Go for Involvement - Not Buy-In

Many leaders today promote employee “buy-in” as the first step to engaging and energizing their people. However, in my experience, when you start by going for buy-in, things grind to a halt. Why? Because most of us don’t “buy-in” to someone else’s ideas until we see the results. Engagement requires energizing people so they act together to produce a desired result.

So, how do you energize a group to take aligned actions to accomplish your business objectives? I have one word for you… 

Involvement 

…But not just any kind of involvement; you need directed team involvement that creates the clarity, safety, and accountability necessary to move forward rapidly as a unified team. 

Organizations attempt this all the time and fail because they: 1) set functional priorities, 2) create plans in isolation, and 3) assign ownership to isolated individuals or functions.

As leaders, we need an entirely new approach to achieve success. We need to mobilize our leadership team to: 

1. Set cross-functional priorities
2. Create outcome-driven plans
3. Ensure shared ownership for the desired results.

1) Setting cross-functional priorities

First the leadership team must prioritize the initiatives that need cross-functional resources and coordination. These initiatives should include a small number of high-leverage priorities so everything doesn’t become priority #1. 

The management of projects that are more functional or individual in nature and need minimal input and support from others should be delegated to the appropriate function or individual.

2) Creating outcome-driven plans 

The bulk of project plans I have seen over the years only define the deliverables (which are usually only the methods for achieving your desired outcomes) and assume everyone understands the desired outcome the deliverables are intended to produce. This is a fatal flaw. 

The new approach is your leadership team needs to clearly answer the following questions for each top priority, cross-functional project: 

• What is the scope of the project and when does it need to be completed?
• If we successfully complete the project, what new business outcomes do we expect as a result?
• What deliverables does the team need to provide to ensure we achieve the desired outcomes?
• What challenges or roadblocks can we expect?
• What are the keys to successful project implementation and deployment?

The answers to these questions form the project charter and should be handed to the project leader and their team. And guess what… all your key leaders are on-board because everyone was involved in creating the charter.

3) Ensuring shared-ownership for the desired results 

This step is the most powerful, yet counterintuitive of all three steps. It is the one that creates both safety and accountability so everyone in your organization will move forward at full speed. Rather than assigning “ownership” of top-priority, cross-functional projects to a single leader, your leadership team must take shared-ownership for the success of the project. This means the leadersthip team is responsible for monitoring, surfacing, and quickly resolving any cross-functional issues related to the top priority projects.

To accomplish this, the focus of leadership meetings must also be changed. Meetings should include structured time to surface and solve priority project issues that can’t be handled at the project team level. In addition, the leaders need to shift from holding people accountable for micro tasks to accepting accountability for identifying and addressing major risks to milestones and outcomes.

These three simple steps creates buy-in because they demonstrates leadership’s commitment to making the tough decisions needed to accomplish our most important initiatives. It is our demonstrated commitment to what we say is important that wins the hearts and minds of our employees.