Does your organization struggle with buy-in? Does it feel like you’re always pulling
people along and constantly pouring energy into getting the fly wheel to turn? Do you
sometimes wonder if you’re the only one who “gets it” or cares that the quarterly goals
are achieved and the organization succeeds? These are questions that many leaders
and CEO’s wrestle with.
A lack of buy in or ownership within an organization might not be a result of employees
not caring. It could be the result of a lack of clarity and collaboration.
I had a great conversation this week with a client who is turning the dial on health in his
organization and the results are incredible! We held a two-day offsite for this client in
February with the focus on creating clarity about why they exist, how they behave, how
they will succeed and one goal that was the most important for this season to tackle.
We also showed them how to eliminate politics and silos (more about silos in another
post) through simple models that when repeated time over time create healthy rhythms
and behaviors centered on vulnerability-based trust and healthy conflict that led to
greater productivity and ROI.
Catching up with the CEO this week, he told me how they have changed the way they
hire, onboard and train new employees based on their newly established clarity and
what a difference it made in just two months. But that wasn’t the biggest shift they’ve
experienced. In March they discovered their quality and output was declining in ways
that would affect their goals, credibility and profit. Instead of talking at the employees
responsible for the quality of their product, they decided to have them be part of the
solution by inviting them to a meeting to ideate ways to improve.
This team rallied around the problem, came up with solutions and by the end of April
they had driven their quality and output up substantially. In fact, the results of including
the implementation team to collaborate around the problem culminated with 10X more
buy-in and ownership from the team, than if the leader had simply demanded
compliance for higher quality systems, reprimanded or even put employees on PIPs.
They were part of the creating a solution and that single one decision to include them in
the conversation, led to greater buy-in and even ownership.
Are you giving functional teams the opportunity to be part of collaborative problem
solving, especially regarding the topics they must execute on and own at the
implementation phase of work? Or has the organization accidently created a culture of
compliance rather than collaboration? This requires courage, willingness, humility, and
above all trust. And the results will blow you away!