The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. 5 Steps to Building the Culture You Want Ah, to have a motivated team that consistently buys in to the vision, wouldn’t that be great? This E-book is a guide for results. Following these five steps will produce the results that countless managers identify as the results they are looking for when they want to employ the tactics of gaining motivation and buy-in. What do motivation and buy in get you? When employees are motivated, we imagine them as happy, able to adapt to changing conditions with a smile and a cheerful disposition. They would get along with each other because they understood the consequences and detriment to the business if they were to allow their disagreements and differences to interfere with what’s best for the business. We also imagine that they would be on the lookout for opportunities and threats to the business and to take action in the same way we as managers do. When employees buy-in, we imagine them as agreeing with our wants, needs and plans in a way that has them as energized about our ideas and direction as we are. You probably have your own definition for the desired outcomes of these two management tactics, take note of what’s missing for you here, you’ll be writing them down in a minute. Step one has us focusing on the results we want to see in the character of our organization, any set of characteristics that are shared by a group of people could be referred to as their culture. When we are referring to these characteristics in this guide, we will refer to them collectively as the culture. Step 1: In simple terms, define the culture you want. Here are some characteristics to get you started. These should come to mind quickly. We’re looking for universal qualities of great organizations. We want our workforce to be:
Happy Agile Productive Cooperative Collaborative Concerned about the interests of the business Agreeable with our direction Energized by our vision
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. If there are characteristics missing from this list, write them in the blank space below. The goal is to have a list of the characteristics that would be extremely satisfying if you were to have them present in your organization.
Step one is complete! You have identified the culture that you desire in your organization. We’ll begin step two after we get some clarity around motivation, buy-in and culture. Question… Are the tactics of gaining motivation and buy-in the most effective tactics to getting what you want? Let’s take a look at motivation: A simple definition of motivation is that people will move away from pain and towards pleasure. Conventional motivational techniques have had mixed results because of:
Incentives that are in place to move people towards something that might not be pleasurable at all or there might be unmet needs that have to be met before the incentive can be meaningful. For instance – it might mean more to me to stay home with my sick child when necessary than to win $100.00 or have a pizza party.
Consequences for people to move away from things that are not painful or may actually be better for the business. For instance – I might see the expectation of a certain amount of hours worked per week as a consequence of my being more productive in a particular week, and since I am required to come in at a specific time and leave at a specific time (which I see as arbitrary because my work load changes from week to week) I am less inclined to stay later when my work load is heavier.
Or:
In summary; who defines pleasure? Who defines pain? Each individual’s motives are influenced by an infinite number of dynamic occurrences.
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. What about buy-in: Buy-in implies that I need to get you to buy what I have, which puts me in the sales business. I’m going to strategize on how to present my “product” in the most appealing way, as to get you to see how it is going to benefit you. Additionally, there needs to be an exchange here (for your cooperation) that cannot possibly be equitable because of the imbalance of power between us. In summary, getting buy-in is a process for gaining superficial compliance. It appears that motivation and buy-in may be inefficient pathways toward getting what you want. Often, when we are thinking about motivation and buy-in, we are thinking about implementation. After all, that’s what we have employees for isn’t it? Imagine we’ve arrived at the place where we know what it is we want done. Maybe we’ve just returned from the strategic retreat with a strategic plan, or we’ve reviewed the latest customer or employee survey scores and we’ve isolated the areas for focus and growth… (Insert initiative here) The next logical question is how? How do we implement an initiative? We’ve made the connection that the upstream questions to motivation and buy-in are answered by our definition of the culture we desire. If you’ve completed step one, you have articulated the kind of culture you want, and you see that it makes good business sense to have this type of culture. Here is where we will depart from the tactics of motivation and buy-in altogether. The following steps of this guide will transform the question “How do I motivate and get buy-in” to “How do we create a culture that looks like the one I’ve outlined in step one?” Before you move forward, it is important that you make the connection in your mind that working on motivation and buy-in produce superficial results that try to answer the question “What kind of culture do we want?”. We’ll give your culture a name moving forward to help stress the point. We’ll call it a “High Performance Culture”. This diagram illustrates the transformation.
Motivation and Buy-in produce superficial results.
Step 1 (High Performance) Culture is a more accurate description of the culture I desire.
If I had the qualities of a high performance culture, I would be getting more of what I want. Carl Blanz, Llc. © Feel free to copy and distribute!
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. So, how do you create a high performance culture? Think of the things that have caused you to perform at a high level. What is it that gave you the drive, stamina, interest and commitment to accomplish something great? The universal lever that activates high performance is choice. You got to choose what it was that excited you. You had the ability to choose not to do the things that didn’t matter to you, which left you with drive to do the things that did matter to you. It is the exact same dynamic at play with a group of people, only we as managers make some assumptions about what people would choose, and fearful that they might not make the right choices, try to head those choices off at the pass. It is understandable that we would make assumptions, with the pressure to perform and to get a group of people to perform, someone has to lead and someone has to breakthrough and set the direction and tone to get things done. Add to that, the cultural make up of our generation(s). Those who built the industrial economy had the answers and the immigrant lower class wanted very much what the captains of industry had - jobs, a future, and possibilities, hope. So now we have some understanding of why we would approach culture building by trying to motivate people and trying to work towards buy-in. Great intentions, not always great outcomes. So how about a different way? Where do I start you ask? There are many ways and methodologies, if you Google “Motivation” you get “About 73,000,000 results (0.16 seconds)” This guide will further outline one way that has successfully and repeatedly helped organizations create the culture they desire. We would like to insert the disclaimer that this is not the only way, and that there are plenty of great companies out there that help organizations with this work, as well as plenty of great leaders and managers that have learned to do this on their own. Focus on the conversations you and your organization are having. Conversations that provide safety for anyone on the team to say “no” or in other words to choose, are conversations that get you to that place in each individuals soul that (because they have the ability to say no) makes their yes a true commitment. Every conversation has the potential for a collective yes. In order to have conversations that allow for individual voices to be heard (their ability to say no) the function of the leader shifts from teller to listener and from manager to facilitator. Make no mistake, this is still leadership. In fact this type of leadership takes courage, the courage to hear other perspectives and to build the way forward with the incorporation of the individual voices. Step one begins with leadership. There are as many ways to build the culture you desire as there are Google searches for motivation. The idea here is to articulate the characteristics (culture) you want to see in your organization and start talking about it with everyone in the organization. The process has a
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. beginning, but no end. Step one is a precursor to the other 4 steps. View it as an all-encompassing method for culture building. Steps 2 through 5 will address initiatives, or a specific vision that you would like to implement. This leads us to step 2. For steps 2 through 4, you will want to schedule a meeting with the team. Try to keep this to the team you immediately supervise. You will see that this process is invigorating; it can and should be cascaded through the organization. This process usually lasts about 3 hours but plan for 4. Step 2: The leader puts a stake in the ground, and holds it loosely. This courageous leadership begins with a stake in the ground. “We’re going to increase the employee satisfaction scores by 2% in the next 6 months”. Or to take from a page in history, “We’re going to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely within the next ten years.” The leader starts somewhere and holds the vision loosely - meaning that other voices are going to be heard, and the initial vision or initiative expanded. This is a critical stage with the potential to strike fear in the hearts of leaders and managers. This is where you move from teller to listener. A couple of things to help you be a great listener here:
An individual is heard when they make the statement “You understand me” not when they hear “I understand you” Only listen here and repeat back for real understanding, do not add or clarify your points yet Convert “what’s wrong” statements to “What’s missing for you” Resist your and the team’s temptation to move into capability, allow silence to fill in the empty space Be brave when you hear what isn’t going to work. Practice gently shifting what’s wrong to what’s missing for you? (Meaning them).
Once the team has all had the opportunity to be listened to and understood, you can move on to step 3. A clear signal that you are ready to advance to step three is when there are no more efforts to clarify one’s point of view. At this point, you will feel a collective sense of satisfaction with the conversation. Often this is a good time to take a little break in the conversation, you and your team are about to experience an energy boost. Get a hot cup of coffee. Step 3: Define what a successful outcome would look like. Begin reframing the initial stake in the ground in the context of the common ground identified in step two. Here’s where your facilitation skills come in. This is also a magical point at which you can model your care for everyone’s contribution by altering your original vision (loosely held) and incorporating the words that other team members had used. Be on the lookout for the group to want to start talking about “how”, gently assure them that we will get to that, but first we need to articulate the shared the vision or the “what”.
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. Keep reworking this and allowing the group to add-delete-change. You will find that the process of you as the facilitator searching for a shared way forward will be incredibly energizing to everyone involved. Step three will come to a natural conclusion when you (the facilitator) can get the thumbs up from everyone in the room that they are on for this vision, initiative… If you are getting some resistance, no problem, just go back to what’s missing and look for the opportunity to convert what’s wrong into what’s missing. At the end of step three, you should have a shared statement of what the next level of success looks like. Also keep in mind that you are part of the team, and it has to work for you as well. Step 4: Decide and make a plan Here is where most of us feel the most comfortable. This is where management skills are useful. Things like who will do what by when, what resources will be needed… This step can also be taken away and completed with sub groups or- individuals can work independently and meet again to review the final plan. If you have a process for planning, go with that. If you are not sure about the process, you might want to step aside and let a line manager facilitate this one. Keep in mind that by nature, your voice will be the loudest and can have a detrimental effect on this particular part of the process. It is also a good idea that accountability for the plan is to each other and to the shared outcome, be careful not to set it up so it is accountable to you. Of course you will need to have accountability built in. Your 3-4 hour session is coming to an end and can either include step 4 or not. To complete the process, ask or ensure that the plan includes a conversation at some point in the future around acknowledgement. This takes us to the final step. Step 5: Acknowledge This is a critical and often missed step in reinforcing the characteristics of a high performance culture. Acknowledgement reinforces what went well and the behaviors that individuals employed which we would like to see repeated. It is here that the human spirit is rewarded. You’ve no doubt experienced the feeling of a job well done and the recognition you received. Also and just as important is what didn’t go well, and what is currently not working. Make sure to put on your facilitator and listener hat again for this. What usually shows up are the problems. By now, I hope you’ve seen what to do with them. Convert them into what’s missing. At this point, you are able to begin the cycle again. This process is repeatable and intuitive, meaning you will most likely know what to do at any point in the process. If you get stuck, acknowledge it, and go back to listening. The following page is a summary of the process.
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The Leaders Guide to Getting Motivation and Buy-in. Step 1:
In simple terms define the culture you want. Begin having this conversation in you organization with everyone. Step 1 has a beginning and no end, it is all encompassing.
Step 2:
The leader puts a stake in the ground, and holds it loosely. Listen to understand, be brave.
Step 3:
Define what a successful outcome would look like Incorporate the voices; you’re looking for a shared vision for the next level of performance.
Step 4:
Decide and make a plan Accountability is to the initiative and the team. Don’t be the loudest voice here.
Step 5:
Acknowledge Celebrate what went well, reinforce the good behaviors and convert what’s wrong into what’s missing. Begin the process again for the next level of performance you and your team desire.
I wish you the very best in your journey to transform the concepts of motivation and buy-in into building a high performance culture. If you need any help, or a jump start, call or email me. Good Luck!
Carl Blanz Advisor | Facilitator Carl Blanz Llc. Leadership > Culture > Collaboration www.mobiusteams.com carl@mobiusteams.com (952) 221-7814
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