Flock
Getting Leaders To Follow
by Robin Camarote
Copyright
Kindle Publishing Package
Copyright © Robin Camarote, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.
ISBN: 978-1-942646-25-9
DISCLAIMER
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or transmitted by email without permission in writing from the author.
Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional.
Any resemblance, within this book, to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental apart from my own stories that are true to the author.
Cover Design: John Matthews
Editing: Cynthia Kane
Author’s photo courtesy of Tim Coburn Photography.
Dedication
To my three kiddos, who make me want to do my best every day.
Advance Praise
“For anyone who has felt the pain of a great idea dying on the vine, Flock delivers a proven approach for getting leaders to buy-in, bite down, and stand behind meaningful change.”
Andrew H. LaVanway,
Strategic Communications Executive
and author of Rock Your First Job: A Manual For Winning At Work
“Getting leadership in your corner is a career game changer–giving you the support needed to make a meaningful impact at work. Flock: Getting Leaders to Follow offers concrete tips and comprehensive guidance for managing up so that your goals and ideas can thrive.”
Kara Styles,
Producer and Writer, msnbc
“As the director of a graduate program, I urge burgeoning professionals to take advantage of the book’s insights. Camarote provides guidance that goes well beyond the cliché to ‘seize the initiative.’ Flock has a knack for diagnosing why even some good ideas have trouble getting implemented and, perhaps more important, she articulates how we instinctively (and often counterproductively) react to these setbacks. In doing so, the book helps you acknowledge these disappointing moments so you can persist and move your best ideas forward.”
Michael Schroeder, Ph.D.
Professorial Lecturer & Director,
Global Governance,
Politics & Security Program at the School of International Service at American University
“With a genuine and straightforward approach, Robin Camarote gives readers the insider's perspective on how to take their best ideas to fruition by getting an organization's leaders on board. Flock: Getting Leaders to Follow breaks down the process in relatable step-by-step fashion, with Camarote's authority on the subject shining through the practical real-world approach.”
Naomi Millán,
Senior Editor,
Building Operating Management
“Time is money in our fast-paced innovation economy, so when you have an idea, it's critical to get leadership buy-in swiftly and effectively. Flock: Getting Leaders to Follow offers practical, emotionally intelligent steps to get the support and encouragement you need to have the positive impact you want at work.”
Raman Chadha,
Founder & Partner at The Junto Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1: Yes, You Can And Should
Why Solve Problems We’re Not Asked To?
Ok, Then Why Not “Just Do It?”
Myths About The Leader/Follower Dynamic
Going Beyond Approval To Building Buy-In
Chapter 2: Sort, Shape, Validate
Step 1: Understanding The Sideboards
Step 2: Shedding Any Self-Imposed Constraints
Step 3: What Can You Do Within Your Current Power?
Chapter 5: Use Good, Better, Best Practices
Add Organizational Details Into Generic Communication Processes
Forget Fluffy Mission And Vision Exercises
Count Me In, Using Metrics To Your Advantage
Shut Down Personal Productivity Worries
Take A Current Project One Step Further
Leadership Styles, Imagined Panel Discussion
Proceeds From The Book Go To A Is For Africa
Other Books by Difference Press
Preface
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:
- A quality idea
- 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.
Foreword
I am writing this forward to Robin’s delightful piece, Flock, because she, yet again, has “managed up” exquisitely, getting me to support one of her creative ideas. I had the privilege of collaborating with Robin for a choice period in my career. I emphasize the word collaborate, because although I was her boss’s boss’s boss, she was masterful in influencing many of my priorities. She got me to follow all the time. I am pleased to do so as our interests align again.
Several recent events have caused me to reflect a lot on the essential issue that Robin discusses in this book, namely creating the right dynamic for interacting with leadership so that one garners support for one’s professional aspirations. I recently started a new job as the Executive Vice President of a consulting firm. As I was interviewing for the position, the CEO remarked that he had talked with a dozen references who praised my leadership, my connection with staff, my business judgment and the results I had achieved. But he was also surprised to learn that I had conflicts with every CEO for whom I had worked. I ensured him that provided he wasn’t unethical or unfair, we would be fine (an attempt at humor), but truth be told, it gave me cause for reflection on my effectiveness in getting leaders to follow.
Very recently, I did a career night at a large environmental professional association. I was asked, among other questions, if I could do my career over, were there things I might do differently. I smiled and said, “Perhaps I could have spoken truth to power a little less frequently.” In my case, I use to operate with an innate sense that the work environment was a jungle and it was a matter of survival of the fittest. As is turns out, dominance and superiority often hinder support and collaboration. I am cured…..maybe.
Robin lays out a simple and compelling recipe for earning the support we all need to pursue our strategic ventures within institutions. She encourages stepping forward, with a thoughtfulness and intensity that will enhance the likelihood of success. Her approach invites an egolessness that invites inclusion and unity of purpose. Her advice about understanding the priorities and concerns of one’s leaders is so practical and effective.
I have watched Robin in action, applying these best practices. She was masterful and her ideas really work. It was fun to be her leader and her follower….reciprocity is the logical outcome. Enjoy.
Peter Trick
Introduction
I was out on a run–just the short loop around our neighborhood. A mile or so in, I had this sudden urge to run home as fast as I could. There was something immediate that I needed to do–I just didn’t know what. It wasn’t the kids. They were fine. My husband dropped them off early at daycare. I wasn’t missing a meeting. I’d already checked my calendar and it was before the 10am witching hour, when client fire drills tended to pop up.
After mentally ticking through my “to do” list, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I finished the run–still feeling uneasy–and moved into the motions that started my typical day. I glanced at my email, showered, looked for texts, got dressed, “liked” some stuff on Facebook while putting on my makeup, checked some more email, packed my lunch, and then finally headed out to the office. I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that there was something undone. As the day progressed, the issue driving this mini-spurt of anxiety started to take shape.
Work over the previous couple of months had been going well. Well, well-ish. Our business was fine for the moment, but we could see budgets decreasing and competition increasing on the horizon. We’d been talking for a while about wanting to cross-sell consulting services into some new markets. Now we kind of had to come to an agreement quickly with account leadership. At the same time, my current client was facing mutinous conditions within his program. He either had to get the division heads on board quickly, or make a dramatic (undesirable) step backwards.
As the discussion on both of these fronts bubbled in staff meetings and status meetings over the course of a couple of weeks, there was a sense of shared ownership of these problems across the team. They weren’t just my issue, my boss’s issue, or the client’s issue. They were ours. And there was an unannounced but open door to step through with ideas.
While there was no silver bullet, my colleagues and I huddled and came up with a couple of ideas and practical solutions. As a team, we pitched the ideas to our leadership, then waited. The uncertainty I felt that morning was the sense of not knowing what would happen. The next steps were out of our hands. And that made me uncomfortable, because the path forward was going to impact my career.
And, this is your career. Whether you have your dream job or “just a job,” you owe it to you to bring your best ideas forward. If you’re doing work today in exchange for money, it all counts. Waiting until something better comes along is a lost opportunity, regardless of whether or not 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 don’t want to try) to get your boss’s buy-in is, ultimately, an excuse and delaying your important contributions.
Because we can’t be the sole developers and implementers, 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 are stuffed down further, put off, or cancelled.
It is curious to me that we don’t typically treat the process of building leadership buy-in as something that warrants a defined process. Why not? My guess is that we have traditionally viewed buy-in as something highly specific to the leader and the relationship we have with them. In other words, this 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.
In the past, we thought of our ability to get our boss to follow us was dependent on indefinable, intangible variables. Factors such as how much they like us personally, how much we have in common, how open minded they are as people, what great sales people we might be, how threatening we can become.
* * *
Point of View
Followership is the flipside of the leadership coin. It is infrequently talked about, but equally important.
We all play leadership and followership roles in our lives, and effectively toggle between the two–often in between meetings. We need more visible, vocal efforts to help grow, honor, and celebrate smart, informed followership skills.
To start, we can talk about following as an intentional activity–one that is done after accepting the job, embracing the challenge and choosing to align our beliefs with the greater good.
Encouraging leaders to follow strengthens all.
* * *
In my experience and after talking with dozens of colleagues, clients, and leaders on this topic, I have found that we have much more in common 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 and engaged in finding fresh ideas and new solutions.
To effectively build buy-in and get our leaders to follow, we have to start with the solution. This might feel a bit backwards at first, because nearly every other process we’re familiar with–technology innovation, program development, or conceptual design–all start with understanding the problem and end with the solution. This process picks up precisely where those others leave off.
Many of us work under a broad assumption that if the idea is good enough, it’ll sell itself. Any plans we do make to build buy-in 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 support.
To ensure ideas are on a better track to success from the beginning, I developed this straightforward framework that includes a logical, step-by-step process to build buy-in from the initial idea through implementation.
The actions needed to get your leadership to follow land in three distinct phases including:
- Shaping the solution
- Making your case
- Following through with best practices, flexibility, and persistence
Figure 1: Phased approach and steps to getting your leaders to follow
Running concurrently with three phases is a continuous internal and external dialog that supports the initial idea, progress, and evolution. In the early phases, the dialog is largely internal. Your idea is taking shape in your mind, and being sorted and validated against the challenges you seek to solve. These steps are internally focused on helping ensure that you are clear in your purpose and vision prior to approaching your leadership. The next phase is making your case, which includes the external dialog between you (and your team, if applicable) and your leadership. The final phase includes the necessary follow-through activities and best practices that will carry you through approval and lasting support for your initiative.
In the coming chapters, we explore the real, practical challenges many of us face when moving our ideas forward. After all, all organizations impose constraints on the resources employees can use to pursue their ideas and solutions. Even the most flat, amicable, supportive companies and agencies have limits. Without them, they’d all be out of time, out of compliance, and out of business.
We’ll also explore the less tangible, infrequently talked about processes needed to build buy-in. We will take the discussion beyond getting your bosses’ approval to building lasting support, engagement, and willingness to follow you and be part of the solution.
Because I believe that getting leadership buy-in is a common challenge, is critically important, and we generally lack the processes and insight to pursue that buy-in methodically, I wrote down these steps. In the coming chapters, we’ll cover the path a solution takes from the moment the idea pops, to establishing the right mindset, then finally building leadership buy-in through a step-by-step process.
Phase 1: The Idea
Tap, tap, tap! An idea is forming. You can’t yet see the whole shape or how it fits, but first there is one, then a couple more, then a couple more. Ideas come to me during long car rides, long runs, and long meetings (not that that is a good reason to have long meetings). There is probably some psychological science behind it. My guess is that these are just times when distractions fall away, and I can think.
Once that solution clicks into place in our minds, everything takes on a new sense of urgency and importance. To have impact and see a spark of an idea catch on, two essential conditions must exist:
- The idea itself.
- Support from our leadership.
Sometimes, our biggest obstacles are right in front of us. They’re our leadership–a boss or a board–put in charge of managing and motivating us in a way that best suits the organization.
A match is no use without a strike strip. (A term I just learned. Makes sense.) In Phase 1, we discuss dual role of staffer and solver.
Chapter 1: Yes, You Can And Should
Chapter Purpose: Discuss why we work outside of the defined lines of roles and responsibilities to solve big problems.
When the idea first came to me to move our team downtown from our suburban office space, I was on my honeymoon in New Zealand. With all of the wedding “to dos” done, ideas on everything from future family to future work to future outfits were popping like crazy. I remember sitting out in the backyard at a bed and breakfast on a hill, and knowing that a move was what I wanted to do.
As a team, we’d just been through a rough period. It was part self-inflicted and part situational. I was a new manager and my skills in delegation, feedback, and providing a sense of direction and support were rough, to say the least. Meanwhile, our client was facing their own internal challenges, and fighting daily to get the much-needed field support for their program. They invested a ton of money in collecting and analyzing data at our suggestion, and their program’s future was suspended in midair while the results were tallied.
Inexperience and client pressures hit at once. In my frustration and intense desire to please my boss and client, I’d hurt some feelings and damaged the team’s morale. Some people left as a result, but some stayed. A core group of a dozen or so analysts, writers, big thinkers, and weed dwellers were left–and they were exactly the right group we needed to make a fresh start to change our relationship with our business and with each other.
Approaching my boss with the idea to move wasn’t easy. While I had a strong, professional relationship with him, this proposal was going to come at a time when he could legitimately question my judgment and leadership ability. I needed him to trust me and give us the benefit of the doubt. I believed that a move would help us rebuild a more cohesive team and bring us physically closer to our main client–demonstrating our commitment.
The need and opportunity was special, and I wanted to nail the request the first time. So I did some research, talked to some people, pulled some numbers together, sketched out a timeline, documented benefits and risks, and then brought a pretty well-thought-out package for his consideration. In the end, he said yes. We moved, and magic happened. The change of scenery was precisely what our team needed to launch the next positive growth phase in our business.
The space between the first pop of an idea and a “yes, let’s do it” is what this book is all about.
I had lunch with my friend Charlie the other day. He was telling me about his new(ish) job as I eyed up his fries. He told me about some upcoming meetings he was planning, dropped a few acronyms I couldn’t guess from context, then started to talk about the boss that came with the office (like the gift received with a purchase that you want to like, because it’s free, but just don’t). His story stuck with me because I felt that it had been my own story so many times. It went something like this…
He took a new job a couple of months ago for all of the right reasons. Approaching 40, he was looking for the next big challenge in his career. This job came with a kick-ass title and a great platform, from which he could reach people across his industry and the government. As we were talking, he shared some of his ideas on how to reposition his organization as a forward thinking, progressive thought-leader. It all sounded awesome, so I asked what the issue was.
It turns out that the problem was his leadership. His direct boss was a nice guy, but not someone really engaged day-to-day in Charlie’s work. In fact, the two of them could go a week or more without having any real substantive discussion on what the other was working on. When they did connect, the circumstances were during high-pressure periods when the entire organization was going through budgeting and strategic planning exercises. So the timing was all off. While Charlie was popping new ideas, he was hitting a pretty firm wall of resistance that came in the form of, “I’ll have to think about it,” or, “I don’t think our stakeholders are prepared for that,” and, “not right now, maybe next year.”
Charlie went on to say, “I just get the sense that he’s not all that into new ideas. Actually, I know he’s not, because he said as much. I don’t know if it’s an age thing, or the culture of this organization, or he thinks I’m full of shit–whatever it is, I’ve not been successful at getting his support. Unfortunately, I need his buy-in to move forward.”
The problem he has is so familiar. Charlie is looking to (and needing to, actually) offer new solutions. He is at a point in his career that he wants to build towards signature, high-impact accomplishments. He’s seeing real and immediate opportunities to make a difference in their program, as well as, a much broader community. It’s clear that their organization isn’t going to get there with the status quo. So, with tension building and time running out on the current planning cycle, Charlie was looking for some ideas on how he might bring his boss along, get him to consider a different way of doing things, and to support a much more ambitious, aggressive program.
Why Solve Problems We’re Not Asked To?
Counter to the common saying that “people hate change”, the desire for change is fundamental to who we are. We just want to control that change. Simple enough, right?
We can’t help but observe our surroundings and think of all of the ways our processes, relationships, and environments could be better. To that end, we are all gifted with big ideas–and a bunch of small and crappy ones, too–but more on that later.
Further, we crave impact and not in a static, predictable kind of way. And there is more. We crave being part of a team and being connected to others. This isn’t an introvert vs. extrovert thing, but a recognition that we all need and want to feel part of something greater than ourselves.
We want to leave our mark by making changes–even slight ones–to our world. Because we’re paid to do so, this energy is most often channeled through our work. As a result, an immediate, dynamic tension is created. As we arrive at the office, or log in in our jammies from home, we become a force driven to make change. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I’m thinking when slogging through hundreds of emails each day.
And on that point, what if you’re already feeling overworked and overwhelmed? Doesn’t pitching new ideas just make matters worse? That would make sense, but, in fact, the opposite is true. According to bestselling author David Allen, in his book Ready for Anything, “The main reason you’ll feel much better when you implement the methods of collecting, processing, organization, and intuitively managing the total inventory of your work is not that it creates less to do. It’s because it automatically puts you back in the driver’s seat, at the center of your universe. You become a cause instead of effect. Overwhelm and overcommittment, though they seem to create so much stress these days, are not the real culprits. Many times, you’ll actually thrive in those situations in which you’re working ‘against all odds.’ The angst arises when you let loose the reins and stop directing your own energy.”
All of our organizational constructs–the org chart hierarchies, networks, trainings, meetings–were all created to tamp out, fan, guide, or otherwise control all of that energy. Taking some of that control back can be accomplished through the thoughtful pitch of an idea.
Ok, Then Why Not “Just Do It?”
This entire process of approaching leadership can be exhausting. The sheer thought of what it might take to prepare “the ask” and submit it is just too much for some people in boss/employee relationships. This is unfortunate, and ends up being rectified by either having a serious sit down or one person leaving.
Most of us, though, have pretty productive relationships with our leadership. The issue with approaching them then, is not that they’re impossible to convince, but that they’re human. They’re subject to the highs and lows, pressures and whims, and hang-ups and pet peeves that we all endure. On top of that, they’re navigating their own careers and may have information that we don’t on issues facing other divisions within the organization. All of these layers impact the way they evaluate any idea brought to their door.
Going back to the lunch with my friend Charlie, the reason it was so important to him to get his boss on board is that Charlie can’t realize his own dreams and aspirations without his leadership’s support.
“I feel an obligation and a desire really to use this time to do something important. Right now, he’s holding me back from doing that just because he doesn’t really want to risk trying anything new or different. So, on a personal level, I’m worried that I’m not really going to live up to all these expectations–my own and other people’s. There are expectations from people we know–like in the industry. There are expectations that I do more than my predecessor, do more to drive activity in this discipline, do more to give them backing to run their programs and business. You know. There are expectations from my wife, like I should be hitting my stride now in my career, and doing something I think is important. Not that she cares too much for herself, but that she wants it for me. Expectations from my dad that I do something to give back. He was always big into the community.”
One View Of Leadership
There is an ocean of truth and perspective on leadership available everywhere you look. I won’t attempt to summarize. However, I did want to share my beliefs about leaders in this situation–when they’re on the receiving end of an idea–because they provide the foundation and context for the recommendation that follow. I believe these characteristics are both real and aspirational, and span the spectrum of leadership experience from newly appointed team lead to director, president, and CEO.
Leaders want the best for the organization.
Like everyone, leaders are human. Their perception, experience, circumstance, training, and ego all contribute to a unique blend of attitudes and behaviors that are subject to change, even daily.
Leaders work hard to gain the platform. Then, once there, they have a love-hate relationship with the visibility that comes with it.
Leaders, of course, worry about making the wrong choice. But what keeps them up at night is the thought of missing opportunities. A wrong choice might set the business back, but it can be rationalized and learned from. A missed opportunity can create long-lasting regret or the risk of looking unprepared (or even stupid). No one wants that.
Finally, I believe we are all leaders. Holding back until we’re empowered with a title is an unnecessary delay to sharing our greatness. Whenever the opportunity arises, we should all be encouraged to lead now from where we are.
Myths About The Leader/Follower Dynamic
In the course of observing and talking with colleagues about the leader/follower dynamic created when proposing new ideas, a number of people articulated precisely want I believed to be true for so long. I heard things such as:
- Leaders typically take a stand on a number of general issues then you have to navigate between those pillars–they’re inflexible.
- Leaders generally will say “yes” to anything they don’t think will create extra work for them. And, of course, the biggest one…
- Leadership’s receptiveness to a new idea is dependent on the personal relationship. So dependent and unique, in fact, that that process couldn’t possibly be written down or documented. Leaders accept and promote ideas from people they know and like and delay or turn down ideas from people they don’t.
* * *
The difference between approval and buy-in is the space between “Yes, you can. Let me know how it goes,” and, “Yes, we can. How can I help?” The approval is only a good start.
* * *
The belief that our leadership lends support to ideas largely based on our personal relationships is counterproductive. It emboldens people to push ideas when they feel their relationship is in good standing, and causes others to hold back when they’re unsure.
Fortunately, the real, underlying dynamic is not that simple. Leaders are beholden first to the organization, and second to the staff. When this short priority list gets out of order, they’re putting themselves at risk–something few are willing to do.
Taking the intangibles out of this equation is not only where we should be–it’s where we typically are whether we realize or not. What I believe is actually happening is a more thoughtful weighing of risks and benefits by decision-makers. It might be easy or tempting to cite a strong relationship as the reason you get from idea to “yes, let’s do it.” We tend to think, “My boss is receptive to my ideas because we’re on the same page. She respects my opinion and thinks I’ve been doing a good job. Her support is, in part, a reward for my strong performance.” It is as tempting to blame the relationship when you’re struggling to get an idea through. “She’s not supportive because she doesn’t like me, and is still mad about that client mistake I made two months ago,” is the flip side to that thinking.
Because we think success or failure is largely dependent on the state of the relationship, we often don’t approach our leadership with a tangible, logical process. This myth about the leader/follower dynamic sets us up to only be successful with the stars magically align.
Counter to this thinking, I believe that you can create the conditions needed to be successful in moving your ideas forward by overcoming this, “it’s out of my hands,” perspective and employing a more concrete, logical approach. You can follow a series of straightforward steps to increase your chances of success–regardless of the state of your connection with your boss.
Going Beyond Approval To Building Buy-In
In our polished and professional environments, we are smart. Everyone is smart. This isn’t an issue of out-thinking someone senior to you. But the core question is one of how to convince another smart, committed person (and sometimes quickly) that they should get on board to support the proposed efforts to reposition, rebrand, amp up, shut down–or whatever it is. We all owe it to teams, organizations, families and ourselves to utilize the platforms we’re entrusted with to their fullest.
Searching for answers online, by Google-ing phrases like “senior executive buy-in,” “persuasive writing,” “internal communications,” “positive politics,” and even old business classics like “making friends and influencing people,” I found that all these concepts have pieces of the answer, but not the entire picture. We all need to bring our leaders along in order for great ideas to take off and fly. Unfortunately, this point right in front of us can be daunting and even ground our ideas before they have a chance.
Approval means that someone gives you the green light to move forward, to expend the resources, to use up the time, or otherwise engage others in your approach. Approval does not necessarily always come with support for that approach, or whatever the outcome is. I’ve received approval plenty of times, and not realized at the time that’s all I was getting. I got the yes but it was a squishy, sort of, “I’ll wait and see,” kind of yes. For better or worse, my leadership viewed the issue and my proposed solution as not important enough, or a low risk for fallout, so they simply didn’t fight me on it. My initial delight at the approval led to a quick and steep disappointment when I was ready to move on to the next step. I thought I was on a path to betterment, and it turned out that my leadership didn’t even agree that we had an issue to begin with. They were humoring me!
* * *
Point of View
I want to draw a conceptual dividing line between gaining management approval and getting leaders to follow. Approval means that someone gives you the green light to move forward, to expend the resources, to use up the time, or otherwise engage others in your approach.
While some of these techniques should help shape a request for approval, the focus of this book is getting leadership to follow, fully support your point of view, and actually become part of the solution.
* * *
While some of these techniques should help shape a request for approval, the focus of this book is getting your leadership to follow and support your point of view.
My goal over the next several chapters is to step though the mindset shift and strategies needed to get your idea off the ground and move quickly from the pop to, “Yes, I’m with you.” With your leadership onboard with enthusiastic support, you have a great foundation to do high-impact, amazing, and important work.
Chapter 2: Sort, Shape, Validate
Chapter Purpose: Know how to quickly sort, shape, and validate your solution.
So, you’ve had a breakthrough. An idea, an approach, a solution is forming. Maybe there is even a smallish cult forming behind you, nodding their heads in unison. It is time to move forward.
In my experience, the challenge isn’t coming up with ideas. We have dozens every day, and even when nothing is snapping, a quick internet search always results in something worth considering. So, hatching the idea isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s figuring out precisely what problem we’re solving, what the impact might be, who will need to be consulted, and whether or not it’s even worth saying it out loud to begin with.
I had the incredible opportunity to work with a nonprofit client on an internal program review. Sounds exciting, right? No, it was. Really! As a management consultant, I’d done oodles of these effectiveness studies as an outsider, but had never worked side-by-side with an independent team doing it to their own kind. The basic process was the same: establish the scope of the problem, gather information, document the findings, develop recommendations, and write a report. The well laid-out steps were straightforward but, of course, not easy.
The team was handpicked by the center’s director to root out the cause of tremendous angst and frustration within her organization around IT policies and services. Staff members in customer-facing offices across the country were frozen in place, unable to do their work, because basic access and security needs were going unmet. The all-star team selected to conduct the study was told there was no pre-determined outcome, and to be fearless in discovery and bold in recommendations. Then, they were largely left alone for six months to complete their work. Only a handful of times would the director or her deputy pull the curtain back and ask, “Is it ready yet?”
One by one, each member of the review team saw that there was only one viable path to computing salvation. You’re at the edge of your seat, I know. The answer? Greater streamlining and consolidation was needed. They knew this recommendation ran counter to their culture, but felt the initial support given by the director made it all okay. Once the details were documented, all of the right pre-briefs, sneak peeks, and preliminary reviews were conducted to ensure that the most influential members of the center’s leadership community felt included.
There was overwhelming support for the review team, and appreciation for the work completed, but as anticipated, they encountered a vocal and influential minority who very much wanted the problem fixed–but not in the way that was proposed. The review team’s proposed solution crossed a big turf line that made it a non-starter for a handful of people. The resistors made the intellectual arguments, financial arguments, and, finally, personal appeals straight to the director to shut the whole thing down.
What happened next? Well, I’d love to say that the director stood her ground, defended the process, and gave the reporting and recommendations her full support. It didn’t quite play out that way. Instead, the director told the resistors that she saw their point of view. She then told the review team that to move forward with their proposed solution, they would need to better sort (or prioritize), shape (make some cultural concessions), then validate (bounce it off a couple folks) to more effectively bring the organization along. In other words, do some more convincing or back down. Either way, make the conflict go away–even if that meant scrapping the whole effort.
This kind of stuff happens all of the time, and there really is no bad guy in the story. Leaders empowered to make decisions do–and they’re often weighing a complex set of pressures and relationship dynamics. For all of the work they do honing their executive presence and decisiveness, they’re often as, if not more, conflict averse than all of us. They’re just people trying to navigate their own careers, and do what they think is best.
Understanding that these dynamics exist isn’t any consolation when you’re trying to have impact. Don’t they see the solution as originally hatched is an excellent path forward? Your leadership’s failure to see the problem from your perspective can (and likely will) result in disappointment, snarky kitchenette commentary, and, at least, one quick shuffle through the top desk drawer for that recruiter’s card. Yeah, yeah. You’ll calm down. Being turned down or redirected a handful of times can be rationalized as all part of the process. But hearing “no” over and over again causes you to question your fit (and their competence, or both).
Being turned down is deflating. Feeling like you’ve wasted your time is worse still. Meeting resistance–or even indecisiveness, at the exact moment when you’re convinced you need to move an idea forward is maddening.
In the face of leadership pushback or resistance, you have to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to bring your leadership along. And to do this, they first have to agree that you have a problem to begin with. Next, they have to agree that all or some significant portion of the solution you’re proposing might just work. We want to see their whole head (and heart, if we’re lucky) invested in the outcome. We want them to change at an emotional, molecular level and support us with every brain cell. Anything short of that isn’t a full buy-in. To do this, we need to effectively sort, shape, and validate our solutions. And on top of that, we need to do it quickly to maintain the energy and momentum we’ve created.
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Point Of View
In a study done by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman analyzing the behaviors of 51,836 leaders, only 27 were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability, and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness.
According to Zenger and Folkman, “The chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.”
I think one of the reasons people are disliked is that they fail to connect with others. They consistently miss (or dismiss) opportunities to sorting, shaping, and validating that they do every day. With the broader context in mind, these findings can be extended beyond the titled leaders Zenger and Folkman studied. When you care about your effectiveness (and your general contentment at work), continually seek connections with others.
* * *
To sort, shape, and validate, ask yourself (or your team) the following questions: What problem does this solution solve? Is it a total or partial solution? Ok, not really. Be precise. What is the specific problem you’re solving? How do you know this is a problem? Whenever possible, include the supporting the data, trend, or feedback that not only speaks to the existence of the problem but the magnitude, as well. Great, now write that down. This categorization or sorting effort is essential to gaining an early understanding of the issue.
Likely, your idea didn’t pop perfectly formed. To shape your idea, examine how known culture, attitudes, resources and spending sensitivities, and anything particularly polarizing should be considered. What about external conditions like 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.
Lastly, do you have a confidant or trusted advisor who you can safely bounce ideas off of? If not, get one right away. Ideally, this is someone who isn’t directly impacted by the proposed outcome, but has some understanding of the organization and purpose. They can be invaluable, and of course, these relationships grow when they’re reciprocal. Touch base with them to float the concept and get a reaction. Even if this person is outside of your group or lacks a full understanding of the issue, you’ll get feedback on what’s confusing, what doesn’t make sense, or what sounds totally awesome and potentially life changing.
Phase 2: The Ask
Once you’ve shaped your solution, the next step in getting your leadership to follow is establishing the right mindset and planning your approach. Chapter 3 includes the detailed actions needed to:
- Know your leadership
- Know the box
Both components help you frame your ask in a way that aligns with your leadership’s perspective and concerns, while acknowledging the known constraints. With a little forethought, you can assemble your thoughts, research, and proposed solution and increase the likelihood of a receptive audience.
Once the planning is complete, you create the ask. I’ve included a worksheet with the essential components that you can use and adapt to your needs. You’ll decide whether formal documentation and writing is appropriate, or if you just use the worksheet to organize your thoughts for a much more informal request. Either way, the elements are the same.
The key is empowering yourself to look at the problem and your solution, and then frame this information in a structured, well-prepared request. Referring back to our framework (shown below), the steepest hill you have to climb is this one–no doubt about it.
In the coming pages, you’ll learn how to effectively scale the hurdles that arise at the beginning, and make your greatest possible gains early in the process.
Figure 2: Phased approach, highlighting “the ask”
The very first thing is to know your leadership’s top concerns for themselves. Knowing these pressures and anxieties (to the extent you’re able to gain that insight) is critical. Before approaching them with anything you have to first view the problem from their perspective. Using the power of your personal observations, answer these questions for yourself:
What issues are they trying to solve?
What pressures are they under from their leadership?
How do they currently feel about their role, effectiveness, and position within the organization?
Do they appear to be in alignment with their leadership or are their important disconnects to be aware of?
Any context you can discern from conversations directly with them and your acute observation of what is going on around them will inform this process.
This is a critical step. While obvious, we tend to gloss over or skip it altogether in our enthusiasm to move our ideas forward. We either overestimate the amount that our leadership cares about a problem–because our problems are everyone’s problems, right? Or we fail to understand how the problem fits into the big picture. For example, it will likely be impossible to convince your leadership to buy-in to a solution that serves one line of business at the expense of another. No responsible leader would support this because their job is to take an enterprise view. Silo’d, niche solutions are an immediate red flag that someone is falling down on their job as a senior executive.
Taking a step back for a moment, an optional precursor to this phase might be examining what your own motives are in tackling this particular problem. Is it about positioning for a leadership role on the solution team, demonstrating that you have what it takes to lead at the next level; is it to garner more staff or financial resources, or any number of other possible benefits? Knowing the greater good for the organization, as well as, what you’re anticipating (or hoping for) personally is an important point of awareness. You likely won’t want to kick-off your request to leadership with “what’s in it for me” but you’ll need to be mindful of the perceived benefits to you–the asker– on both sides.
So assuming you’re only proposing things that you truly believe are for the good of the organization, you’ll want to frame your ask in that context. The benefits that might ultimately pay off for you or your team are important but not the headline at this point.
Instead, you’re going to focus on conveying the big, important message that brings the whole solution together, for everyone. You’ll need to discipline yourself to only speak of the problem and solution in close alignment with the broader organizational goals and leadership concerns. The kind of discipline needed is more than turning down left over cookies in the kitchen. Yes, no one is in there to see but sadly the sugar and calories still count. Staying on message and continuing to only focus on the identified problem and the universal benefits create the needed space for leadership to buy-in.
So, you’ve hit a point that you’re ready to ask. You have a ripe problem, a refined solution set, and a sense of purpose. Let’s figure out how to plan and package the solution into a thoughtful presentation.
Chapter 3: Plan Your Approach
Chapter Purpose: Develop a logically structured plan showing an understanding of your leadership and the organizational boundaries.
To be clear, this book is about winning the hearts of your leadership and gaining real, full support for your initiative. Anything short of that is risky and a huge potential waste of time and money. But winning someone’s heart isn’t easy, and the sheer force of our personalities certainly can’t do it, even strong relationships won’t move someone just because you ask them to.
I read an article recently about the challenges with and strategies for selling to the ultra-rich. It was funny, because I’d never really thought about it but have come to understand that there are certain industries and causes that are exclusively focused on marketing to super rich people. And it’s hard.
So, the issue they encounter is that many ultra-rich have the resources at their disposal and people know this. They’re constantly hit up to buy stuff, big stuff. At some point, they get so fed up with the constant being sold to, that they put up barriers to these messages that are even beyond what we see in people of more average or limited financial resources. The solution in the particular article I read was telling stories. I think this is true of all marketing, but it seems especially relevant when you’re trying to differentiate yourself in a really crowded field.
So knowing that they get asked to do more stuff, and support more stuff, and pay for more stuff all day long, a plan is needed to ensure your approach reflects their interests and concerns–just to be heard–and then logically structured around the purpose and function of the organizations. There are two essential components to planning your approach–knowing your boss and knowing the boundaries or the organizational “box.” The elements and actions needed within each are described below.
Know Your Boss
Know your leadership’s strengths, weaknesses and work style. Unfortunately, knowing your own is insufficient to getting through to your leadership. Most of us have taken the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory at some point, or maybe even done Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (highly recommended). Both are great and important reflective exercises. Whenever you’re afforded the opportunity to spend some time to build self-awareness (whether self or organizationally directed) then, by all means, take it. There are always new insights to gain, especially as you grow and expand your role within your organization. You’ll never regret learning more about your strengths and tendencies and how all of these nuances of personality type and preferences combine to impact your perspective and work style.
Within the time we invest in understanding ourselves, far less time is spent sharing those insights broadly across the team–both up and down the leadership chain.
Michelle McQuaid is a thought-leader, researcher, and number-cruncher on many topics including the benefits of building upon strengths at work (as opposed to overcoming weaknesses). A critical component of this dynamic is the shared understanding of strengths between the employee and their leadership. In her 2015 Strengths@Work Survey with the VIA Institute, Michelle found that employees with managers who could identify their strengths are 71% more likely to feel engaged and energized by their work.
In the same study, she found that 45% of employees are aware of the strengths of their coworkers or boss. This is a good start, from which organizations can and should grow. A broader understanding of everyone’s strengths at work creates the ability to more thoughtfully and productively staff projects and blend teams.
The awareness gap seems acutely problematic for the generation who most recently joined the workforce. In Deloitte’s 2015 Millennial Survey on effective leadership, only 28 % of the 7,800 respondents believed that their organization is making full use of their skills. Whether real or perceived, the disconnect points to an opportunity to build a greater understanding of strengths across our organizations.
The issue is that we’re most often treated to this information for ourselves and our subordinate staff. We don’t often have the conversation with our leadership about what their styles are. They might tell us, if we’re lucky, at some kind of facilitated team building event. Otherwise, there is rarely an opportunity created for leadership to share this kind of information.
What you’re even less likely to have are insights into any issues they are working on for themselves, with their supervisors. For example, I had no idea that one of my previous and most favorite bosses ever was being coached on how to give more constructive feedback and not come off like a scary, “my way or the highway” type. In retrospect, I could see those tendencies, but I suppose it was less noticeable to me because his style complemented my preferences for receiving direct guidance.
I recognize that getting more insight into what issues your boss or leadership is working on might be difficult, but it’s important to try and understand as much as you can about where they are professionally. And by try, I mean muster the most respectful, non-pushy self you can, giving them little heads-ups that you’re interested. The objective is not to gossip or judge behind the scenes, but to really gain a better understanding of the place in which they are working. Shockingly, even though they’re down the hall, their work environment and pressures are likely different than your own.
While you’re at it (building an understanding of your leader’s strengths and development areas), you need insights into where they tend to land on big, conceptual issues. For example, one spectrum might be process automation through use of technology. People can typically identify themselves between the two extreme ends, from manual is best to let’s turn the whole thing over to robots and go home.
Spectrums at work could also include status quo vs. innovation (as it relates to service delivery, for example), flat vs. hierarchical organizational viewpoints, conserve at all costs vs. invest enthusiastically. There are dozens of these attitude spectrums that you can examine your leadership against. Without realizing it, you’ll find you know the answers to 99% of them just based on how you’ve heard them respond in previous, unrelated circumstances.
Knowing where they land on technology innovation and willingness to spend money, for example, immediately starts to point to some key words and angles to promote during your pitch. Telling your story within this context and hitting at least 3 out of 4 of their “big things” puts you on much better footing than if you’re trying to get a tech gadget-y, innovator, obsessed with off-the-shelf products to buy in to a homegrown, paper-based solution to time reporting. It doesn’t mean that you have to change your actual solution, but you do need to know where you’re going to encounter the most resistance and what will be immediately attractive. These details are important to the sequencing and timing in your request and “how” you ask.
I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin, and read his advice with my coffee precisely at 6:03am when his daily post pops into my inbox. An entire book could be written on the application of Seth’s advice to any number of organizations. One that sticks out to me as relevant to this discussion on changing mindset is building an awareness of how the idea we’re proposing changes our target–our customer, client, leadership and so on.
In a blog post on what makes people feel stupid (not good for business I’ve learned), the fifth bullet reads, “Give your customers a product, idea or service that causes them to be ridiculed or shamed by people they hope to impress.” You can swap out customers for leaders in this sentence, and see the immediate need to ensure a thoughtful, planned approach to every idea you bring to your leadership. Anything that might result in ridicule or shame will be an immediate non-starter. There would be no way for a leader to be supportive because, of course, the very suggestion would put themselves at risk and in direct conflict with their bosses, board, or key clients. Reading this, it’s hard to imagine that you’d come up with anything that might fall into the “ridicule” category, but it happens and it’s a good check on yourself to avoid major disappointment.
Know The Box
Have you ever worked with people who are busy waiting for approval to do their jobs? Um, yes. That was me. Blame my birth-order (oldest girl) and deferential tendencies; I tend towards doing the expected thing to the best of my ability. Whenever I was hired or tasked with a job, I sought pretty clear direction on what needed to be done, and an even clearer flashing green light signaling “go.” I may be exaggerating slightly, but this is mostly true to how I feel.
The same is true for how we function within our organizations. The sideboards actually serve us well in clarifying expectations, then encouraging people to move and maneuver within those parameters. So to know the organizational “box,” consider the following.
The first step is understanding the sideboards, and engaging leadership in sketching them out. Once you know where the boundaries are, you will be ultra-clear about where your solution falls–inside or outside of those bounds. Understanding this up front is critical for building buy-in in the future.
The second step is shedding any self-imposed constraints. Now that you know what your leadership accepts and expects, you can more clearly differentiate between the organizationally imposed limitations and what you’ve been putting on yourself.
The third step is figuring out anything and everything you can do within your current power. Take your current agenda, and juxtapose the two and start planning out the actions you’re going to take to move this thing forward.
Step 1: Understanding The Sideboards
Overcoming this tendency is actually less about trying to deny it or cover it up, and more about gaining a clear understanding of what the expectations and sideboards are. Where do decision rights lie on hiring and firing? Can you be the final say, or do you need to consult with your boss and HR? Can you approve the investment required to buy new technology, or pursue a proposal? Can you commit the team’s time and organization’s money? Can you renegotiate with a client to influence what they’re expecting and what will be delivered? Can you talk directly to beneficiaries to influence their perspectives?
Having direct conversations on tough, historically ambiguous topics such as hiring/firing and financial investments can be incredibly enlightening. If your leadership is prepared to answer any of those questions and offers guidance easily and willingly, you are fortunate. As important as I believe this approach to be, it can be tough to get an enthusiastic response when pressing leadership to clarify some of these big items. Instead, it often turns into a grilling on why you’re asking and what exactly you have in mind–which might be nothing specific…yet.
In most cases in our current organizations, the sideboards aren’t defined in the employee manual (to the extent any of those relics exist these days) on purpose. Our leadership wants the flexibility to make the calls, and insert themselves in decisions when they need and want to. For this reason, the ambiguity works to their advantage. It’s counterintuitive, but in general, people underspend or underuse when they’re not sure of the limits. For example, employees with unlimited personal time off are out of the office less than organizations with a strict three weeks per year leave policy. So most of us work day-to-day without a ton of guidance on what we can do. So sadly, we don’t do as much as we could.
Putting firm sideboards on the type of decisions and approaches that employees have and can use actually encourages the creative process, and it’s not as stifling as it might seem. When we moved into our new old house in Falls Church, we wanted a project. The place was (and still is) a funky configuration of additions. With probably more than six families living there over its 60 years, layers of style preferences and functional needs were cobbled together in a pretty intriguing, but unappealing, combination when we first bought the house. Without previous remodeling experience, my husband and I started hacking away with our contractor–renovating and reconstructing. The agreement made upfront between the three of us was that the only thing off limits was moving walls. We agreed to leave the big stuff (plumbing, entries, heating, etc.) where it was, and work within the existing structure.
Prior to buying this house, I was never really into interior design. I mean, I liked visiting and drinking wine in other people’s beautifully decorated homes, but hadn’t spent a ton of time researching or reflecting on how they got that way. As our renovation project got underway, my life became consumed by design magazines, books and websites (and this was all before Houzz and Pinterest existed). Piece by piece, colors were chosen, appliances picked, and furniture purchased. In the end, I was really pleased with how well those choices turned out and came together.
The key, I think, was that early decision to work within the structure. The literal limits imposed by the walls helped narrow choices, and reduced any chance of getting too overwhelmed. The funky walls and room configuration actually helped spark my energy–not constrain it.
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Start What You Can, When You Can
Taking the initial steps within your control can lend power and credibility to your ask. Starting demonstrates a level of commitment that is tougher to dismiss. Imagine someone approached you with an idea for a new program. Prior to showing up in your office, they completed a trend analysis (within their job), floated the idea to a handful of established clients (within their job), and estimated the costs needed (within their job). What they couldn’t realistically do is run the idea by the legal council, solicit a public relations/marketing plan, or pitch new clients.
I think most managers would agree that getting the idea started the request in a much better position to be considered. Knowing your leadership, you’ll have a better understanding of how far you can take something before talking with them–wherever that line is drawn, taking the preceding steps helps.
* * *
What constraints do you operate under? What are the limitations in your defined role, available resources, time? Most days, we categorize this as the “stuff” that someone else is doing to us. Rarely are we handed the perfect role, unlimited money, and all the time in the world– at least not for any priority project that someone actually expects to get done.
So, as is typically the case, we get a call and take on a new project with limited resources, a short turn-around time, and less than ideal conditions. If your meetings are anything like mine, we end up discussing how to cope with the limiting conditions more than the actual solution.
Step 2: Shedding Any Self-Imposed Constraints
Many of us share a powerful set of internal constraints that are kicking around just beneath the surface. These are our personal sense of our “know how.” ability to balance/time management, and conviction. We often lament the external, when it’s really the internal constraints holding us back.
Why? External constraints such as time and cost are familiar. We are accustomed to addressing them in meetings every day. “I don’t think we have enough (or the right) people,” or “We don’t have time,” are commonly heard assessments of external constraints. These, of course, are real, but rarely the actual reason a project is slow to start or fails to get out of the gate.
Instead, our internal dialog is much more powerful, but it is not always observed and hardly ever documented. We’re understandably much less comfortable saying to our teams, “I don’t know how to solve this”. Or, “I’m worried that if I really commit, that my delicate work/life balance will fall apart.” Or, “I don’t really care that much about this problem.”
Overcoming these internal obstacles starts by noticing what is going on, then getting honest with yourself about the real resources needed to push through.
Step 3: What Can You Do Within Your Current Power?
You can only be figuring out how to fit in or figuring out how to stand out. You can’t do both at the same time. Building awareness of where you are in your career, what you need to do to be satisfied with your work, what the organization needs from you at the moment, and how to intentionally toggle between the “fitting in” and “standing out” is an important skill. Understanding that being new to the job, or newly promoted, probably mandates a period of trying to fit in. During this period, your days might be filled with informational interviews, a lot of active listening, reading and studying and sticking pretty close to delivering what you’ve been asked to produce. This period of “fitting in” can be as short or as long as you need it to be. Once you feel you have a pretty good handle on the landscape and parameters, you can intentionally shift gears to “standing out.”
It’s way more effective to do this from the vantage point of already understanding the purpose and culture–your suggestions come from a point of strength and awareness, as opposed to wild ass guesses about what might just work.
Conversely, if someone popped in unscheduled, huffing and puffing about a great idea that came to them in traffic on the way in, it probably wouldn’t resonate as well. I know, because I’ve tried it both ways.
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 demonstrate that you have the perspective, vision, and direction to at least get it started, and implement whatever you can in your own work. We must first be the change we want to see.
Chapter 4: Make Your Case
Chapter Purpose: Create a logically structured case that includes the problem and your solution, as well as supporting data, estimates, and assumptions.
Leaving your idea to chance is not a strategy for approaching your leadership. We all know this, but still toss out ideas like dice. Even when you have a great relationship, an accepted problem, and a pretty clever solution–an intentional, thoughtful, planned approach wins.
The goal is to get your leadership to follow you. To do this, they first have to agree that you have a problem that needs solving to begin with. Next, they have to agree that all or some significant portion of the solution you’re proposing might just work.
We want to see their whole head (and heart, if we’re lucky) invested in the outcome. Anything short of that isn’t full buy-in. Now, bringing them along may not be realistic at the beginning. Just getting approval up front might be the very best you can do, but it’s important to recognize that approval is all you have. When things actually get tough and you start to take your solution outside of your immediate chain or organization, the fights get tougher and you’re going to need them behind you 100 percent.
To get there, you’ll have to make your case with a thoughtful, well-planned presentation. What does a thoughtful, well-planned solution presentation and request for support look like? The worksheet below contains the “anatomy of the ask.” Based on the reflections done in Chapter 2, you will know whether or not a formal, written request is appropriate, or if a short conversation is better suited to your leadership’s style and the issue at hand. Once you determine the method (formal or informal), the worksheet below is scalable to meet your unique needs–the components are the same regardless.
If you’re working on the ask alone or with a team, set aside time to think through the following elements. Answering a series of tough questions in advance might help you hone in on the solution and more precisely how you want to shape the approach. A list of questions to get these thoughts flowing can be found at robincamarote.com/downloads.
Phase 3: The Follow Through
In the last two chapters, you made your most significant advances in gaining buy-in and getting your leadership to follow. However, you’re not all the way home just yet. In the final two chapters, we discuss the actions needed to lock in agreement and solidify your leadership in the role of supporter, endorser, advocate, and participant (the ideal scenario for long-term success).
Chapter 5: Use Good, Better, Best Practices
Chapter Purpose: Integrate best practices to increase likelihood for buy-in.
Stop right where you are. Trained thinking on how to build buy-in has lead us astray. We need to break some old habits, and get back to leading with real, honest best practices. Why? Because generic, box-checking exercises might be recommended or expected, but traditional techniques lack the color, energy, nuance, and cultural context to actually produce anything valuable. Before you can start getting your leadership to follow, you have to break some behaviors and practices that are undermining your potential success.
Focus On The End Goal
Stay focused on what it takes to win. Not for you to win personally, but what will be needed organizationally, and what the end goal looks like. In their groundbreaking work on the concept of Megacommunities, authors Gerencser, Van Lee, Napolitano, and Kelly argue for three key guiding principles that help build and sustain potentially fragile partnerships. While aimed at large, multinational organizations coming together for a cause and forming a megacommunity, they stand true for the microcommunities we create within our organizations. The principles to keep in mind include:
- Respecting the autonomy of each player.
- Sharing a commitment to communicate and engage.
- Remaining biased towards action.
We get hung up on irrelevant details all of the time and it costs us the idea and any early interest or support we might have had. This happens all of the time when pursuing new work. The initial excitement around the opportunity and interest in helping the client solve a tough problem can be quickly lost in the details. On proposals, for example, we get sidetracked on a detail about which past performance statements to include or how to structure the document or who should be at the top of the project organization chart. When things get hard, our nature is to dig in and hang on to the details, instead of fighting for the big, life-changing, deal-winning solution. Figuring out what is important and what isn’t early on, telling everyone, and forbidding people to focus on unimportant details is critical.
One of my friends and mentor uses a terrarium example. She reminds us to make sure the big stuff is in place first. Get your rocks and larger plant life settled and looking good. Then add some gravel with just enough variation to make it interesting. Finally, and only if you have time, add the sand and dirt and tiny little pieces of decorative moss.
Here is one handy list of stuff that matters and stuff that doesn’t.
Add Organizational Details Into Generic Communication Processes
Strategic communications entails adding the organizational details and cultural nuances into generic communications processes. There are loads of four-step communication flow charts out and, sadly, they don’t work. This is SmartArt gone wrong, and is akin to suggesting that your coworker simply “eat less and exercise” to lose weight. First of all, they’re offended. Second, the reality of losing weight is both as simple as that and infinitely more complex and emotional. There are dozens of contributing factors that all get mashed together as someone navigates the very tricky and technical “how to” associated with those seemingly straightforward pieces of advice.
Organizations like the Project Management Institute are incredibly well intentioned and have invested gazillions of hours in bettering the world through the documentation of inputs, outputs, and techniques. If any of that crap works, I’d argue, that the project was probably already in good hands to begin with. So there is no harm in using the framework to help organize your thinking, but assume that you’ve mitigated some risk of it all falling apart. The unfortunate reality is good ideas fail–and often after millions have been spent–in part because there was never real leadership buy-in from the beginning.
PMI’s Pulse of the Profession™ research shows that “…fewer than two-thirds of projects meet their goals and business intent (success rates have been falling since 2008), and about 17 percent fail outright. Failed projects waste an organization’s money: for every US$1 billion spent on a failed project, US$135 million is lost forever… unrecoverable.”
Other surveys showed a range of project failure anywhere from 37 to 75 percent. And maybe the most concerning part is that the project death becomes more certain as the project’s budget increases.
So with hundreds of thousands of eager, process-oriented people at work, you would think that once our ideas grow up to be actual projects that life would be good. And yet, hundreds of millions of dollars are tied up in initiatives that stall or bump along with no clear, successful end in sight. There are a number of factors including insufficient resources and complex business processes. Overcoming these obstacles can only be done with a solid foundation of leadership buy-in. They’re too big for any one project team to conquer alone–regardless of the goodness and promised value of the idea, once delivered.
The reason we play lip service to these techniques and then go through the dramatic, very visible motions of setting up the processes like interim review panels and schedule status meetings, is that we’re supposed to. The conceptual buy-in for all of this stuff is really high, and for good reason. It totally makes sense on paper. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to replicate the sterile conditions in any normal work environment.
To avoid this trap, update generic processes with all of the organizational detail needed to reflect the real operating environment–even if it seems embarrassingly bureaucratic. More thorough and realistic process documentation is helpful to more precisely estimate the timeline and resources, as well as manage risk to on-time delivery and disappointing stakeholders.
Forget Fluffy Mission And Vision Exercises
Crafting mission and vision statements happens periodically as part of larger strategic planning exercises. The intent is right, but often something falls apart in pursuit of a statement that is meaningful and reflects the blended interests and functions of the group or organization.
The best mission and vision drafting exercises are fun, interesting team building events. The worst are slow, painful, argument-inducing wordsmithing meetings.
In either case, documenting the mission and vision of your organization doesn’t often yield the intended results. Few leave with clear direction on the ability to follow through on their strategic actions, or the adequate resources to do so. As a result, behaviors don’t change and we slip back into “business as usual” as the newness of the ideas and energy wears off.
Save your team and yourself the headache and frustration and skip ‘em altogether. An alternative, crowdsourcing option might work better. Instead of drilling from the top down, ask every team member to write down a mission and vision statement (using real, understandable words) that they could get excited about. Then, you create an opportunity to share these individual statements with the broader group or organization. No edits, no critiques, just a shared understanding of what motivates each individual. You can get creative with message boards and graphics for large organizations or maintain a simple list for smaller groups or leadership teams.
In addition to time lost to mission and vision wordsmithing, the actual initiatives that come out of strategic planning sessions have a steep hill to climb. In their book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution, authors Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette, and Edwin Boswell cite their research, “Only 30 percent of strategic initiatives are successfully executed.” Pretty shocking considering how much time and energy we all collectively invest in strategic planning!
Whether you’re the CEO at the top, or a group manager or a team member focused on making change, you’d probably agree that that is too few. The authors go on to say that even those efforts that are successful are too slow. The issue? There are common barriers to execution within organizations that include a lack of broad understanding of the initiative’s purpose, desired new behaviors aren’t adopted, and lack of commitment. Many organizations try to overcome these problems with technology–or even process reengineering–and the change advocates within are still disappointed. Why?
You probably all know the punch line. It’s the people. Not surprisingly, leadership is the prescription. But where should that leadership come from? Our default reliance on guidance coming from the top down is part of the problem. Their recommendations for overcoming this dismal success rate include:
- Making sure everyone knows the objective–and wants to get there (the really hard part).
- Devoting focused time to accelerating key projects that get things moving in the right direction.
- Making the work environment collaborative, supportive, and pleasant.
- Aligning roles and responsibilities with the inherent strengths of the team.
I would argue that all of these things can be done from any position within the organization–everyone is certainly able to adopt them for their own work, and lead by example. If it’s important, you’ll make the goal clear, know when you need to sell or bolster the “why,” pick the most important projects, eliminate distractions, do your part to encourage a collaborative environment, and leverage your own strengths in moving the idea forward. Titled leaders are limited by their defined role. Untitled leaders are limited only by their imagination.
Count Me In, Using Metrics To Your Advantage
So you have an idea and a planned approach to take it to your leadership and begin the buy-in process. If your boss is a numbers person–and really, whose isn’t?– metrics might be helpful to make your case. The metrics I’m referring to are different than the data you might be using to demonstrate the problem, or to create a sense of urgency. Performance measures are typically implemented near the end, just before a launch. The idea, of course, is that we want to understand the results or impact the change has had on our desired goal. Articulating what these metrics might be can be a compelling way to demonstrate our understanding of the problem and how tuned-in we are to solving it. Giving tangible examples might also help our leadership envision a future state and begin thinking how powerful the information would be.
According to a study of 4,500 public relations and communications professionals worldwide, done by the University of Alabama in October 2012, “…measurement issue is rated as the #3 issue among 10 big issues in the field. What’s going on here? Given the sharply increased focus on measurement standards by several groups and organizations today, it seems likely that more reliable and meaningful measurement approaches and standards–and the moment of truth–are close at hand. Who will embrace these approaches and use measurement to build competitive advantage–for the organization? Yes, measurement can certainly be a competitive advantage for the profession and the organization.”
Further findings support continued investment in and attention on building soft skills and self-insights. The study reported, “…practitioners say mastery of the so-called soft people skills–better listening, cultural sensitivity, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution capabilities, and change management skills–is crucial.”
With this dynamic in mind, properly designed and effectively applied performance metrics can be the key to unlocking interest and support. Sound metrics can unify teams, advance organizations, and even inspire action–but the road to get there is almost always controversial. The best performance metrics are those that clearly convey to decision-makers whether the organization is progressing towards strategic goals, or stuck in a holding pattern. Mapping your metrics to what is important to your leadership is really the only thing that matters at this stage. For additional insights and a mapping process, visit robincamarote.com/downloads.
There are many challenges with creating metrics, collecting data, and interpreting the results. In the beginning, setting up metrics (or even imagining which might be most useful) can be a hurdle to overcome. The issue is around the cost and time associated with collecting the right data, establishing a firm baseline, and figuring out a way to credibly tie any results you observe back to the idea or action you’re planning to take.
If you have any data laying around, snag it. You might be able to get creative and repurpose information from a past employee survey, or other kinds of mission-performance reports. If nothing is handy, you’ll need to pitch the performance metric component of your idea as part of your request.
Here are a handful of people impact-centered performance metric examples to jump-start your thinking. My guess is that you have pretty good existing information on your mission impact, potential market, and internal processes–because we’re all very accustomed to measure the measurable. The people stuff and their associated soft skills (as supported by the University of Alabama study mentioned above) can be a bit tougher to sell. I hope these help to spark some thinking about what might resonate with your leaders.
Establish A Drama-Free Zone
One of the biggest things that changed my work (and really, my life) happened immediately after completing a stressful client project. During project delivery, client expectations were high, we were under cost and time limitations, and I was a new manager. The combined pressures and inexperience resulted in me giving harsh feedback (when it wasn’t warranted), issuing edicts (when they were least effective), and not following through on personal commitments I’d made (when they were desperately needed). Needless to say, the staff was incredibly frustrated with me, and we all got caught up on a swirl of gossip and speculation. I didn’t know how to address the issues directly, so I played right into my part in this daytime soap opera. It was exhausting, and had absolutely no benefit to our business or my client. The feelings people felt–including myself – were real, but the drama was manufactured. When the dust settled, several staff left the company. I was crushed and had to face the hard lessons of taking care of people first–even under pressure.
This realization brought clarity to the fact that I wanted nothing more than to be a good manager going forward. I then had another related thought: I had to create a drama-free zone. The groundwork for this had already been laid in my personal life. Around the same time, I’d started dating the man who is now my husband. This was great for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest positive impacts was the zero drama that he tolerated in his own life. He didn’t talk about, didn’t sell it, or advise it. Drama-free was just how he was, and still is today. My mother-in-law (a People magazine-wielding drama lover with sequins for every occasion) still wonders where she went wrong. Hugs, T!
If I had to sum up my husband Brian’s perspective it’d go something like… Everyone has good intentions, always. Nothing (well, almost nothing) is personal. There is no value add in taking offense in the actions of those around you. Interpreting events from other person’s perspective can yield some interesting and helpful insights.
His no-drama influence came at a time when I really needed it. Not only was I getting spun up about anything and everything at work, I was doing the same to my personal life. And that was when we only had a pair of cats!
So when things fell apart with my team at work, I had no one to blame but myself. Learning how to dig out of that situation, and fix it going forward, was an important professional experience and one that I’ll also keep with me.
Eliminating drama starts one day when you decide that you’ll stand strong and allow the winds that come to blow around you. The image of the Eiffel Tower is something I conjure up when I need a quick visual reminder. Structurally, it’s sturdy but, by design, everything in the air can move around it and through it without shaking the foundation.
Establishing a drama-free zone starts when you tamp out sparks by not reacting emotionally, and just dealing with the core problem. Drama-free zones are maintained by staying focused on your goal and committed to your belief that it’s not about you. An amazing thing happens when you cancel your daytime drama. Staff and leadership can focus, and the possibilities are endless.
Chapter 6: Flex And Persist
Chapter Purpose: Plan to keep going, keep refining, and keep pursuing paths you believe in.
There is some relief in putting success or failure in someone else’s hands, but in the end, we realize that we all control our own fate and experiences. I’ve had about 1,000,000 ideas. Some fraction of them were really important and worth fighting hard for. Others were good and yet, after being turned down, I let them float away and went back to the distractions ready and waiting to fill my days. Some were completely awful, and were great learning experiences that should have faced immediate and certain death. It’s all part of the process. The ability to work with my leadership to help sort these ideas out, get feedback, and be empowered to go back and work on the ones with the greatest promise, was a gift.
In an interview with Anthony Tjan in November 2009 that resulted in a Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Flexibility and Persistence: Getting the Balance Right,” Bill Trenchard, who is the former CEO and Chairman of LiveOps, shared his perspective on what pursuing an opportunity really requires. Bill said, “I think it’s the combination of flexibility and persistence. There’s a balancing act here. You need the flexibility to, in the face of new data, say, ‘this isn’t the right fit, I need to go somewhere else,’ and you need the persistence to push through when necessary. You’ve got to be persistent and relentless about your culture, your people, the technology, and the product, really everything you do.” He went on to say that earlier in his career, he believed that success was all about the idea. Later on, he came to the conclusion that, “…it’s so much more about execution and migrating and changing the idea as you test it in the market.”
One way to think about applying this advice is to think of your leadership as the first market. If they don’t buy-in, what is that telling you? Are there problems with the merit of the idea, or is something turning them off during the pitch?
A wise man I know spouts passion, persistence, and kindness as the critical criteria for success at work and in life. I like these words so much that I’d love to share them here as my own, but then that would be unoriginal. So, I’ll just focus on persistence.
Persistence is one of the easiest principles to understand and probably the hardest to do. It’s hard because the experience of being judged, turned down, or (politely) asked to go away can erode our confidence and belief that we have ideas worth sharing. Getting over the sting means hearing the “no” a little differently. Going back to the belief that nothing is personal, the “no” really isn’t about us.
One of the best examples of persistence that I’ve personally observed centers around my long-time client, Tim. It all started in 1998 when Tim (who would later become the program director) had a couple too many tequilas and a great idea. Tim and a couple of new friends from around the organization were assigned to a task force charged with evaluating industry best practices for maintenance management, and the associated cutting-edge technologies. What did they name themselves? Task Force 23. This point is completely irrelevant to the point of persistence, but it’s too random not to share. Anyway, to complete this research, the group planned a number of trips to observe how other organizations were conducting their maintenance programs. Toward the end of the exploratory period, and after a couple of nights out with new friends and new colleagues, Tim had an epiphany.
His vision was to capture the maintenance required for all of the facilities in their organization’s massive real property portfolio–including details for a number of highly unique structures. It wasn’t so much of a novel idea, but one that hadn’t really been attempted with any seriousness among federal agencies. After seeing the external organization’s success, Tim was a diehard believer in the value of data, and the potential of data-driven decision-making. Before ordering another round at happy hour, he was pushing the life-cycle asset management Kool-Aid to anyone who would listen–including his leadership, who were less than enthusiastic about the cost and workload associated with gathering and managing all of this information.
But, Tim persisted. In the coming 17 years, he would take every opportunity to share his observations, the solution, and the benefits of this approach to maintenance. He spoke to hundreds in big meetings and conferences, and took single individuals aside, when needed. He was going to make his case one person at a time, if needed. Eventually, he won the top job and had the platform from which to fully develop and implement his solution. It’s been a bumpy road to say the least but he’s making headway. Over the years, they continue to encounter resistance, but Tim’s message is now so engrained in the culture and lexicon that there is no going back.
Resistance is not only possible, it’s likely. Especially when you’re pushing hard against the status quo into uncomfortable and unexplored territories. Often times, it can’t be overcome with a single, perfect pitch or argument. Instead, it’s about getting up every day to try again.
Chapter 7: Out Of Ideas?
Chapter Purpose: Know how to get unstuck and start the flow of ideas.
Whether it’s because of the daily grind or an especially hectic period, sometimes we’re just flat out of ideas. The subsequent four tactics are what I use to help me shift my mindset to a place where ideas are more likely to pop. Consider the following while observing the patterns in your work to help spark some solutions to challenges you might not be seeing at the moment, or are not able to articulate in words just yet.
Try On A New Mental Hat
You have been nailing your responsibilities, but have this itch to do something more. Your program is humming along, the client seems happy, the staff are productive, and you’re now bored. With all of the insight you’ve gained in recent months, you’re also surprised that someone hasn’t yet reached out to engage you in the next big thing.
You might be waiting for someone to call, hoping that you’re consulted on the next big strategic move the organization needs to make, or assuming those plum opportunities only pop up for people higher up. If even a smidge of those sound familiar, a mindset shift needs to happen. What’s the new perspective? Knowing that it’s you, and it’s now. To do this, you promote yourself (just in your own mind for now) into a position of influence.
After fourteen amazing years with a big consulting firm, I started to feel restless. For months, I tuned into the feeling, talked to people, sought leadership advice, and started to explore some other options. Opening this door, and mentally trying on a different role, was precisely what I need to see an alternate path. Once I could envision a productive life as an independent consultant (the complete opposite to where I was at the time), I was afforded an amazing opportunity to take a couple of steps to the side to pursue a parallel path. There are good reasons why people do, and should, stay within organizations. When you’re starting to feel stuck, however, mentally trying on another role can help open your mind to new perspectives and possibilities.
What leaving that familiar, comfortable structure taught me was that I alone owned the responsibility for doing important work, and having an impact on the challenges I cared about. Waiting for someone else to select me for the team or promote me into the “right” position was really an excuse for not taking action and fulfilling my potential. With a sense of personal empowerment, no one can stop us from building our own knowledge, weighing the options, forming an opinion, and proposing a solution.
Once we examine our situation from another vantage point, we’re in a much better position to decide what to pursue, volunteer for, or pitch.
Involve Others
They say misery loves company, right? I think this is true except in traffic. I’m miserable and know that everyone else is, too, but I’m wishing they would all just go home.
Anyway, I’ve also found that entrepreneurship (broadly defined) and innovative problem solving loves company, too. Initiating something off the prescribed work plan (especially if you’re seeking to make a different and positive impact and need fresh ideas) can be incredibly attractive to staff and colleagues around you. If you’re going to be focused on solving the world’s problems–or at least those happening on your floor of the office–it is helpful to find some other like-minded folks willing to jump in.
I love my team and cherish the time spent working with them. The ideas are bigger, concept designs are brighter, and the potential benefits grow both in terms of impact and specificity. Everything is better when they’re involved.
Even knowing these benefits, we sometimes hesitate to use the resources at our disposal (our staff or general organizational resources such as IT and HR) out of a concern that we would be asking too much for them to devote time to an effort outside of their millions of other responsibilities. After all, it’s not their fault that they had exactly the right skills and happened to be within shouting distance. These concerns are legitimate, and we absolutely should be mindful of how we engage them.
The trick though is just being up front with people, being as specific as possible about the commitment (keeping it small to start), and being 100 percent okay if people say no. Acknowledging that the solution under development is outside of the core scope of their responsibilities is important, too. Then, you give people a real option of whether or not they get involved. I’ve found, over and over again, that people are eager to set aside a little extra time to be part of a first-responder team on a newly identified problem. If the timing isn’t right for them for whatever reason, you can offer to engage them next time and move on–with no real or implied penalties for opting out.
Shut Down Personal Productivity Worries
Personal productivity is tricky. We all want to optimize our impact, but the goal seems elusive. There are days that I feel incredibly productive, and other days I’m just busy. I know other people are worried about the same, because about 99% of all of the articles coming out online for Fast Company and Inc. alone have something to do with increasing our own impact for time spent working. The message here is that if we’re just better at using our own time, things at work will get better. Obviously, these perspective-shaping companies are posting all of this material because there is a reader demand.
The demand reveals a lot more about what we’re worried about at work–on a personal level–than what actually changes any of our distracting, counter-productive habits. The truth is that we all have varying degrees of productivity, and our own yardsticks with which to measure ourselves, and others. There really is no absolute standard for knowledge workers.
The issue of productivity is one that no matter how much you’re doing, we all worry that it’s not enough. That our boss won’t think it’s enough, or that our clients will be disappointed, or that our coworkers will think that we’re not pulling our weight. All of these are real and valid fears, because a judgment of productivity is common in our world. The issue with focusing on this tough-to-quantify characteristic, is that even if we were all off the charts in terms of our productivity, it doesn’t necessarily mean that our business is better, or clients are happier.
Solutions flash across our brains in a matter of seconds. With the right conditions lined up, we can affect change in the course of a day–or a week. And this could be the change the makes all of the difference. Focus pushes us towards something big and meaningful.
* * *
Point Of View
Hammering on people to improve their personal productivity is akin to the messages were bombarded with about weight, age, and money. They’re pushed under the guise of being helpful but have the long-term effect of demotivating and making people feel not good enough. When you read these fluffy bits online, know that you’re being sold to. While we might pick up a helpful tip from time to time, there is little to be gained by judging yourself against others.
* * *
Contrast that with the slog we’re often more familiar with. We chip away at big, amorphous problems, and settle for progress in the smallest possible increments. Worrying about our own productivity within that system seems really sad. Working harder or more diligently on a problem that will never or should never be solved is a crappy way to live and work.
The other problem with our worry on productivity is this concern that someone senior to us isn’t going to think we’re sufficiently productive, so we hold off asking for anything else. Until we’re feeling like we’re at the top of our game and producing everything they’ve asked, plus a little more, there are these little lingering worries around our worth and value. With this in mind, I’ve found that a way to generate ideas to is top putting so much pressure on ourselves and our teams to produce them.
Take A Current Project One Step Further
My friend Leah runs a magazine. And not just that, she actually manages all of the external communications and marketing for a high-profile association. She’s one of only a handful of staff who works remotely. The vast majority of the team lives and works in Phoenix. The distance creates the predictable miscommunications and tensions, but does seem to have a couple of advantages. She’s the “go to” when leaders on the team need to vent. This can be exhausting and awkward, and the odd thing is that most of the leadership team seems to know that the others are calling Leah to share their frustrations too, which often include little digs on each other. As if the typical office drama wasn’t enough, they’re going through a major leadership change. Tensions are high and people are on edge. Meanwhile, the membership is being forgotten in the shuffle by everyone, it seems, except Leah who has the wonderful advantage of some distance and perspective on all of the fuss.
During the last couple of months of turmoil, it was time to start work on an annual event that her organization sponsors. Leah knew all the stages by heart, but wasn’t really feeling enthused about pulling all of the needed pieces together. Again.
Feeling tired of the project before even getting started, she then remembered the honoree at last year’s event, and started thinking that of all of the members who would be great candidates for the independent award. She started to think, wow, this black tie event would be a great way to showcase some of the awesome women in our industry. They’d be honored, we’d show a connection to membership, and further one of our goals of celebrating women and encouraging more young girls and women to enter technical and engineering fields. Win, win, win… oh, and some wine was probably involved.
Anyway, she knew adding this idea on to the regular planning activities was going to be a tough sell. The leadership just didn’t have the appetite for anything more “new” at the moment. So, what’d she do? Essentially all of the research, relationship building, networking, and cost/benefit analysis that could possibly be done. Further, she selected a handful of candidate women from her own network, and built a mocked up bio that would help demonstrate the strengths of each candidate. Needless to say, this was an idea that she believed in that just had to happen. When she had the entire package together, she took a much simpler decision directly to her boss. A choice between 1) push “go” and enjoy all of these benefits and advantages for this price, or 2) stick with the status quo and risk these criticisms and concerns until we do something.
This might seem risky to those of us (all of us) who are limited on time and hate the idea of wasting a lot of work on something that eventually is shot down. Her fall back plan was clear, and demonstrated a clean alignment to other aspects of her work. The networking never hurts, and it didn’t take a ton of time. It was fun, and something that she could do easily and personally from her location near Washington, D.C. The second part of the research, her write-ups, were used in the magazine and in an online feature for these prominent women. She knew she’d be able to recycle the content in some way. And, she did.
Of course, she got the first yes, and the second. Next came a note of appreciation for her resourcefulness from her boss. The cost made it into the draft budget, and survived three rounds of tweaks and cuts because the plan was so well laid out and articulated. The boss truly appreciated that the bulk of the potential questions were answered in advance–and they got a secondary benefit out of all the legwork.
Leah reenergized herself by finding a way to tack on a new, high-impact idea to a piece of work she was already delivering. Looking at your current workload, is there one or two things that if you could add them that the outlook might suddenly look a little brighter?
Engage Your Leadership
While there are many things I love about being an independent consultant, I actually miss having a boss. I always enjoyed and benefited from creative problem-solving and feedback. For those of you working within organizations, you can still miss this kind of connection but for a very different reason. What do you do when your leadership doesn’t observe your work on a day-to-day basis?
This is an issue for my friend Charlie. He has a decent boss–a nice man who’s a plodder. He’s probably been in his job for too long, but it’s too late to start anything new. So he continues on in his leadership role in this think tank. He says the right things, but doesn’t seem to get too excited about much–except when it’s the time of year to pull the annual work plans together and agree on a research agenda. Then he gets super stressed, and seems to retreat intellectually into a zone where only the most safe, tried and true ideas get included. Over the years, Charlie has tried to build a relationship with this boss, but they don’t seem to connect on anything but the most superficial levels. Charlie, by the way, holds his own senior leadership position within the organization, and is accountable to a much wider external audience than is often recognized within the walls of the office.
So Charlie’s belief–and I tend to agree–is that they’ve never worked on anything together. The business model is that each lead has a slate of tasks and a budget, and once all of the details are hammered out, everyone goes on their way for the next year and does whatever they need to do with their resources. They’re expected to pull content together, arrange stakeholder meetings, issue press releases, get positive attention for their great research, write and get published, speak as many places as they can, and so on. There is just very little cross sharing of resources, ideas, or support across the program areas.
This is a real challenge when you’re trying to build support and a relationship with someone. I personally believe that this can only be done by doing something difficult together–ideally, a constructive project–but for better or worse, it also happens when you have to deal with a tough personnel issue.
Engaging with your leadership is something you can do, and have a reasonable expectation that they’ll help you find a way to work together. The key here, like the other process steps covered in previous chapters, is to figure out what is driving them. It might be revenue, or a bigger network, or a more secure pipeline, or an interesting technical issue. Figuring it out and finding ways to engage your leadership so that they can see you in action is critical. Understanding this might help you offer some ideas.
Chapter 8: The Boss Menagerie
Leadership Overview
Throughout my career, I have worked with, learned from, and been inspired by great bosses and leaders. This is my single greatest stroke of professional luck. I know they were good because I liked them at the time, and I revisit them often in my mind whenever I’m faced with my own leadership challenges. I’ve picked four of the best to contrast different leadership styles and demonstrate how the same ask might be shaped in the proposal to each. To start, I provide a very high-level introduction to who they are. I’ve then asked each to share a bit about their leadership style. Their real responses are arranged in a virtual panel discussion with some dialog (that is completely made up) to link their observations together. In light of the unique characteristics and strengths they’ve shared, the chapter closes with a graphic on how I might tailor an “ask” to each individual in a way that aligns with their interests and concerns.
First, the introductions. To start, there is Steve. He’s a smart and thoughtful economist who loves to mix serious spreadsheets on global pricing issues with a casual working environment loaded with laughs. Next, there is John. He’s an environmental policy thought-leader and fiercely loyal team-builder. He brings his football coaching style to work, and uniquely skilled in making his first string leaders feel standout special and part of the team at the same time. Next is Rob. Hands down, he works harder than any man I’ve ever met at never letting a ball drop and making something good, better. He shows up. His energy, drive, and ability to recall all of his action items (and yours!) was both baffling and inspiring. Lastly, there is the kindest, most generous, encouraging soul who walked side-by-side with me through my decision to take the leap and try this consulting thing on my own. As I’m writing this, Troy is a Peace Corps volunteer on the ground in Nepal helping with the response and recovery from the recent earthquake. I can’t think of a stronger, more calm and capable person to lead such a trying and terrible event.
Each of these former bosses took time to write down their thoughts on leadership and how their style has evolved over time. These insights are popped into the virtual panel discussion, The Boss Menagerie, that follows.
Leadership Styles, Imagined Panel Discussion
I’m starting a collection.
“Like of frog figurines?”
No, like perspectives on what it takes to get your leadership to follow and support your ideas. I’m only asking a handful of wise, smart, and exceptionally good looking senior leaders I know. I also collect wedding details gone wrong–kind of a pictorial tour of how people ruin their day with crappy choices on flowers, music, and cake but that’s a different project. Anyway, can you help with the first one?
“Sure.”
Great. So, let me quickly introduce you to each other in chronological order of bossiness–there is Steve, John, Rob, and Troy. Each of you is an exceptional leader and top decision-maker in your respective organization.
You all work in large organizations spanning for-profit consulting, federal policy development, and international aid.
You are having incredible careers, and have made tremendous professional accomplishments by anyone’s standards.
You’ve each been recognized by leaders throughout your own careers as people with something important to offer your businesses, programs, and staff.
Of course, I couldn’t agree more.
While I don’t see you on a daily basis anymore, your advice and guidance has been taken to heart and incorporated into my own approach. I’m sharing your thoughts on leadership to demonstrate the range of effective styles to help readers envision how to tailor a request to their own bosses. Your comments are arranged in the imaginary panel discussion below. (The very idea of having you all in the same room gave me heart palpitations, so it’s better that this is virtual.)
To help orient people to your different leadership styles, let’s start off with something reflective. How do you think your staff today would describe your leadership style and how has it changed over time? If you say relaxed and easy going, I’ll be pissed. John, why don’t you go first?
“Well, thanks. I definitely wouldn’t say easy going, but I would say that it’s changed over time. When I first started managing and leading people, I was pretty hardline about things. I think that came from a lack of confidence and from copying the only two leaders I knew. One was my Dad. He was a great guy, but a hard man and a quiet person. He was a Marine in WWII, a card carrying member of Tom Brokaw’s greatest generation. My other leader-role model was one of my first bosses, also a former military guy. He’s a brilliant guy who I’m still close to today. But he, too, is a tough guy’s tough guy with a PhD in engineering, and a black belt in karate. So he’s not only the smartest guy in the room, but he can whoop your ass, too! I thought it was the perfect combination of mental and physical toughness, discipline, and intellect. And I tried emulating his style for many years. That tough guy, tough love persona works for some people, but I realized I wasn’t being my authentic self when I tried to emulate him. I also believed that a leader could be a different person at work than at home, and I ultimately concluded that I had a false persona at work. Again, that may work for some, but it did not work for me. I felt like I had to be my authentic self all the time, whether at home or at work.
I know that at one point in my career, I had a bad blind spot and no awareness at all that I negatively affected a number of people who worked for me. Part of this was recognizing that my large physical presence was intimidating to som, e and I had to figure out a way to soften my approach. That was something I definitely wanted to address and change. I also had to work hard at always maintaining a positive and optimistic outlook. I can be a pessimistic person, and I can get negative fast if I don’t check myself frequently. I believe really strongly that leaders must be positive, optimistic forces. So I’ve worked really hard to be that way all the time. That’s something my wife has really helped me with, as she’s a naturally optimistic person who always sees the glass half full. In reality, that’s really the best way to be, and as a leader there’s simply no choice. Years later, I now feel that self-awareness, empathy, and optimism are my strongest leadership traits. I think what sparked the change, in addition to the need for authenticity, was a level of leadership-based experience I had accumulated over the years. Ultimately, that was what helped me feel very confident in leadership positions.
That comes through. I would definitely say that you’re self-aware and empathic. The optimism one was new to me, but I’m glad to hear that. You also hate it when people eat chips too loudly in meetings. Did you know that about yourself?
“Yeah. If you can’t hear people on the phone over someone’s chewing, that’s annoying.”
Fair enough. Rob, what about you? How would your staff describe you?
“Was that me with the chips?”
No, it was someone else. It was a really awkward meeting. So, what do you think they’d say?
“I think they would use three broad terms to describe me: enthusiastic (positive, optimistic, collaborative), transparent (engaged, honest, transparent), embracing of diversity, and action-oriented (practical).
I love that you say “three broad terms,” then pack in like 20 extra adjectives. That’s so you. Overachiever.
“While those all sound positive–and I think and hope that they are–I have also realized that these style ingredients do not work for all audiences and all situations. So, subscribing to the theory of “we are who we are,” I’m not inclined to change this style, but I do try to employ a “volume button” to tone up and down how I use this style. For example, my “rah rah” enthusiasm works well with new, start up-type activities, but not so much if, for example, I am having a hard conversation around downsizing, or a poor assessment. Then, I have to “dial up” transparency and practicality. I am fiercely collaborative and am fortunate to work in an environment where that style is so highly valued. Mind you, that’s not always the most efficient strategy, because you tend to start with “group gropes,” but I think that’s the best way to engage, while closely monitoring for breakthroughs on removing barriers and advancing our collective cause.
Being so action-oriented, I have to be careful not to move out so quickly, assuming everyone is on the same page. I think the right balance there is to develop, socialize, receive buy-in, and attribute accountability for a vision–then move on out! My personal commitment to diversity is reflected not only in my support and sponsorship of formal Diversity & Inclusion programs, but in how I’ve evolved my leadership style over the years. At one point, I may have perceived a thoughtful introvert as someone who dragged her feet. Fortunately, through on-the-job leadership training and formal training (e.g., Myers-Briggs, Belbin, Hogan), I learned how to complement and incorporate various styles. An extrovert, I work hard to solicit input from my introverted colleagues. I try to ensure that we have a “plant” (Belbin lexicon) on my teams to offer up orthogonal ideas that can drive a team crazy–but help us avoid the “group think” pitfall. Finally, in my work settings and non-profit roles, I offer the same philosophy to my teams that I offered to the youth football team that I used to coach–1. Have fun 2. Learn and apply what you learn 3. Be winners.”
Troy, I’m anxious to hear what you think? We worked together the most recently of everyone here and both went separate directions. That was such a strange transition period, but one that I think everyone involved is better for now. Since leaving the business world, you’ve gone into a very different public sector environment–in a remote, developing country. What do you think your staff would say?
“I believe that my staff would describe my style as a ‘talk-the-talk AND walk-the-walk’ kind of leader. I have always been keenly aware that when you lead people, you ask them to do tasks – and sometimes very hard tasks that take them away from family and fun, tasks that wear them out, tasks that bring them to the office or keyboard late at night or on weekends. When you ask staff to do these hard kinds of activities, I believe strongly that I am most likely to get the commitment if the staff person feels I am also pulling my weight – not necessarily performing the same tasks, but working at the same pace and level. I feel much more able to ask for the sacrifice of a weekend, or a canceled vacation, of someone if I am willing or have done the same myself. In my 25 years as a management consultant, this was always my motto – work next to and with my staff – sometimes volunteering to take part of their tasks and doing it together – or doing it myself, so that they would immediately feel that I cared, I was willing to do what I was asking them to do, and that I was not some leader in the sky, but a leader in the room right next to them.
This approach is particularly important when I ask a member of my team to take on a project that was new for him or her. The classic example was when I asked a staff person to lead a proposal or some other large, written deliverable for the first time. I always committed to doing part of the work myself both to show my commitment and to allow my staff person to know that he or she would be undergirded with support. I always volunteered for a role subordinate to the new proposal manager – it allowed me to be part of the process, support the staff person, and watch while the project unfolded. During these kinds of tasks, my staff hopefully saw me doing what he or she was doing while leading also from within.”
Steve, in contrast to Troy, you and I worked together so, so long ago. I was your 23-year-old administrative assistant, and thought you were the nicest (possibly goofiest) boss ever. But then, what did I know? I had no point of reference. Are you, in fact, the nicest boss ever?
“Yes. I am. Which, by the way, did you ever learn how to use a fax machine?”
No, but it hasn’t really turned out to be a huge impediment.
“Great. Glad to hear that. So, like the others, my leadership style has evolved in the degree to which I define and accept my role as leader. I think I have a generally collaborative style. I really don’t like giving detailed instructions to people about what to do. On the other hand, in some circumstances I have pretty strong opinions about what I want from the people working with me. So I am happiest when I have people working for me to whom I can assign overall responsibility for an area, and let them run with it. If they know what they are doing, and it isn’t an area that I have strong feelings about, that’s the best. We check in periodically, discuss how the work is developing, and trade ideas. Sometimes my support is needed for building support internally for a project or overcoming some bureaucratic obstacle. In those cases, my challenge is more to remember that I am in fact a leader.
People want feedback and attention, and sometimes direction. If I follow my natural inclination and let them completely alone unless they come to me, then people can get unhappy or wander down a wrong path. This is also the situation where problems can be hardest to correct. I have had several situations where people with pretty broad mandates were just not getting the results needed. When I talk to them they say all the right things, I end up thinking that I can’t figure out what the problem is without looking over their shoulders 24/7. Earlier in my career, those situations sometime ended with my boss telling me the problem had gone on long enough and the person had to be counseled out. That is never a pleasant experience, but I eventually learned that it’s better for me to either fix the problem, or come to that conclusion myself, than wait to be told.
Conversely there are projects where I am directly involved and have pretty decided opinions. In those cases I have the opposite problem of trying to develop the people working with me rather than being overly controlling. An easy example is dealing with draft reports - it is typically so much easier to get the result I want by editing the report myself, but no one learns anything that way. So I really have to work at giving the draft back indicating where I want it revised and why, without doing it myself. Of course that is always a challenge when we are working under deadline.”
You guys are awesome. Thank you.
Tailored Request Examples
With a little more insight and perspective on four leadership styles, I want to explore how the same request might be shaped to best resonate with the issues and concerns of each. Let’s assume a new project opportunity has come up. The prospective client has approached the team about doing the work, and needs a proposal if we’re interested in responding. The client’s challenge is similar to our current base of work, but there are some interesting problems that are outside of the norm. The revenue would be small to start, but has the bigger potential upside if the team can deliver results on these unique issues.
All leaders are concerned with mission and business (revenue/profit) impact and they all love data, so let’s agree that those interests are common across all of the leaders profiled. However, they have different views on the best paths to success.
This graphic is a simplified view of how the same project might be pitched to different leaders based on their primary, driving interest. Of course, every person and situation is unique and complex, but typically, I find that leaders have a prevailing issue or concern. It’s not that the other points won’t be meaningful to them, but they should be deprioritized in the ask. Lead with the benefits of greatest interest to each.
Conclusion
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.”
- Amelia Earhart
When it comes to moving our ideas forward, while staring that very first hurdle–our leadership–in the face, persistence means asking once, asking again, and asking again. It is asking until you get the answer you seek, or a clear sign that it’s never coming.
They say that insanity (or something like this) is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In writing this book, my hope is that you’ve envisioned how to shift your perspective to help break the insanity (or ad hoc) cycle. I do believe we should try over and over, but for our sake and for the benefit of our ideas, we owe them a fair chance up front–something that is only gained through thoughtful planning and alignment.
Through the preceding chapters, we covered the six steps to building buy-in and getting your leaders to follow. Those include committing to sharing your ideas, taking the next step to shape and validate the concept, planning your approach, and making your case to leadership. Once the idea is out there, you can follow up with best practices and prepare to persist, in the event that you need to ask more than once or flexibly allow your idea to evolve.
I firmly believe that most of the “no” answers we hear are actually more of a “not yet,” or “tell me more before I commit,” or “can we change the color so I’d like it a little more?” You can embrace the relationship with your leadership as a rich learning, collaborative experience, but don’t let anyone else define what is valuable or worthwhile for you. Shrinking away too early doesn’t help anyone–least of all the idea you’re fighting for.
So as you think about getting your leadership to follow you, take a fair assessment of your efforts. Be willing to try something new–or even try the exact same idea again, if the conditions you are facing have changed even slightly. No one is going to fight harder for your ideas or vision than you.
Proceeds From The Book Go To A Is For Africa
The proceeds from this book go to A is for Africa (AIFA). A is for Africa is a small, nonprofit foundation that provides educational support to Matim Primary School outside of Arusha, Tanzania. My father and sister, Rick and Molly Smith, lead the organization and manage day-to-day operations. My mother and sisters travel to Tanzania to launch projects and provide strategic advice and fundraising support here in the Washington, D.C. area.
AIFA develops and implements educational projects in partnership with the school and community, including the Headmaster, Angw’eni Damianus Lang’o, the teachers and students, and Maasai Wanderings, a community-minded tourism company based in Arusha.
Examples of their work include: providing a hot lunch to 900 students daily, building a preschool classroom, paying the salaries of the supplemental preschool teachers, supporting a teacher appreciation program, opening a computer lab and library, and launching a number of teacher-led student clubs, including computer and knitting clubs. You can learn more about our organization at www.aisforafrica.org.
With A is for Africa, I dream of a world that all our children’s biggest fears are paper cuts and skinned knees. I imagine in just 50 short, short years that we will be more connected on a daily basis to people around the planet that we can fathom right now.
Whatever your ideas, your mission, or your calling might be, don’t give up. If you really care about something, keep searching for ways to make it work. Getting our leaders to follow is key.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank you, my reader. Thank you for jumping in, slogging through, giving me the benefit of the doubt at times, and being willing to try. Your hatched ideas–combined with the support of those around you–will change the world. Know that.
To my truly exceptional bosses. You’re all so different but so generously share your support and experience. I have learned so much from you. Every last one. It takes a village, apparently, to raise a half decent consultant. To KD and our team. Your combined talents result in incredible things happening every day for each other and for our clients.
To my mom who taught me (and a whole bunch of other people as an English teacher) how to read and write and live fully. To my dad who says, “Sure, why not? Let’s figure it out...” to nearly every crazy idea I’ve ever shared with him. To my husband, who can instantly snap everything into perspective, make me laugh, and encourage me to keep going with amazingly few words.
To my sweet, strong Gracie–definitely this girl’s best friend who embodies both leader and follower and who spent her last weeks at my feet as I hacked away at this dream.
About The Author
Robin Camarote is a communications consultant, meeting facilitator, and blogger at robincamarote.com. She is intent on helping clients get a greater return for their time invested at work. Raised by two “can do” parents who drilled resourcefulness and persistence, Robin carries those practical lessons into client offices and conference rooms today to map out the issues and creatively solve their challenges with communication and buy-in.
Inspired by the big ideas of thought-leaders such as Seth Godin, she left her management position within a large consulting firm to work independently in 2013. Her goal, then and now, is to reduce the fluff and time-consuming distractions at the office while working directly with clients on their mission. Being a consultant is accepting that you’ll never have your finger directly on the button. Instead, the ideal is to work through and on behalf of clients to achieve their goals. That is precisely what makes Robin love this work. She kisses her three kids goodbye each morning and makes a little promise in her heart to ensure the time apart is worth it by helping her clients have a big, positive impact.
Flock, Getting Leaders To Follow offers a timeless and universal framework for helping people connect with their leadership, articulate their vision, and gain the kind of support (not just approval) needed to see the solution through to completion. Robin works with a range of clients–mostly federal and non-profit organizations–who need leadership to follow.
Between her birthplace in Alaska to her current home in Virginia, there have been geographic stops and lessons learned along the way. Whatever the location, she enjoys meeting people, making connections, and combining ideas in new, innovative ways. She’s interested in engaging with other like-minded people (and maybe some who need a little convincing) via the many amazing outlets for communication and conversation available today. She lives with her family in Falls Church, Virginia.
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@RobinCamarote
About Difference Press
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Other Books by Difference Press
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The Mother Within: A Guide To Accepting Your Childless Journey by Christine Erickson
It’s Not Rocket Science: Leading, Motivating and Inspiring Your Team To Be Their Best by Susan Foster
Every Time I Diet I Gain 5 Pounds: Step Into Your True Self And Shed Your Baggage by Galina Knopman
Vibe Your Way to Fit, Healthy, & Hot by Charity Gonzalez
Money Mindset for a Champagne Life by Cassie Parks
Three Guys Walk into a Bar: How To Thrive As A Creative Business by Jim Shields
ClutterFree Revolution: Simplify Your Stuff, Organize Your Life & Save The World by Evan Michael Zislis
Thank You
Thank you for reading Flock, Getting Leaders to Follow.
There hasn’t been space in this short work to include every process, technique or practice for building lasting leadership buy-in and support. To read more, please visit my blog regularly at robincamarote.com for bits of advice and things to consider as you plan your ask.
Additionally, I’m offering a free, 1-hour makeover. No, not hair and makeup–though that would be fun. Instead, bring me your idea (I can keep a secret) and your current thinking on how to pitch it to your leadership. We will work together to focus and refine your approach to increase the chance of getting an enthusiastic, “Yes!”
Please feel free to contact me at robin@robincamarote.com with any stories on what worked, what didn’t, and what you’re thinking of trying in the future. I’d love to hear from you.
Contact Information
Website: www.robincamarote.com
Twitter - @RobinCamarote