Getting Stakeholder Buy-in with Lisa Mitchell

“Given Talent Leaders are stuck in the sticky organizational middle, EVERYONE is a stakeholder.”

- Lisa Mitchell

How can we make the buy-in part of the process EASIER and more ELEGANT?    

Today’s episode is a solo one.  The need for stakeholder buy-in is constant for all Talent leaders.   Yet there are common pitfalls and mistakes made that make some initiatives more difficult or worse, fail.  That’s why I decided it was time to talk about the challenges and how to avoid them, and give you some questions you can take away to think about that will help you be more successful at getting buy-in.

I’d love to hear YOUR thoughts on getting stakeholder buy-in.  Seriously!   How do you do this?  What trips you up sometimes?    Send me an email at lisa@greenappleconsulting.ca, or a message via Linkedin.   

In this episode of Talent Management Truths, you’ll discover:

Some key challenges with getting buy-in

• Questions to ask yourself to help you work through a situation with a stakeholder who has resisted buying into a solution you have proposed:
  • What is NOT within your control?
  • What IS within your control?  
  • If you couldn’t fail and there was no fear of the response you might get, what new approach would you try?
• Mistakes Talent Leaders make when trying to get buy-in - and how to avoid these

Enjoy!

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Transcript

LM Ep 111

 [00:00:00] Welcome back to Talent Management Truths. I'm your host, Lisa Mitchell, and today is a mini solo episode about a topic that's really, really important to every single talent leader, and the topic is [00:01:00] getting stakeholder buy-in. It's complex sometimes whether you work in a small, medium, or large organization.

I define a stakeholder simply as a person who has an interest in something. So if you're working on a strategy or initiative and need to implement it, you probably have a whole list of people, stakeholders who have an interest in what you're doing. It's a really broad term. Stakeholders come in all shapes and sizes, different styles, different preferences, different baggage, different lenses and perspectives.

You might have a stakeholder who needs to authorize some part of the project, or they might need to be consulted upon it, or they'll be directly impacted by the project. As an end user, you get the drift. Now, sometimes you have certain stakeholders who are allies or advocates, and then you might have others who are resistors or rebels.

And sometimes there are the stakeholders that we forget to think about in the first place. That's a really common mistake, unfortunately. And for [00:02:00] talent leaders especially, well, this is an ongoing consideration because talent leaders like you are stuck in the sticky organizational middle, and everyone for you is a stakeholder.

Plus talent leaders are usually overloaded with work and don't necessarily have enough time or. Believe they don't to think out their buy-in strategy. So today is your lucky day. Thanks for joining me because we're going to explore this central question. How can we make the buy-in part of this process easier and more elegant?

Well, let's walk around the issue and get a sense of what can get in the way. When you think about getting stakeholder buy-in, in your world, what challenges do you run into? In my experience, and this is backed up by what I hear daily from my clients, those challenges include unreasonable stakeholders, not enough resources.

So really fast timelines and the [00:03:00] fact that talent leaders are very much service focused. They want to add value. Let's address the unreasonable stakeholder challenge first. Well, I remember a certain SVP that I worked with years ago. He often seemed to resist buying into programs or solutions that I had proposed or needed to execute upon.

And his reactions, to be completely honest, led me to dread approaching him on anything. And yet I had to. Without going into all the gory details, I can say that we eventually learned how to trust and work with each other. It took time, and what I realized was I had to focus on what I could control and what I could not.

For example, I could control my own reactions to what I felt was his resistant behavior. I could choose not to take that behavior personally. I could choose to focus on Lisa Mitchell, him, [00:04:00] which my team, if any of them are listening. Any of my team over the years used to use as an alternative to the phrase kill them with kindness.

I could literally be so consistently pleasant and reliable and competent that it would wear him down. This stakeholder eventually became an ally, and he admitted to me later that he did resist initially because he'd felt ignored or disrespected by my predecessor. So it actually had nothing to do with me.

But when I got that initial reaction, I stopped consulting him early enough and thoroughly enough because I wanted to avoid 'em altogether. It was a vicious circle really. Now let's talk about the challenge of not enough resources, really fast timelines. Here's the thing, I don't have a story for you, but I can tell you that I've told myself that that same kind of story before, and we always have fast timelines.

Change is, is the only constant, I think, what needs to happen. Is, we've gotta be really [00:05:00] organized. We need to have an overarching tool, a strategy that that we use, that we go to that ensures that we are looking at all of the resources at our disposal, and we're working with the timelines we have, and we're managing expectations with stakeholders along the way.

Let's take a look at the third challenge. The fact that talent leaders like you are very service focused and are, and really wanna add value. the issue that comes up a lot that I see is we can sometimes try to add too much value. And what that means is that you might kind of fall into the advice monster trap and, and be really prescriptive, for instance.

and kind of push stakeholders away, they might not feel like they have enough involvement. So it's this idea of falling in love with your solution too early and going too far down the path before you've really gotten that buy-in early on so you could [00:06:00] waste time in the end. This I see, I see a lot.

And so don't feel bad if, if you've done this, but I would invite you to think about, okay. I need to have an overarching kind of straw model design. And then I need to build in the time to, to go back to my stakeholders, vet that I'm on the right track, that it makes sense. 'cause there's always gonna be new thoughts and new ideas that come up.

And then I can go back. So it's this embracing of the iteration. Okay, so let's bring it to your world. I invite you to think of somebody. That you work with in your world. Think of a stakeholder who's resisted buying into a solution that you've proposed. And I'm gonna give you some questions. I'll put them in the show notes, some questions that you can work through, ideally by writing down your answers really powerful.

So the first question is, okay, as you think about the stakeholder who's resisted what is not within your control, okay, what is within your [00:07:00] control? And finally, if you could not fail and there were, there was no fear of the response you might get, what new approach would you try? Okay, now I wanna shift into talking a little bit about my observations.

So the biggest mistakes. And the work I do, and I talk to hundreds of leaders every year, hundreds individually in my group programs. You know, for this podcast, the biggest mistake I see them making and that I've seen myself make quite honestly in my long career when it comes to getting stakeholder buy-in, are I.

One missing, one of the key pillars of communication and change management that are critical to driving buy-in. And I have a model that I use, and I'm putting my proprietary stamp on it right now as I say it out loud. I'm, I'm hoping to write a book about it eventually, but it's, it's this idea of providing acknowledgement, really showing your stakeholder that you've seen them, that you've [00:08:00] heard them, and this is trickier for people to do than they think.

It's not the same as, praise. So acknowledgement. The second thing is context. Always providing more context than you think the person needs, right? Really helping them understand, you know, the where for of this initiative that you're, that you're trying to move along. The other piece is involving people really key for communication and change management.

Give people a say. If they can't have a say in the decision itself, then have a say in how the decision is acted upon. Provide choice. Another mistake I see is giving up too soon. And you know, you get to control how often you try. So, you know, I talked about that one stakeholder in my experience where I kind of, kind of slowed down my attempts to try to talk to 'em 'cause it was so dreadful.

But ultimately I think that we can plant seeds and then water them right? And just [00:09:00] not try to push too hard, too fast. Give people time. Another mistake is getting overwhelmed. Okay, so I see this with talent leaders. You guys are run off your feet. Meetings, meetings, meetings. So much going on. So break it down, make it manageable, think about and plan out how can you build in checkpoints to ensure buy-in has been established at the get-go early on, and that it's being maintained throughout the life of your initiative or strategy.

Another mistake is not preparing, not setting an an intention before you, try to build a relationship and get, buy-in from a stakeholder. So make building this. Buy-in part of your strategy and action plan. Actually think about it and have some steps. A further mistake is not being clear on what the stakeholder needs or wants.

So I think that, again, this sort of goes back to falling in love with our own solutions. [00:10:00] You know, really check your assumptions and, and ask yourself if you're sort of, you know, I believe I know what's best and they need to just listen to me. be open to not knowing, be open to really learning something new from this stakeholder.

The final mistake I wanted to mention, and I know this is quite the list, is judging the stakeholders or not trusting them and then not showing up the way you really want to show up. So, you know. Try to notice, are you feeling yourself become defen, becoming defensive, perhaps too aggressive or too passive?

Or maybe even getting into micromanaging that stakeholder, whether it's an employee or a senior leader. You know, we can, we can get a little bit too pushy with the email follow ups and, and, and that kind of thing, right? A little bit passive aggressive, something to think about. So with these common mistakes in mind, at this point, I'm, I'm going to [00:11:00] ask you to think back to the same stakeholder situation I asked you to think about earlier, or feel free to consider a new one now.

What three ideas do you have for improving their buy-in, and what will you do about that over the next week? My little challenge or homework for you? Finally, let me leave you with the following thoughts. One, you cannot over communicate. It's critical that you embed and thread your key messages, the benefits, the reason for buy-in throughout your initiative.

Two, get strategic about building buy-in. Ensure you've covered all angles. Make sure you have support from the top, the bottom, and a across. And don't take it for granted. Work to sustain it. Three frame reasons for buying in based on outcomes that the stakeholders want and need. [00:12:00] Step into their shoes.

Think about what they, what you want them to know, what you want 'em to feel, what you want them to believe, and what you finally want them to do. I had love to hear your thoughts on getting stakeholder buy-in. So you know, please send me an email at lisa@greenappleconsulting.ca or send me a message via LinkedIn.

I'd absolutely love to geek out with you, and I'm not kidding if you found this episode valuable. Please leave me a five star review with comments ideally so that others can find the show. I'll be sure to pop those inquiry questions that I post to you in the show notes so that you can come back to them if you do happen to be driving or walking the dog right now.

Have a great rest of your day and thank you for listening.

 [00:13:00]