A frequent challenge of entrepreneurial leaders is earning buy-in and a sense of ownership toward business outcomes. As a leader, you may believe that you must set strategy or make decisions alone, thus left to convince others of your viewpoints.
This tends to occur especially with team leaders and founders who are high achievers. It’s your ability to execute and make decisions quickly that’s created traction in the business. However, relying on this same paradigm stalls future growth. Being the “go-to” person for all decisions not only results in upward pressure in the organization, but also means you miss out on the ideas of your team, who may have a perspective that could result in a better outcome. As Schlesinger¹ shared,
“Getting to the ‘right answer’ without anybody who is supporting it or having to execute it is just a recipe for failure.”
What if you could act as both leader and facilitator to work with your team and collectively make decisions? This is why I created the Conscious Conversation Framework—a tool to increase collaboration and ownership among your team, and inherently leads to greater buy-in.
The Pressures Leaders Face
When we get our teams actively involved in strategic goal setting it creates buy-in because now they’re active participants. At the same time they’re learning from you about what’s important and what isn’t. As team leader you can play two different roles in these conversations.
- Expert – You have your lived experience that allows you to understand key aspects of the business such as the product, customer, growth strategy, and long-term vision. You have an informed opinion on the direction to take the business and the team.
- Facilitator – You’re guiding a specific group of people toward making a decision or creating an action plan. You’re helping to diversify the perspectives and to build safety to allow the best ideas to come into the business.
Most founders or managers only sit in the seat of expert. They make decisions and then wonder why it’s a struggle to get buy-in from the team. The Conscious Conversation framework invites you to create a balance between these two roles and teaches you how to be a facilitator in order to instill more buy-in, a greater sense of ownership and generally more excitement to achieve the goals of the team.
Continue reading on the Maven blog to see the step-by-step framework that will help you earn team buy-in and a sense of ownership toward business outcomes…
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¹Why Managers Should Involve Their Team In The Decision-Making Process, Harvard Business School Online, March 05, 2020
