Buy-In – The Imperative Strategy

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In providing research and developing training programs for various large corporations about managing change, we find that the biggest stumbling block for employees from top-down is lack of buy-in. Top executives have the vision, but often fail to get buy-in from managers who have to carry out the change initiative. This lack of buy-in trickles down and pretty soon everyone is at odds with the change because not having been in the initial ideation sessions, they don’t see any value. Great change initiatives have died on the vine because ‘THEY are just giving us more needless things to do.’

This idea is supported by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, authority on leadership and change, who finds that in order to succeed, 75% of the company’s management, needs to ‘buy into’ the change.

Busy managers, who are already overwhelmed with previous change initiatives, tend to panic and jump in too fast with new systems; they act without proper preparation and neglect to get input from their team which leads to a very bumpy ride. Systems fail to reach their full potential and people become frustrated, which results in pushback, absenteeism, and low productivity. In his book entitled Influence by Robert Cialdini he explains that one of the most influential words in the English language is ‘because’. Studies have proven that no word has more power to motivate people to take action than ‘because’. Simply adding this word to a request, to a statement, to a call to action, the numbers of people who respond go up exponentially. In other words, people need a reason to give their buy-in otherwise they won’t do it, drag their heels or do it very badly.

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About the Authors

Sarah Gee is co-author of Business Improv, and as senior faculty member for The Second City Business Communications has informed, challenged, inspired and entertained audiences for Fortune 1000 companies across the globe. As facilitator, consultant, and coach she shapes and builds corporate competencies for major corporations such as General Motors, MB Financial, and United Airlines. Sarah also helps develop future leaders with Business Management training programs for executive MBA students at the University of California, Anderson School of Management, Duke University Fuqua School of Business and Columbia College. Contact Sarah: [email protected].

Val Gee is author of several books published by McGraw-Hill including: Business Improv, The Winner’s Attitude and Super Service. Since arriving in America from England in 1983, Val has designed, developed and delivered training solutions for business professionals worldwide including: Motorola, Hyatt Hotels, Siemens, DeVry University, GE Healthcare and HSBC. Bringing the power of her capability to focus on thought leadership, change management, and generating creativity, Val is currently facilitating several workshops around the U.S., for employees of a large government agency. Contact Val: [email protected], www.mjlearning.com.

Project Management – Post Implementation Productivity

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Projects introduce new products and services, processes, applications, and standards to the organization. Regardless of the change, individuals within the organization will not possess the same level of familiarity and proficiency with these new item(s) as they had with those already existing. Subsequently, productivity will drop in magnitude and duration correlating to the change preparation of the organization.

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A Technology Case Study: Implementing What the Customer Wants

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleIn order for any change to occur – whether it’s a decision to purchase a product, or an implementation to add new technology – whatever touches the ultimate solution must buy-in to the change.

Often our focus is on getting the end-result we think we want. We forget that without buy-in from the necessary people and policies that maintain the status quo, we face the high cost of the resistance emanating from pushing change into a system that believes that it’s fine, thanks.

I’d like to share a story about how I helped my own tech guys shift their project work and our revenue as a result of having decision facilitation skills. At the end of the day, unless there is a decision – one person at a time – to adopt to, know how to, and be willing to change, there will be resistance and possibly failure.

First Signs of Trouble
In 1983, in London, I started up a body shop/recruitment company to support the ‘new’ language and ’4GL’ support technology called Focus. As the first company that supported this language (26 competitors grew up in the field) we grew quickly. Seemingly overnight we had 43 tech folks going out to client sites as programmers, systems analysts/designers, project managers/leaders.

Within the first months, I began hearing murmurs of annoyance from the folks: “Stupid users.” “We have to spend twice as long redoing what they told us to do!” “Why don’t they get it right when we first talk to them?”

As a test to see what was going on that was creating so much failure and cost (time/money), I called in my head tech guy to design a requirement I’d been complaining about.

Julian’s first question was: “What do you want?” I didn’t know how to respond because 1. I wasn’t a techie and didn’t know how to explain to him in his language; 2. I didn’t have the right description, as it was mostly a picture in my mind; and 3. no one in 1983 had the vocabulary or capability we have now. So I responded “I don’t know.” Julian smirked. “This is what I hear from clients. But I know what you want. I’ll take care of it and show you some screens next week.” We were already in the middle of the problem.

What he created was from his own vantage point, using his own beliefs and limiting assumptions (remember again that it was in 1983, and my ideas were well beyond the capability of the technology). “This is all wrong,” I said.

Julian’s eyes glazed over. In the UK you don’t tell the MD that she’s a Stupid User. I continued: “Imagine where we’d be now if you had started our conversation with ‘ What would you have if you had all of your wishes and dreams, and a computer could do everything that your brain would like to do?’ With that, I could have I would have ‘designed’ screens and offered colors and made up functionality. That would have been a far better start.

New Skills for Internal Consultants
I realized that all of our tech guys needed decision facilitation skills to enable them to

  • recognize how to bring together the appropriate elements to be included in a way that would serve both the strategic AND tactical elements,
  • elicit the right data at the right time so the clients could get their projects completed efficiently,
  • eliminate resistance.

I taught the 43 tech guys my ‘Buying Facilitation® model (a decision facilitation model that is a change management model, independent of buying or selling). The results were instant, and dramatic.

  • The systems designers were able to elicit the right data and develop the exact right design the first time with no redos.
  • The systems analysts not only understood the tech issues, but were able to understand and address all of the personal/human issues and manage the change and potential resistance issues upfront, before they became a problem.
  • The programmers got the proper information to code the first iteration, with a minimum of changes.
  • The client didn’t need the work to be redone.
  • The clients got to hear/see/feel their vision of success and agree to it before anyone moved ahead with technology.
  • The projects were completed well before time – sometimes 25% sooner – and since we were being paid on a project basis, we made more money and the team was freed up for the next project.
  • The clients trusted us so much that they handed over much of their own programmer’s work to us and were able to take on additional creative projects that they hadn’t planned.
  • With 26 competitors, we captured 11% of the market (even with prices well over 40% higher than everyone…. my nickname was Sharon Drew Blood), and my clients signed sole supplier contracts.
  • Everyone was happy, and I kept all of my employees for 4 years.

In fact, my competition tried to steal my employees; no one budged, regardless of the money that was thrown at them. I made sure they had plenty of personal time off, I took them for darts/beer at the local pub once a month, and I made sure they were happy. Plus I kept them doing what they loved, rather than having to deal with any ‘issues.’

I hired a ‘Make Nice Guy’ (who I also trained) to go make sure everything chugged happily along: if any sort of problem – client concern, project glitch, personality issue, tech malfunction – occured, it was his regardless of time of day. Or he could take the day off.

As a result, I had nothing to do but grow my company. And I was able to exit after under 4 years, with 3 branches in two countries (offices in London, Stuttgart, Hamburg), $5,000,000 revenue (remember this was a start up in 1983, in a huge depression) and a 43% net profit.

Your tech folks and internal consultants need decision facilitation skills in addition to technology skills. Because at the base of it all are humans who resist change, get confused, hang on to turf, and don’t always communicate properly. Let me know if I can help you design a program for your tech folks or internal consultants:[email protected]

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the new book Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Inspiring Employees with a Values-Rich Environment

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Even if your corporate culture leaves a lot to be desired, managers can create a localized environment that inspires your employees to achieve peak performance. It’s a fact that I discovered over and over in my work for JetBlue, Southwest, Doubletree and other companies with high-performing cultures: the vast majority of your employees want to work in a place where people care about customers and each other, are fully engaged, take pride in their work, and feel the obligation to continually improve. In other words, they want you to create an inspiring culture, even if it’s just in your department. They will even help you create it, if you show them the way.

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About the Author

Ann Rhoades, author Built on Values: Creating an Enviable Culture that Outperforms the Competition, is president of People Ink, a culture-change consulting firm. Ann serves on the Board of Directors for JetBlue and P.F. Chang’s. She was one of the five founding executives of JetBlue Airways; Chief People Officer for Southwest Airlines; and Executive Vice President of Team Services at Doubletree and Promus Hotel Corporations. To read Ann’s complete biography, click here.

Everybody Loves Bob – Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done

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StrategyDriven Change Management ArticleEverybody loves Bob. He’s a corporate hero. Just last week Bob was watching television after dinner, but he wasn’t really watching. Instead he was thinking about work, as he does most nights. Suddenly it hit Bob: he hadn’t checked to make sure engineering had included the new wiring diagram in the customer’s shipment that was due to go out first thing in the morning. Without the diagram the equipment would be useless.

“I don’t know what time I’ll be home,” he shouted to his wife as he bolted out the door, jumped into his car, and sped to the plant.

Jerry was on guard duty at the gate and greeted Bob warmly. He was accustomed to Bob showing up at all hours of the day and night. Bob went straight to the shipping dock. Sure enough, the box was sitting there ready to go, and it didn’t contain the wiring diagram. It took Bob an hour to track down a copy of the diagram, put it in the box, and reseal it for shipment. He got home at midnight.

That’s the kind of thing Bob does all the time. And the bosses recognize his devotion and applaud it often. He’s gotten raises and been promoted, and he’s been named Employee of the Month five times in the past two years. Many of his co- workers now emulate Bob and give an extra measure, too.

No doubt about it, Bob’s a great guy. Trouble is, his company’s approach to getting work done is a raging disaster.

Bob is forced to be a hero because he’s a loyal and ambitious employee struggling to overcome his company’s chaotic processes for getting things done. He gets lots of credit for making the fix to save the customer, but he’s constantly creating dramatic work-arounds because the existing processes create problems that shouldn’t exist. Worse still, Bob’s behavior and the accolades he receives simply reinforce the notion that everyone should work around the system. No one seems to grasp that if the system were fixed, there would be no need for heroes like Bob.

There are lots of companies like Bob’s, fragmented and inefficient. They survive despite themselves only because people like Bob are constantly fixing things. It may take thirty days to fill a customer order, but only three of those days involve real work. The rest of the time people are arguing about who’s responsible for some part of the order or the order is languishing in someone’s in- box.

For well over a century managers have achieved increasing productivity on ever larger scales by dividing and subdividing work into smaller and smaller units. The modern corporation that has evolved as a result consists of many specialized functional departments, such as sales, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and finance. The people who work in a given department all focus on the same departmental goal— advertising promotes sales, shipping moves the product, procurement buys the parts— and they report to the executive in charge of their department, who measures their performance and rewards or penalizes them according to the department’s own metrics.

Most companies get metrics all wrong. They allow each department to determine what it wants to measure. And because you get what you measure, each department gets a different and often uncoordinated result.

There is an alternative to the fragmented work process, and it allows us to be faster, cheaper, and better. It isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight, but for those who master it the results are astounding.

The only way to survive in this ever-changing, expanding, globalizing economy is to continually adapt. Often this requires examining our processes from a macro-level. Getting a 50,000-foot picture of our operations illustrates outdated, cumbersome, inefficient processes. Rather than a series of discrete steps, work becomes an end- to- end continuum. People no longer focus entirely on their own jobs with no notion of how their work affects their colleagues’ ability to do their jobs or even the customer. Instead, they are thinking about the whole and not the parts, about outcomes instead of activities, about the collective rather than the individual.

About the Authors

Michael Hammer was a bold and revolutionary thinker, the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, the most important business book of the 1990s. Named to Time magazine’s first list of the twenty-five most influential Americans, the business world lost one of its rare geniuses when he passed away in September of 2008. Dr. Hammer was also the author of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade as well as articles in the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management and other publications. To read Michael’s complete biography, click here.

Lisa W. Hershman is the Chief Executive Officer of Hammer and Company. She is a seasoned business professional and author, who brings a wealth of real-world experience and an innovative style to her position at Hammer and Company. Lisa is the co-author of the business guide Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done (rated 8 out of 10 by Inc. Magazine) and an inspirational and sought-after speaker and conference moderator/leader both in the United States and internationally. She is a regular contributor to BusinessWeek and her columns have appeared in Forbes.com and Foxnews.com. She has appeared as a business expert on Fox Business News, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Ron Insana Show, and other nationally syndicated business radio programs.