Why Should Anyone Trust Your Vision?

Why Should Anyone Trust Your Vision?
1:06 PM Wednesday November 3, 2010

Recently, an Irish Times reporter interviewed me on the changes currently taking place in Ireland's finance industry (the nation's financial regulator had just announced the $39.3 billion price tag of the Anglo Irish Bank bailout). Clearly, much is going to have to change in the banks and how the government deals with them.

But there's a buy-in problem, as the reporter pointed out. "Why would subordinates trust management to develop a change vision in a situation like this, when management got the company into a mess? I would be worried I was being asked to buy into the wrong thing! And even if it was a good new vision, how are they going to get my support if I don't trust them?"

There are many aspects to this problem (and I probably didn't do a very good job of dealing with them all in the sound bite the reporter wanted). But let me address just one issue here.

The reporter's questions were based on an assumption that the way good decisions are made and implemented is sort of like this: (1) top management (often four smart people) analyze the situation or ask a consultant to; (2) then they create a plan and tell the troops to execute it, or, more likely these days, they "sell" it, or at least aggressively communicate it to their troops; (3) the troops take the direction and execute. The fact that many people, including the reporter, think like this is understandable given the way organizations have developed over the years, but — though many organizations still behave this way — it's not close to how the best organizations handle change today.

The conventional decide-execute model handles large changes very poorly. I've written much about this (starting with a book called Leading Change), but for now let's just say that success comes from a lot more people getting involved in the decision-making process, and not just by sticking them on a committee — I mean really engaging them so that they are interested and want to be involved. If done right, better data is brought into a decision, and by engaging people you have already set things up to make buy-in easier.

This isn't a co-opt strategy. You really want people from all over to contribute. When they do, and you go well beyond the original small cast that made the decisions that created problems, it gives the buy-in process more credibility. And it makes any decision/vision easier to communicate widely because the large cast who helped with the decision will be happily involved in the communication process.

Now this is a little more complicated than my brief summary to the reporter, but let me repeat the one single point I want to make: Almost all managers have been brought up in a world where small-numbers decide, large-numbers execute (after the large-numbers are "sold," which is almost impossible if the small-numbers are not trusted). People continue to think and act this way, often unconsciously. But that approach doesn't fit with today's reality.

When it comes to large-scale change in our increasingly diverse and fast-moving world, we need to engage people in the decision-making process, to get their buy-in and to get the job done well.

http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2010/11/why-should-anyone-trust-your-v.html