organizational leaders ignorant of this basic concept are easily identified: They keep information close to their chest; they make careless offhand comments; they behave inconsistently; they play favorites; they blame others for failures but are quick to take credit for successes; they micromanage and humiliate; they pit people against each other; they stoke conflict rather than resolve it and otherwise threaten people implicitly and explicitly.
In contrast, enlightened leaders, seeking to make it easy for people to buy into a leader’s vision of a better future, recognize them for their accomplishments, give them direction and feedback, help them understand the why of the work they do, treat them fairly, and bestow on them at least some autonomy over how they meet their goals.
These various efforts all rest on one basic tenet of human behavior: People need a safe and trusting environment to perform at their best. Deep in our DNA there is a voice whispering that if we feel unsafe, we must minimize risk, lest we end up with our head on a platter. If employees are fearful, they will put their energy into avoiding risk rather than engaging in analytic thinking, problem solving, and the spirited creative process necessary to pursue important goals. Remember my client Jim from Chapter 2, whose tendency to intimidate his team truncated discussions and stifled communication, not to mention limited his ability to exert influence with a positive executive presence. Only when there is an air of trust flowing through the organization’s HVAC system will employees buy into the kind of risk taking that fosters innovation and growth, not to mention their own personal development.
When the people at Google investigated what made a team successful, they found that psychological safety was “far and away the most important” factor. Julia Rozovsky, a Google analyst, noted that “the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.” Only when colleagues felt that they could take risks without being punished did they really push themselves.
The smart idea then is to create a culture in which people feel safe to speak up, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to have a chance to be part of the decision-making process, if only to be asked for their input. This is especially critical in small-group settings in which you have regular contact with your colleagues and peers. It is through their interactions with you that they will learn that you can be trusted to encourage them, to give them honest feedback, and to keep your word.
Here are some ideas that can help you foster a climate of psychological safety:
• Respect others. The most basic way to get people to follow you is to respect them. Tell them that you rely on their skills and that you appreciate their efforts, and they’ll step up for you. Even more importantly, show that you trust them by letting them actually do the work. Don’t micromanage; instead, have a conversation with them about your expectations, answer their questions, and let them get on with their work. If you trust them, chances are they’ll trust you back.
• Find out what they expect from you. If you’ve moved from one culture to another, be it across international boundaries or just from one corporate style to another, find out what your colleagues and employees expect from you. Do they expect to be consulted when making decisions? Do they expect decisions and deadlines to be firm or flexible? Do they expect you to tell them exactly how you’d like something done, or are they used to accomplishing goals in their own way? Learning what others expect may prompt you to adjust your style, as well as give you the opportunity to explain to them just what your style is.
• Be clear about what you expect from them. Few things are more frustrating to employees than being forced to guess what managers want. Tell them what you expect from them and then evaluate them by the standards that you set. If you want to see more risk taking, don’t punish them when they extend themselves and fail; instead, work with them to make the risk pay off. If you call a meeting to brainstorm, encourage them to think big; but if the aim of the meeting is how to make something work, keep the focus on the practicalities.
• Set the direction and stay the course if possible. Just as guesswork wastes time, constantly changing the purpose of a project can be demoralizing. People crave certainty and are more likely to invest themselves in their work when they know that investment will pay off. Even if they’re used to having flexible deadlines and revisiting decisions, wholesale and abrupt course changes can throw everyone off. If the direction does change, give your employees as much advance notice as possible. Keep them looped in, and they’ll adjust their sails with minimal fuss.
• Reduce uncertainty. Setting direction and being clear about expectations will substantially reduce uncertainty. However, sometimes those general tactics are not enough to allay anxiety, and you have to investigate the particular triggers driving those concerns. Will the mission result in time pressures and too much evening and weekend work? Will it place the employees in a role in which they feel unprepared or uncomfortable? Will they feel supported in their role or alone with their sense of inadequacy? Are there enough rewards—do they understand what’s in it for them? Do the stakes have implications for their careers or their immediate sense of wellness? Sometimes it is impossible to remove uncertainty from a mission, but you can strive to make them feel assured of their psychological safety and the availability of support. By keeping everyone in the loop and communicating frequently, you become the light your employees follow in the dark, which empowers them to buy into and support your decisions.
• Be human. We’ve discussed the need for social intelligence at length in Chapter 4. Demonstrating empathy and vulnerability with a request for buy-in helps others feel your recommendations rather than just hear them. Make your pitch personal: Research shows that people are more likely to help an individual in need than they are to contribute to a generic charity. Asking others for help signals anything but weakness, even if that seems counterintuitive. People have a natural instinct to help others. Tap into it.
• Be the real deal. Your credibility is the pivotal variable in how people respond to your requests. Make sure you’re on solid ground, and if not, bring the data and the reinforcements necessary to qualify you as their leader. People value expertise and experience in their leaders, and it takes more than a title and a few boxes of pizza to get people on board with your ideas. Don’t be afraid to showcase your competence, delivered with genuine warmth, and you’re likely to bring even the skeptics around.
Communicating to the Core
No matter what the setting, to get buy-in clear communication always matters. Whether in one-on-one sessions or at large town hall–style meetings, whether with subordinates or with superiors, if you can’t clearly and simply convey your point, people will tune out. But if you can, you’ll find their ears—and minds—wide open.
Some strategies and tactics for communicating in a compelling way follow.
Know the Members of Your Audience and What’s Foremost on Their Mind
What are their beliefs and values? What are their expectations? What barriers and distractions do you have to address before you can direct their attention to your message? In other words, “read the room.” If your team or company has been through the wringer, you can’t ignore that as you rally people to meet the next production target. Similarly, if you know rumors are flying about mergers or layoffs or other organizational change, address those rumors. Otherwise, people will fill in gaps in information with ideas spun from their biases and beliefs. You may not have all the answers they seek, but by acknowledging their concerns and the issues swirling in the organizational ether, you display your organizational awareness as well as your empathy for them.
At the senior level, you’ll secure buy-in more easily if you’ve taken the time to meet the stakeholders individually and clearly communicate the risks and opportunities in a way that addresses their personal values and interests. The level of detail you go into in these meetings reflects your understanding of your audience. An instructive example comes from one of my clients, a recently hired technology leader at a global consumer products giant, who frequently interacted with the company CFO. In one of their first one-on-ones, the tech executive avoided detailed tech talk and instead focused on her understanding of the business needs and her recommendations on how to achieve several key business objectives. This was language the CFO understood very well, and he was grateful to her. At one point he said, “Hey, I want to thank you for really just talking about the business challenge that you see and not bringing in there a technology decision with me.”
In fact, this CFO had long been frustrated with new people in the organization coming into his office and starting with a technology discussion instead of a business problem he was trying to solve. As the CFO himself put it: “They’re coming in and they’re telling me I need these data hubs, Microsoft Azure, da, da, da, when all they needed to say is, ‘I think we need better consumer insights.’ They would’ve had me sold. I wouldn’t have needed to have a six-page deck on these boxes that look like there’s clouds around them, but we didn’t get the conversation about consumer insights. So I let them go for 30 minutes. Then I said, ‘Guys, none of this makes any sense to me; what would’ve made sense, if you brought into me my challenges of getting consumer insights today, and that you guys have a plan to solve it. Do you need to show me the plan in this level of detail? Probably not.”
The CFO’s candor confirmed for my client the wisdom of her approach. “I definitely don’t go in with that level of detail with a finance guy or a marketing guy,” she said. “I know those guys, I’m not going to get buy-in—I’ll lose them the minute I mention the cloud.”
Tell Them Why They Should Care on a Human Level
When you’re presenting facts, numbers, stats, and other findings, don’t forget to tell your audience why the information matters—why this audience should care about the information, how it relates to them, and what it all means in terms of human outcomes. The people in your audience may be smart, but as we’ve seen with our tech-averse CFO, they can’t necessarily connect the dots from the specs and technical data. So make it easy and spell out the “so what”?
For instance, if you’re proposing to your local library that it purchase several new computers, don’t build your pitch to the tech-unaware decision-making committee around contrasting the tech features of the library’s old models with those of the more powerful new ones. Instead, point out to the committee that kids from the community’s low-income families rely on the library’s computers to do their homework, and that has grown increasingly difficult because the equipment is outdated. If you do that, you’ve tapped into more than just people’s rational brains with a straightforward cost-benefit analysis. You’ve put a human face on the issue.
Ground Your Facts in Real-World Context
Imagine you’re a lawyer representing a family whose child died because of a product defect. The company on trial had been aware of the faulty product for some time but decided against a recall because it would cost $3 million. And that is the amount you’re requesting in compensatory damages. You know how difficult it is to put a price on a child’s life, but you figure a jury would see the logic of compensating the bereaved parents at least the amount that the defendant company tried to save by keeping its flawed product on the market. The company’s attorney argues that $3 million is too much, at which point you address the jury with a rhetorical question: “What is a child’s life worth in our community?” And that’s when you put it all into a real-life context.
You may point out, for example, that the annual compensation of the defendant’s CEO exceeds $7 million and that you have no doubt he’s worth every penny. You may show the jury a government spending report that NASA provided $15 million in grant money to a golfing equipment manufacturer so it could see how its golf clubs perform in space. You may also show the jury a story about an auction at which a Picasso sold for $179 million, and another about the loser of a recent heavyweight prizefight getting a guaranteed payout of $100 million. “All these amounts were fairly valued, I’m sure,” you tell the jury. And then you ask again, “So what is a child’s life worth in our community?” after which you add, “That’s your call to make.”
This strategy may or may not work, but by putting your request into a real-life context, you’re doing two things: (1) giving your listeners the opportunity to mentally step outside the situation at hand and see the proverbial forest instead of the trees, while also (2) tapping into their personal value system, where decisions are mapped onto principles that are deeply important to them. If buy-in is about alignment with one’s beliefs and values, then it is people’s core values that you need to evoke with context in order to get it.
Deliver a Gut Punch They Won’t Forget
We never run out of problems to solve and challenges to overcome—often the only question is which ones to prioritize. So when you’re looking to get buy-in, it’s not always enough to make a business case and tug at the heartstrings. Sometimes you have to deliver a metaphorical punch to the gut to make people feel the issue you want them to move to the top of the agenda. One of my clients, the chief information security officer at a U.S.-based global consumer products company, did just that to help the company’s leaders understand the importance of cybersecurity and the threat posed by the least likely of suspects—the company’s own employees.
At an information security networking workshop, my client decided to do a demo—a phishing exercise in real time—with 45 of the company’s directors from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Pretending to be the organizer of the event, my client’s team sent spoof e-mails to the participants just five minutes before the session was to start. The intent was to show the directors the threat a simple e-mail can pose, while walking them through the exercise. However, before the session even got started, five people had already opened the e-mail and went looking for the organizer, telling him, “Hey, you had attached the wrong agenda—this appears to be dated.” The organizer sat there thinking, “I know I didn’t send this out . . . what’s going on?” A couple of minutes later the session began, and my client started walking everyone through the exercise. The spoofed e-mails contained an attachment that, when clicked on, activated the computer’s camera and took a picture of the computer user. It also took a snapshot of whatever was open on the desktop at the time and put it up on the server.
No fewer than 24 people had clicked on the attachment in the minutes leading up to the session, and the reactions were, in my client’s words, “amazing.” Speaking of the workshop participants, he said, “They hear about the dangers; they do phishing exercises; we tell them what they can and cannot click on, and they can’t really contextualize it, but when you show them a picture of them opening up the attachment and whatever is open on their desktop, their jaws hit the floor. And they start getting it.”
Sometimes, the best way to get buy-in is to let people experience the problem before you offer the solution. That’s when actions truly speak louder than words.
Motivation and Purpose
There’s no avoiding the fact that managers are dealing with the human animal when they marshal their troops for a mission. The emphasis here is on the word “animal,” which indicates that despite our best intentions and evolved approach, we are dealing with very basic human needs and emotions. But when we understand these instinctive drives and default reactions, we are empowered to play to them in a way that can propel people toward buy-in.
Visionary leaders have long understood the need to emotionally connect with people in order to enlist them in a common goal. One of the most famous examples was developed over 400 years ago by Shakespeare, when he immortalized King Henry V’s pep talk to a handful of English troops as they prepared to wage battle at Agincourt against 10,000 French soldiers. I analyzed Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech in detail in my book Breakthrough Communication, and the science appears to still hold true. Experienced veterans that Henry’s soldiers were, they needed no instruction on how to wage war against a vastly larger enemy, but they did need meaning and purpose to keep them from turning on their heels. And the king delivered on that front in spades. Here’s an excerpt from Breakthrough Communication:
It is midfall in the year 1415. Morning. King Henry looks out over his ragtag army, and even he is not sure if he and his soldiers can pull this one off. The mighty bluster of the French army can be heard not far off. Many of Henry’s soldiers taste cold fear in their throats. Henry’s own cousin, and one of his commanders, Westmoreland, remarks, “O that we now had here But one ten thousand of those men in England That do no work today!” It’s a logical wish. A few more guys. Just to even the odds. And here is King Henry’s brilliance, the moment when he takes just that fear, just that quite plausible wish, and turns it around into the fiery meaning that will ultimately steel his troops and make them follow him gloriously and unflinchingly into battle against the kingdom of France. No, says Henry, no more men. We have enough. “If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honor.”
That’s the meaning that Henry has injected into his current action: he is not asking his troops merely to pick a fight with a much bigger enemy. No. He is offering all present the chance to become legends, to leave the day, dead or alive, sheathed in honor. “I am not covetous for gold,” Henry tells his assembled army, “But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.” No, he tells Westmoreland (and all else who may be similarly inclined), “wish not a man from England.” In fact, the inspiring young king goes on to say, if anyone wants to leave, despite the numerical odds, he’ll gladly let him go. In fact, he’ll pay for the trip, “crowns for convoy put into his purse”! Because what remains will be a feast of honor, all the more honor to go around for those who stay and fight.
The St. Crispin’s Day speech is justly celebrated and studied not just by actors and scholars, but by leaders in every field who want to create that spirit of bonhomie, the sense that “we’re all in this together.” But the speech does more than that. Shakespeare’s Henry V exhorts his men to look beyond the battle to the fellowship they will share in glory: “Then shall our names, . . . Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.” Why do they fight, and to what end? Henry repeats that “But we in it shall be remembered—We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; . . .” The noble king, in tying his fate to those of his men, reminds them all that in binding themselves to one another, they bind themselves to the glory of England, now and forever.
Few of us will have the need or opportunity to deliver a St. Crispin’s Day–type speech, but the good old-fashioned pep talk still has its place in the twenty-first century.
Laying out a vision and encouraging people to embrace it as their own is not confined to battlefields and packed auditoriums. Even a small office can benefit from a rousing speech by its leader. The content and delivery of such a speech will, of course, vary with the audience, but there are common elements to all effective motivational talks. Professors Jacqueline Mayfield and Milton Mayfield, who study “motivating language theory,” have identified three key traits of an effective motivational speech. Such a speech is “uncertainty reducing,” it is “empathic,” and it is “meaning making.” Each of these qualities, you’ll note, addresses issues of psychological safety and purpose, and all require appeals to both reason and emotion.
As the Mayfields observe, “A good pep talk—whether delivered to one person or many—should include all three elements, but the right mix will depend on the context and the audience.” Thus, uncertainty-reducing language, which includes direction, instructions, and performance standards, is the kind of nuts-and-bolts talk that you would emphasize if you’re managing college interns or people new to a role. That kind of audience needs practical information on how to accomplish the stated goals. Empathic language centers on concern for the employees—they need to feel you care about them. If you’re staring down a hard deadline, for example, and need your employees to devote extra time to meet it, acknowledging the toll of long hours can assure them that their concerns are not being taken for granted. Meaning-making language links an individual’s efforts to the larger organizational purpose—what Shakespeare’s King Henry V was so expert at delivering on St. Crispin’s Day. He didn’t need to tell his soldiers how to fight, but why they fight. Therefore, if you’re leading an experienced team into (metaphorical) battle, focus less on the practical and more on the purpose.
Motivating people is not just about delivering speeches, of course, but also about understanding what drives them. This is especially important in creating buy-in one by one. Do the individuals most desire status? Money? Creative control? Opportunities for personal and professional growth? Do they want to move up in the organization, or are they satisfied with their current position? Do they want to make an impact on the lives of others, or are they more concerned about their own happiness at work? Not all people have the same approach to their careers; your job as a manager is to figure out how to make those differences work for both you and them.
In considering those different approaches, psychologists Heidi Grant and E. Tory Higgins highlight the importance of motivational focus, or the primary driver of a person’s behavior and goals. They identify two distinct types of motivational drives: “promotion focused” and “prevention focused.” Those with a promotion focus “see their goals as creating a path to gain or advancement and concentrate on the rewards that will accrue when they achieve them. They are eager and they play to win.” They are more likely to take chances and swing for the bleachers. They’re fast workers and optimistic—which is great—but not always best at working through the details or coming up with alternative plans if their big idea doesn’t pan out.
Prevention-focused workers, on the other hand, “worry about what may go wrong if they don’t work hard enough or aren’t careful enough. They are vigilant and play not to lose, to hang onto what they have, to maintain the status quo.” These employees are meticulous and thus usually slower than their more high-flying colleagues and are less likely to dream up that big idea—but they are good at analyzing that big idea and figuring out how to make things work.
Few people are purely promotion or prevention focused, but most of us do lean one way or the other. For managers, knowing just which buttons to push to help others move toward shared goals can make a difference in how willing they are to do so.
Motivating people to adopt a shared goal or greater purpose is, in short, a tricky business. You can move a thousand people to cheers or tears with a great speech, but in order for it to take hold, there must be follow-through. For Henry V, the follow-through was the actual Battle of Agincourt; in the corporate world, follow-through means continuously working with teams and individuals and understanding how to motivate them to connect to a larger purpose.
Mind the Cultural Differences
The success of any effort to create buy-in depends in no small measure on the corporate culture and the drives of the people who work there. It also hinges on local culture and, specifically, on varying interpretations of authority and decision making. What works in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, for instance, may not work in China, Mexico, and Brazil.
INSEAD Professor Erin Meyer, who has worked with companies around the world, states that ignorance about a culture’s approach to authority and decision making can easily damage international business relationships, presenting unique challenges to managers in charge of a globally dispersed workforce. Americans, for example, prefer an egalitarian approach to leadership, where employees at all levels are encouraged to contribute ideas and challenge one another’s conclusions. In contrast, workers in China, Mexico, and Brazil are generally accustomed to a hierarchical structure in which leaders provide specific directions, with little interest in the perspectives of the rank and file.
Managers who are new to a global role and unaware of these not-so-subtle differences run the risk of diminishing their executive presence, not to mention causing frustration on both sides. As an example, Meyer points to a Chinese-American joint venture in which the American managers saw the Chinese workers as unwilling to think creatively and provide input, while the Chinese viewed the Americans as lazy and arrogant for not preparing proper directions in advance of work assignments. Counterintuitive as it may be, in certain cultures, trying to get buy-in from employees by soliciting their input may backfire and hurt your reputation.
It isn’t just attitudes toward authority that differ. While you might expect that hierarchical cultures would also favor top-down decision making, Meyer notes that “on a worldwide scale, we find that hierarchies and decision-making methods are not always correlated.” In the egalitarian United States, for example, decisions are made at the top but may be altered or adjusted as new information comes in. By contrast, in hierarchical Japan, decision making is consensual rather than top-down, meaning that the group comes to an agreement on an issue first, before a proposal is passed on for the same process to a more senior level. And while it may take time to reach that shared decision in a consensus-driven culture, once a decision has been made, it is virtually impossible to influence it afterward. The same applies to other consensual decision-making cultures that are hierarchical in terms of leadership, such as those of Germany and Belgium. In these cultures, a U.S. leader who is used to calling the shots may be in contravention of the norms of a workforce that very much expects to be an integral part of the decision-making process, and thereby may lose the respect of the workers.
These intercultural land mines are relatively easy to sidestep, provided one does a bit of preliminary research. Is everyone looking to the boss to make a final decision, or is the consensus of the team the deciding factor? The same sensitivity is required around attitudes toward leadership. In the hierarchical cultures of Germany and Japan, an employee would rarely question the boss’s conclusions in a meeting, whereas in the egalitarian cultures of the United States and Australia, “speaking truth to power” is considered an important trait of executive presence.
For example, a U.S.-based automotive manufacturer I’ve worked with asked me to help develop the executive presence of one of its divisions’ VP of engineering, who was Chinese. Specifically, his boss said, “I want him to challenge me more in meetings. I need his perspective on things.” The American manager had sought to engage in productive debates with his Chinese direct report because he valued his intelligence and expertise. But for the Chinese VP, who’d just recently been transferred from one of the company’s factories in Beijing, this was a cultural barrier he had a hard time crossing. “In China you don’t challenge your boss in meetings,” he protested when I shared the boss’s feedback with him.
To help the Chinese VP adjust his communication style, we practiced several ways he could tactfully challenge his boss’s assumptions to make for more productive dialogue and brainstorming. Not only did the Chinese executive learn this new behavior, but as a corollary he also learned how to engage with his subordinates in the United States, speaking with individual stakeholders to get their input and seeking their buy-in before making any major decisions.
A concluding caveat: Although global cultural differences can be sizable and can sharply affect what approaches are the wisest in seeking to motivate people and secure their buy-in, it is also true that it generally works in our favor when employees feel their input is valued and the organization has a firm foundation of mutual trust.
Buy-in and Executive Presence
There are all kinds of articles available in all kinds of media on how to create buy-in. Some focus on getting others to go along with organizational change, or to choose a specific product, or to embrace a new idea, and they all emphasize, to a greater or lesser degree, how to sell that change, product, or idea. It’s all about the pitch and the sale and the transaction—and these articles are not wrong to focus on how to get others to buy what you’re selling.
What they don’t say much about, however, is how to create buy-in in you.
This isn’t an either-or proposition. One of the best ways to get others to believe in you and be willing to put themselves out there for you is to prove you can deliver results. But demonstrating that you’re competent at your job is only one side of the buy-in coin; the other side is forging relationships with others so they trust you to lead them through whatever comes next. By engineering buy-in rather than banging people over the head with your ideas and expecting them to jump on board, you show a level of judgment, maturity, and confidence that one would expect from a leader.
In Chapter 6 we’ll explore the power of strategic storytelling to help you establish your presence and to influence others at a deeper level as you move them toward your shared vision and objectives.