by Carol J. Sutton apr, Fellow CPRS
"The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein: It rejects it." Dr. Peter B. Medawar
The short answer to this question is that "buy-in" is the flip side of "resistance". It’s when people – your team at work, your spouse and children, your late night pick-up hockey mates, your book club members, etc. – decide to accept a particular interpretation of a situation and cooperate to achieve a goal that looks like the best option in the given circumstances.
It’s not about swearing undying loyalty to a cause or suppressing one’s own ideas and concerns; far from it. Buy-in is the state achieved after working through the most likely possibilities and agreeing on what seems to be the best option at the time. How do we help our team mates and direct reports – and even those to whom we report – reach this important stage?
We start by remembering that it is not change, per se, that people resist. It’s actually the sense of "being changed" that results in most people digging in their heels. Being told what to think about and which perspective to take is sure to get my back up. You, too? (Yes, I thought so.)
So, what to do? First, resist the urge to "sell" or "spin" the solution you think is best. Too often we think we have to make people like the decision – and us – in order to get them to cooperate. Not so. The concept of Fair Process1 tells us that in order to accept the results and get on with things, people need to understand
how a decision is made;
agree that the decision-making process is fair, and
comprehend what is expected of them.
This is not the same as decision-making by consensus or democracy in the workplace. Not every opinion, need or interest can be accommodated; neither is this compromise for its own sake. Rather, it is the merit of the ideas themselves that determines the final decision.
According to Associate Principal, Emily Lawson, and, Director, Colin Price, McKinsey & Company, London2, when attempting to introduce complex changes, companies can transform the attitudes and behaviours of employees by implementing key insights from psychology and learning theory that provide a basis for understanding human emotional and intellectual responses.
"Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees – no easy task."
In other words, the crucial point is that all significant change is personal. This is especially so when circumstances seem to require dramatic change – e.g. due to global market forces, demographic shifts, skills shortages, etc. Herein lies the territory called organizational culture. "Since the collective culture of an organization, strictly speaking, is an aggregate of what is common to all of its group and individual mind-sets, such a transformation entails changing the minds of hundreds or thousands of people," say Lawson and Price.
The authors go on to suggest four conditions for changing mind-sets that are very much in line with the principles of Fair Process; i.e. people need to understand the "why" of the change and feel willing to give it a try. The rewards and recognitions in place must match up with new ways of doing things. The people being asked to change need to be trained in the skills needed to handle the new activities successfully, and, last but very much not least, employees need to see those they respect "walk the talk" – i.e. model the new behaviours.
It’s not just children who learn the biggest, strongest lessons from watching others. Adults, especially in the workplace, both consciously and unconsciously look to those whom they respect to provide leadership both in deeds as well as words. The people we seek to emulate may be those in positions of overt authority, those whose integrity we respect or those whose success we wish to replicate. Role models are spread throughout an organization and so, at every level, we must "walk the talk" if we are to lead by example.
That does not mean we all have to act identically, like some sort of "Stepford" robots. What we’re looking for in this instance is the ability to achieve outcomes consistent with the organization’s over-arching goals. So, you may mentor, coach and lead your team through a set of actions that are different form mine; nevertheless, we are both faithful to the Vision and Mission of the organization and get to the same place in the end.
The key is to be able to translate those big-picture statements into workable, bite-sized bits that your team and mine can achieve each and every day. The ability to develop and execute this translation is a communication competency; two-way by definition. "Communicate" and "change" are now buzzwords in the workplace. Far more rare is management education that shows people how to work with this translation requirement – from global injunction to local message, such as "The Manager Is The Medium™".3
Informal opinion leaders are just as important in reinforcing – or contradicting! – the new ways as official company role models. Lunchroom grousing about "another senior management shuffle" can undermine months of careful message building. There’s no substitute for knowing one’s audience – especially crucial "audiences of one" who will be quick to point out any inconsistencies in the changes being proposed.
Long-lasting learning is based on doing, i.e. experiential learning. It’s fundamental expression might well be traced back to Confucius. Circa 450 BC he is reputed to have said: "Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand." About 2,400 years later, Dr. David A. Kolb published Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (Prentice-Hall, 1984) and the shape of adult, lifetime learning was altered irrevocably.
Dr. Kolb’s work shows that adults first need time, to take in new information. Simply talking at them does not penetrate in such a way as to produce new or different behaviour. Then, people need opportunities to put their new understanding into action, using it in real life situations so that it becomes an integral part of their knowledge base.
One implication of this finding is a need for learning over some period of time: i.e. information broken into chunks, with occasions for practice and reflection in between is best. "Large-scale change happens only in steps," Lawson and Price remind us.
Another implication might be termed “to teach is to learn�. Following from the work of psychologist Dr. Chris Argyris, we now know that if a person has to impart the new information to others, he or she will develop a fuller and richer understanding of the material than they would have otherwise. According to Dr. Argyris' work, this occurs because learning and teaching call upon distinct sectors of the brain.
Based on the findings of Dr. B. F. Skinner’s work in motivation and rewards, organizational psychologists have concluded that to make new ways of doing things “stick�, the rewards must be sufficient to make the change worthwhile and consistently aligned with the new behaviours, to keep people on the desired track. Otherwise, the change message lacks credibility.
For instance, several decades ago when I was an eager, young practitioner of public relations in a corporate position, my role was to act as "in house" consultant to several managers of various of the company’s manufacturing facilities. Mine was a staff function, with no line authority; all I had was a limited power of persuasion to enjoin these gentlemen to engage in the appropriate communication activities.
After many months of trying to gain their attention, I finally learned that the process by which their performance was reviewed – and against which they were compensated – did not include any of the projects or programs in which I had naively assumed they would be interested. It was a hard, albeit lasting, lesson in how necessary it is to make reward systems match stated goals and objectives. Otherwise, the individuals cannily interpret the lack of review/reward as the real status of the objective; i.e. it has no credibility.
Working well in groups is another behaviour crucial to success today and it, too, needs appropriate reward. As reported in Fast Company (November, 1998) Robert Hargrove (author, Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration) says, "More and more of us are faced with having to achieve breakthrough goals and to solve complex problems. You can't do that alone. The only way to meet these kinds of challenges is through collaboration."
Collaboration means teamwork, another important concept that’s being reduced to buzzword monotony today. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to understand how to be an effective team member, as well as leader – in that order. Traditionally, we have all become used to working with our functional counterparts, a.k.a. "silos" – lawyers in the legal department, accountants in finance, communicators in PR, public affairs, etc. Now and from now on, organizational success rests on employees’ ability to move beyond their comfortable silos and work cross-organizationally.
To return to this column’s starting point – buy-in vs. resistance – HR Consultant Clinton Wingrove, Pilat (North America) Inc., says that "Any process that generates fundamental change will experience push-back. The measure should not be, 'Is there push-back?' If there is no push-back, then we are probably not doing much of value. Life is about occasionally being made to do things we don’t want to do; then being glad later.
"We should always ask ourselves, 'Are we comfortable with the people who are pushing back (e.g. Are these the ones we were hoping would change)?' and 'Is this the type of push-back we would expect (e.g. Are the things they are challenging focused where we expected the pain-point to be)?' … This is not a popularity contest."
That’s an important message for change leaders and communicators in all organizations.