People Buy into the Leader,Then the Vision
In the fall of 1997, a few members of my staff and I had the opportunity to travel to India and teach four leadership conferences, something we’ve done many more times in the last decade. India is an amazing country, full of contradictions. It’s a place of beauty, with warm and generous people. It has a strong emerging economy. Yet at the same time millions and millions of its inhabitants live in the worst poverty imaginable. It was there that I was reminded of the Law of Buy-In.
I’ll never forget when our plane landed in Delhi. Exiting the airport, I felt as if we had been transported to another planet. There were crowds everywhere. People on bicycles, in cars, on camels and elephants. People on the streets, some sleeping right on the sidewalks. Animals roamed free, no matter where we were. And everything was in motion. As we drove along the main street toward our hotel, I also noticed something else. Banners. Wherever we looked, we could see banners celebrating India’s fifty years of liberty, along with huge pictures of one man: Mahatma Gandhi.
OBSCURE BEGINNINGS
Today, people take for granted that Gandhi was a great leader. But the story of his leadership is a marvelous study in the Law of Buy-In. Mohandas K. Gandhi, called Mahatma (which means “great soul”), was educated in London. After finishing his education in law, he traveled back to India and then to South Africa. There he worked for twenty years as a barrister and political activist. And in that time he developed as a leader, fighting for the rights of Indians and other minorities who were oppressed and discriminated against by South Africa’s apartheid government.
By the time he returned to India in 1914, Gandhi was very well-known and highly respected among his countrymen. Over the next several years, as he led protests and strikes around the country, people rallied to him and looked to him more and more for leadership. In 1920—a mere six years after returning to India—he was elected president of the All India Home Rule League.
The most remarkable thing about Gandhi isn’t that he became a leader in India, but that he was able to change the people’s vision for obtaining freedom. Before he began leading them, the people used violence in an effort to achieve their goals. For years riots against the British establishment had been common. But Gandhi’s vision for change in India was based on nonviolent civil disobedience. He once said, “Nonviolence is the great-est force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
The leader finds the dream and then the people. The people find the leader and then the dream.
A NEW APPROACH
Gandhi challenged the people to meet oppression with peaceful disobedience and noncooperation. Even when the British military massacred more than one thousand people at Amritsar in 1919, Gandhi called the people to stand—without fighting back. Rallying everyone to his way of thinking wasn’t easy. But because the people had come to buy into him as their leader, they embraced his vision. And then they followed him faithfully. He asked them not to fight, and eventually, they stopped fighting. When he called for everyone to burn foreign-made clothes and start wearing nothing but homespun material, millions of people started doing it. When he decided that a March to the Sea to protest the Salt Act would be their rallying point for civil disobedience against the British, the nation’s leaders followed him the two hundred miles to the city of Dandi, where govern-ment representatives arrested them.
Their struggle for independence was slow and painful, but Gandhi’s leadership was strong enough to deliver on the promise of his vision. In 1947, India gained home rule. Because the people had bought into Gandhi, they accepted his vision. And once they had embraced the vision, they were able to carry it out. That’s how the Law of Buy-In works. The leader finds the dream and then the people. The people find the leader and then the dream.
DON’T PUT THE CART FIRST
When I teach leadership seminars, I field a lot of questions about vision. Invariably, someone will come up to me during a break, give me a brief description of an evolving vision, and ask me, “Do you think my people will buy into my vision?”
My response is always the same: “First tell me this. Do your people buy into you?”
You see, many people who approach the area of vision in leadership have it all backward. They believe that if the cause is good enough, people will automatically buy into it and follow. But that’s not how leadership really works. People don’t at first follow worthy causes. They follow worthy leaders who promote causes they can believe in. People buy into the leader first, then the leader’s vision. Having an understanding of that changes your whole approach to leading people.
People don’t at first follow worthy causes. They follow worthy leaders who promote causes they can believe in.
For the person who attends one of my conferences and asks whether his people will follow, the question really becomes, “Have I given my people reasons to buy into me?” If the answer is yes, they will gladly buy that leader’s vision. But if the leader has not built credibility with his people, it really doesn’t matter how great the vision is.
During the dot-com boom, I read an article in Business Week that profiled entrepreneurs who partnered with venture capitalists in the computer industry. At that time, Silicon Valley in California was full of people who worked in the computer industry for a short time and then tried to start their own companies. Every day hundreds of them were buzzing around trying to find investors so that they could get their ideas and enterprises off the ground. Most never found backing. But whenever an entrepreneur succeeded once, she found it pretty easy to find money the next time around. Many times, the investors weren’t even interested in finding out what the entrepreneur’s vision was. If they’d bought into the person, then they readily accepted the ideas.
Every message that people receive is filtered through the messenger who delivers it. If you consider the messenger to be credible, then you believe idea and believed in it 100 percent.
But the start-up of her second company happened almost overnight. It took only two phone calls that lasted mere minutes for her to land five million dollars in backing. When the word got out that she was starting her second company, people were dying to give her even more money. She said, “We had venture capitalists calling us and begging us to take their money.”1
Every message that people receive is filtered through the messenger who delivers it.
Why had everything changed so drastically for her? Because of the Law of Buy-In. People had bought into her, so they were ready to buy into whatever vision she offered, sight unseen.
YOU ARE THE MESSAGE
Every message that people receive is filtered through the messenger who delivers it. If you consider the messenger to be credible, then you believe the message has value. That’s one reason that actors and athletes are hired as promoters of products. People buy Nike shoes because they have bought into Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Michael Vick, not necessarily because of the quality of the shoes.
People want to go along with people they get along with.
The same is true when actors pro-mote causes. Have the actors being employed suddenly become experts in the cause they’re promoting? Usually not. But that doesn’t matter. People want to listen to them because they believe in them as people or because they have credibility as performers. Once people have bought into someone, they are willing to give the person’s vision a chance. People want to go along with people they get along with.
IT’S NOT AN EITHER .OR PROPOSITION
You cannot separate leaders from the causes they promote. It cannot be done, no matter how hard you try. It’s not an either/or proposition. The two always go together. Take a look at the following table. It shows how people react to leaders and their vision under different circumstances:
| LEADER + | VISION = | RESULT |
| Don’t buy in | Don’t buy in | Get another leader |
| Don’t buy in | buy in | Get another leader |
| buy in | Don’t buy in | Get another vision |
| buy in | buy in | Get behind the leader |
WHEN FOLLOWERS DON’T LIKE THE LEADER OR THE VISION . . . THEY LOOK FOR ANOTHER LEADER
The only time people will follow a leader they don’t like with a vision they don’t believe in is when the leader has some kind of leverage. That could be something as sinister as the threat of physical violence or as basic as the ability to withhold a paycheck. If the followers have a choice in the matter, they don’t follow. And even if they don’t have much of a choice, they start looking for another leader to follow. This is a no-win situation for every-one involved.
WHEN FOLLOWERS DON’T LIKE THE LEADER BUT THEY DO LIKE THE VISION . . . THEY LOOK FOR ANOTHER LEADER
You may be surprised by this. Even though people may think a cause is good, if they don’t like the leader, they will go out and find another one. That’s one reason that coaches change teams so often in professional sports. The vision for any team always stays the same: everyone wants to win a championship. But the players don’t always believe in their leader.
And when they don’t, what happens? The owners don’t fire all of the players. They fire the leader and bring in someone they hope the players will buy into. The talent level of most professional coaches is similar. The effectiveness of their systems isn’t much different. What often separate them are their leadership abilities and their level of credibility with players.
WHEN FOLLOWERS LIKE THE LEADER BUT NOT THE VISION . . . THEY CHANGE THE VISION
When followers don’t agree with their leader’s vision, they react in many ways. Sometimes they work to convince their leader to change the vision. Sometimes they abandon their point of view and adopt their leader’s. Other times they find a compromise. But as long as they still buy into the leader, they rarely out-and-out reject him. They will keep following.
An excellent example occurred in Great Britain. Tony Blair had a long tenure in office as prime minister. He was a popular leader, elected to serve three times. Yet at the same time, the majority of people in Great Britain were against Blair’s policy of involving the nation in the war with Iraq. Why did Blair remain in office so long? Because they had bought into him as a leader. As a result, they were willing to live with their philosophical difference with him.
WHEN FOLLOWERS LIKE THE LEADER AND THE VISION . . . THEY GET BEHIND BOTH
When people believe in their leader and the vision, they will follow their leader no matter how bad conditions get or how much the odds are stacked against them. That’s why the Indian people in Gandhi’s day refused to fight back as soldiers mowed them down. That’s what inspired the U.S. space program to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s vision and put a man on the moon. That’s the reason people continued to have hope and keep alive the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., even after he was gunned down. That’s what continues to inspire followers to keep running the race, even when they feel they’ve hit the wall and given everything they’ve got.
As a leader, having a great vision and a worthy cause is not enough to get people to follow you. You have to become a better leader; you must get your people to buy into you. That is the price you have to pay if you want your vision to have a chance of becoming a reality. You cannot ignore the Law of Buy-In and remain successful as a leader.
BUYING TIME FOR PEOPLE TO BUY IN
If in the past you tried to get people to act on your vision but were unable to make it happen, you probably came up against the Law of Buy-In—maybe without even knowing it. I first recognized the importance of the Law of Buy-In in 1972 when I accepted my second leadership position. In the chapter on the Law of Navigation, I mentioned that after I had been at that church several years, I took them through a multimillion-dollar construction program in which we built a new auditorium. But when I first got there, that was not the direction that the people had wanted to go. The week before I arrived at my new church, more than 65 percent of the members had voted in favor of building a new community activity center.
Now, I had done some homework on that church, and I knew coming in that its future growth and success depended not on a new activity center but on a new auditorium. My vision for the years ahead was absolutely clear to me. But I couldn’t walk in and say, “Forget the decision you just made and all the agonizing you did to make it. Follow me instead.” I needed to buy some time to build my credibility with the people.
So I developed a strategy. I arranged for a committee to make a thorough study of all the issues involved with the activity center project. I told the members, “If we’re going to invest this kind of time and money, we have to be sure about it. I must have information on every possible issue related to it.” That seemed fair enough to everyone, and off the committee went to work.
For the next year, the group came back to me every month or so and reported on the information they gathered. And each time I’d praise their work and ask several questions that would prompt them to do more research.
BUY-IN IS NOT ABOUT THE LEADER
As the leader, I had the responsibility to make sure the organization didn’t make an expensive mistake that would hurt it in the future. Delaying the decision helped me buy enough time for them to buy into me. Mean-while, I worked hard to build my credibility with the people. I forged relationships with the leaders in the church. I answered everybody’s questions so that they could understand me and how I thought as a leader. I shared my ideas, hopes, and dreams for the work we were doing. And I started to produce growth in the organization. That, more than anything else, gave the people confidence in me and my leadership ability.
As a leader, your success is measured by your ability to actually take the people where they need to go. But you can do that only if the people first buy into you.
After about six months, the people started to see that the church was changing and beginning to move in a new direction. In a year, the building committee decided that the activity center was not in the church’s best interest, and they recommended that we not build it. In another year, the people reached consensus: the key to the future was the building of a new auditorium. And when the time came, 98 percent of the people voted yes on the issue, and off we went.
When I arrived at that church, I could have tried to push my vision and agenda on the people. That’s probably what I would have done in my first leadership position because I was inexperienced and didn’t understand that belief in the leader was as important as belief in the vision. But by then I had matured a little. I knew my vision was the right thing to do when I arrived in 1972, just as sure as I was two years later when we implemented it. But if I had tried to sell my vision instead of selling myself, I wouldn’t have succeeded in helping those people get where they needed to go. And in the process I would have undermined my ability to lead them.
As a leader, you don’t earn any points for failing in a noble cause. You don’t get credit for being “right” as you bring the organization to a halt. Your success is measured by your ability to actually take the people where they need to go. But you can do that only if the people first buy into you as a leader. That’s the reality of the Law of Buy-In.
Applying
THE LAW OF BUY-IN
To Your Life
1. Do you have a vision for your leadership and your organization? Why do you lead? What are you trying to accomplish? Write your thoughts in a vision statement. Is that vision worthy of your time and effort? Is it some-thing you’re willing to give a significant portion of your life to? (If not, rethink what you are doing and why.)
2. What is the level of buy-in for the people you lead? If your team is small, list all of its members. If it is large, list the key players who influence the team. Now rate each person’s buy-in on a scale of 1 to 10. (A 1 means they won’t even follow you in areas where they are required to according to their job description. A 10 means they would follow you into battle even in the face of death.) If your people don’t buy into you, they will not help you execute your vision—even if they love it. They will find a new leader to lead them.
3. Think about ways you can earn credibility with individuals. There are many ways you can do that:
By developing a good relationship with them
By being honest and authentic and developing trust
By holding yourself to high standards and setting a good example
By giving them the tools to do their job better
By helping them to achieve their personal goals
By developing them as leaders
Develop a strategy with each person. If you make it your primary goal to add value to all of them, your credibility factor will rise rapidly.