Work with Me

How to Get People to Buy into Your Ideas

Simon Dowling

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780730330073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Lead from any level with the power of buy-in

Work with Me shows you how to master the art of the 'buy-in.' You achieve better results when people go along with your ideas because they want to, not because they have to; the key is knowing how to build that kind of commitment This is the art of buy-in, and it's one of the most powerful skills you can have. When people are fully on board, they bring their full selves to the project. This drives their priorities, their performance, their innovation and ultimately, your outcome. Buy-in sits at the heart of creative and collaborative cultures; it drives highly adaptive and nimble teams. This book is a how-to guide for achieving buy-in, regardless of your leadership level. It's not about using power and authority, it's about building support and commitment to your ideas and initiatives. You can lead from any level, even laterally, and have a positive impact on the way things are done in your organisation. This book is your coach for speaking up, standing out and embracing the changes that fuel engaged workplaces and better business.

• Build engagement, agreement, commitment and ownership
• Overcome obstacles and drive stellar performance
• Deliver optimal outcomes through enthusiastic collaboration
• Boost creativity, passion, energy and focus

In the shift from traditional industrial economies to a value-focused economy of ideas, organisations thrive on great ideas, but those ideas don't count unless they're actually implemented. Work with Me shows you how to get people on board so you can bring great ideas to life.

PART I
Get Ready

The path to buy-in begins well before you sit down at the proverbial table and pitch your idea. First, there's important work to be done: both on yourself, and on understanding the bigger picture. Before we can ‘Go!’, we need to ‘Get Ready’.

Abraham Lincoln once famously stated, ‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.’

Let's get sharpening …

CHAPTER 1
SHIFT
Choose the power of buy-in

Let's be the first to send a man to the moon.

Let's make cameras digital.

Let's set up a network of private drivers who'll take people wherever they want to go.

We need $250 000 and four new staff to upgrade our customer database system.

We should trial driverless cars.

I need management to support a 5 per cent pay rise for my team next year.

Darling, I'd really like to have another child.

Let's make another Police Academy movie!

Every one of these ideas needed the instigator to bring other people willingly and enthusiastically on board to breathe life into it. Each required some careful persuasion, a lot of negotiation and probably some persistent nagging, but the outcome couldn't be a reluctant ‘All right, do what you want’. To be successful, the outcome had to be ‘I'm with you on this … Let's do it … Sign me up’. Head and heart had to be on board and action had to follow closely behind.

In your own organisation, you probably hear comments like these every day:

• ‘I know what it will take to improve team performance.’
• ‘I know how to improve our product so we'll get fewer customer complaints.’
• ‘We know what our new strategic direction needs to look like.’
• ‘I know how marketing can better support us in the field.’
• ‘I know what we need to do to stop losing market share.’
• ‘We know why morale is low and what to do about it.’
• ‘I know how to make sure everyone puts their cup in the dishwasher.’

Yet how many of these ‘I know’ statements make it from idea to implementation? Too often they are accompanied by an exasperated ‘If only I could get others to think or feel the same way’.

A great idea will stay just that — an idea — unless you can get others to work with you to turn it into a reality.

This is especially true in the context of the modern organisation, where your idea is competing for attention with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others.

Politicians need us to buy into their policies and vision in the same way that senior executives need their shareholders to buy into the vision of their organisation. Managers need the buy-in of their teams, while team members need the buy-in of people across the business to implement new ideas and projects. The implications of getting this wrong are too great to ignore.

The cost of getting it wrong

In his book Leading Change, renowned thought leader John Kotter reports that 70 per cent of change initiatives fail. That's a lot of wasted money, time, energy and resources — not to mention the sheer frustration! One reason for this type of failure is a lack of buy-in from the people needed to bring that change to life.

In 2005 Australian airline Qantas learned this the hard way when its leadership team announced it was introducing a new parts management system called Jetsmart. Things did not go smoothly for the senior leaders, who were heavily criticised for failing to engage with engineers, operational staff and unions. As a result, Jetsmart (nicknamed ‘Dumbjet’ by Qantas engineers) became mired in endless disputes and problems, all of which took place in the public spotlight. Three years and $40 million later, Qantas announced that it would retire Jetsmart and start over.¹

The costs associated with a lack of buy-in from the relevant stakeholders and parties can be catastrophic.

Here are some more examples to get you thinking:

• In 2014, the product development team in a company I was working with had created a very nifty piece of software designed to help its customers manage their account with the company. The software promised to make customers' lives easier and to help retain customers. Yet the only way to get customers to use the software was for the sales team to introduce them to it. Despite promises to the contrary, the folks in sales simply weren't signing customers up for the tool. The software sat on a shelf gathering dust, while tensions between product developers and the sales team quickly escalated.
• Craig, a software engineer, wanted to shift his team to a new product management methodology. Against the backdrop of a fast-changing industry, Craig saw it as critical that project teams worked at a much faster pace, trying new things and finding ways to experiment with new approaches. Craig had experienced the benefits of the change first-hand in his previous job, and thought it was a no-brainer. But several months later, Craig found his efforts stalling in the face of a lack of buy-in from his leadership team and also from many long-standing staff, who couldn't see how the change would be good for them. Craig's frustration led him to leave the company less than twelve months after starting there.
• A professional services firm, another of my clients, once announced a series of workshops for its staff designed to equip people with the skills to improve their productivity. The only problem was, no one enrolled. After some investigation, initially aimed at finding more suitable dates, it became clear that the people who had purchased the workshops hadn't done enough to get buy-in from the different parts of the business. In fact, it turned out that the announcement to run the program had been taken as an insult by many of the managers, who felt they were being told they weren't productive enough!

Do these scenarios sound familiar? Have you experienced something similar in your own organisation?

In each of the above examples, what started out as an idea, ripe with potential, ended up becoming a problem that failed to achieve buy-in. And the cost? Large amounts of money being spent trying to bring projects to life that were doomed to failure — or to rescue them from the clutches of defeat. Add to that the lost value of the failed opportunity, and you already have a pretty hefty price tag.

The costs continue to add up, including the strain on people's time, energy and relationships, as they battle into various stages of resistance. This dampens everyone's morale ...