Winning a seat at the table - Do your stakeholder's buy-in to your part of the business?

When I wrote my book Buy-in: How to Lead Change, Build Commitment and Inspire People last year, it was very much to share my experience leading major programs and projects over the last twenty years.

What has surprised me since it was published however, is that the challenges we face as leaders with buy-in run much deeper than any program or project that I have led. I regularly hear from leaders in IT, security, finance, HR, legal, procurement and risk, who are struggling with a lack of stakeholder support on a daily basis. Not just with their programs and projects, but with a lack of buy-in to their broader functions too.

The one thing that these functions all have in common is that they are all corporate, cross-business, services. They are created as an organisation grows when it makes sense to centralise specialist functions; but this can often cause problems too. In 2014 Sven Kunish et al. reported that fewer than 10% of the companies they surveyed were were highly satisfied with the effectiveness of their corporate functions. In my experience this lack of satisfaction is triggered by other challenges too:

• Centralisation creates distance between our functions and the people that we are there to serve.
• Our functions becomes faceless, people choosing to "Call HR" or "Speak to security" rather than having trusted relationships with our people in it.
• We are so busy being a jack of all trades for the business, that ironically we become a master of none.
• We are accused of being in our ivory-towers, bureaucratic or interfering.

But probably the toughest challenge we face as corporate services is that our function becomes a business unit itself. We have to jostle with other business units for space on the strategic priorities list - often coming off worse while we try and justify how investment in our function helps the organisations bottom-line.

For a long time this outcome might have been ok. Our functions might have gotten away with minimal uplifts while others got the lions share in the past, but we are now under increasing pressure to change our functions rapidly too. CEO priorities such as future-proofing our workforce, cybersecurity, digitisation, emerging technologies, data privacy and regulation, are critical to our organisations ability to operate in the future, yet the focus for many of our stakeholders keeps defaulting to their needs here and now.

When stakeholders pay lip service to our functions it's incredibly frustrating. Personally it can feel quite insulting too. Our stakeholders try and pigeon hole us based on our functional expertise, giving us a seat at the table when it matters to demonstrate commitment, only to then ignore our leadership and advice because they haven't really bought in.

Understanding the buy-in we have today

I'm of the belief that the buy-in every corporate service has lands somewhere on a spectrum. At the bottom of this spectrum is the token support I mentioned earlier. Yes our organisation needs our function, but in the grand scheme of their priorities, their lack of interest tells us that our remit is kind of irrelevant too.

This realisation for any leader is a tough pill to swallow, it's like a parent giving a child fifty cents to go away and play and I know first hand how much this hurts.

Marginally better than tokenism is a tacit understanding that our functions need to exist. It's an unspoken agreement that we need to help our organisation operate and do what it needs to. We have more stakeholder support but our remit only extends to meeting the organisations basic needs, essentially we're just "there". We're taken for granted, like a laptop that starts up every morning.

Hardly inspiring or particularly fulfilling.

At some point, most of us get to enjoy tactical stakeholder support. This is when our stakeholders recognise some form of burning platform enough that our remit increases to include one or many special projects. I like to call this band-aid buy-in.

The challenge with band-aid buy-in is that our stakeholders are now looking for outcomes beyond our business-as-usual. They need us, and our teams to lift, to deliver something bigger and better than we have before.

From here, one of two things usually happen.

A few of us will grab the bull by the horns and lead our functions and wider organisation to success.

A few of us will try and grab the bull by the horns, and our organisation will buck us straight back off again.

We have a crack at demonstrating our worth, try and deliver bigger and better, but it backfires because here's the thing...

When we deliver corporate services to the rest of the organisation, we don't just need buy-in from our executive, we need everyone else onboard too. This is real test of whether our corporate functions can deliver the value that our organisation needs. This is what builds trust and extends our remit so that we have the seat we want at the table.

So where is yours?

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Next week I'll be digging into how to get buy-in to your corporate service and the how to get your stakeholders to buy-in to you, your team and wider organisation too. If you enjoyed this article and we're not connected please feel free to connect!

About the Author

Julia is on a mission to help individuals, teams, and organisations deliver bigger, BETTER!

She has spent over two decades making great strategies a reality, executing change, and delivering benefits to organisations around the world.

Now, as a speaker, trainer, facilitator, and coach, Julia works with leaders and their teams to deliver meaningful change that matters.

Whether you are struggling with traction, are being challenged to do more with less, or need to unite around strategy, big ideas, and transformational goals, Julia knows that if you want to deliver bigger results, you have to be able to deliver better.

Julia is the author of “Buy-in: How to Lead Change, Build Commitment and Inspire People,” and is a graduate of Stanford University’s Executive LEAD program. She is based in Melbourne, Australia and works with leaders and their teams across the Asia-Pacific and US.

Contact her at [email protected] if this article sparked your interest and you're keen to explore more.