How to achieve buyin
Have you ever been on a team where some people aren’t committed to the group or leader’s decision? It’s not a recipe for results.
Continuing this week’s discussion on effective team communication, here’s what you as a leader can do to get your team to buy into a decision, even when you don’t have consensus.
According to Patrick Lencioni, author of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, “Teams that commit to decisions and standards do so because they know how to embrace two separate, but related concepts: buy-in and clarity.
Buy-in is the achievement of honest emotional support. Clarity is the removal of assumptions and ambiguity about a situation.
Notice that he didn’t say that commitment is consensus. Waiting for everyone on a team to agree on a decision or path forward is a recipe for mediocrity, delay, and frustration.
Commitment is actually about the ability of a leader to get a group to agree to a decision when they don’t naturally agree.
Effective team leaders drive commitment by first extracting every possible idea, opinion, and perspective from the team, then having the courage and wisdom to step up and make a decision knowing full well it won’t sit well with everyone.
Strong leaders know that nine times out of ten, everyone sitting around that table will be able to commit to implementing the solution -- even if they’re opposed to it -- when their ideas are at least heard, understood, considered, and explained within the context of the ultimate decision.
Great team leads create a “disagree and commit” culture by ensursing clarity around a decision.
But wait, there’s more to achieving buy-in. You still need to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Does this story sound familiar?
After hours of discussion, the CEO and her team decide to respond to a downturn in the economy by implementing a hiring freeze until the bottom line improves, and the VP of HR is charged with communicating this to the company. The VP then sends an email to all managers announcing the decision, and within five minutes, three of the executives -- who were in the discussion with the CEO -- are in the VP’s office saying, “Wait a minute, that didn’t apply to my group!! We can’t freeze hiring in sales/engineering/finance!”
The team didn’t have clarity. And you can’t have buy-in if you don’t have clarity.
How to gain clarity within a team
Here’s a quick way that you as a leader can ensure everyone around the table is clear about a decision.
Stand at the whiteboard, or launch a notepad on your virtual meeting, and ask a simple question of your team.
“What exactly have we decided here today?”
Then write down what everyone says.
Within moments, you’ll hear things like:
“Wait a second. That’s not what I thought we agreed on.”
It’s amazing how a group of intelligent, highly educated adults can sit around a table discussing something for two hours and walk away thinking everyone is on the same page.
As George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
So what happens after you gain commitment? It’s time to hold each other accountable, which we’ll discuss tomorrow.
