Five Reasons Why Compliance Is Not Buy-In

Have you ever been voluntold to do something? This is when a person or a team is volunteered for something without their actual consent. An example is when a manager says to a team, “I knew your project would be the best use case for this coaching, so I went ahead and put your names down”.

This can be quite annoying!

Now imagine being asked to run a workshop for a team that has been voluntold to show up and work with you. This is a situation I find myself in quite often. The last time it happened, the team showed up for the meeting upset. They were so hostile that you could feel it through their cameras on the Zoom call.

The fact that the team was upset is not that surprising. Research on psychological reactance theory shows that people react negatively to their autonomy or freedom being restricted. Even online recommendation engines have been found by researchers to trigger psychological reactance. When people feel that they are losing their autonomy, they are motivated to reassert their control.

So this first meeting was a real challenge. One of the team members made it clear that she didn’t understand why they were there. She didn’t think they needed my help since their innovation project was already making good progress. We eventually got to a point where they agreed to give me a chance.

Compliance Is Not Buy In

Working with this team reminded me that getting people to comply with a leader’s request is not the same as getting them to buy-in. You only have buy-in when two factors are present, a positive evaluation of your initiative and active participation that contributes to success. This definition makes it clear that compliance is not buy-in and there are five reasons for this:

1. Motivation: Compliance comes from external pressures to follow rules and policies due to fear of consequences. In contrast, buy-in comes from internal motivation where people genuinely view the initiative as valuable and legitimate. In other words, they are invested in its success.
2. Engagement: When people are forced to comply, they will do the bare minimum to meet expectations. When they buy-in, they will take ownership and control by actively seeking creative solutions to problems.
3. Communication: When people do the bare minimum it means that they will only do what they are instructed to do. So communication mostly flows from the authority figure to the team. Leaders have to consistently give instructions about what needs to be done. When there is buy-in, communication is more likely to be two-way as the team shares challenges and insights.
4. Commitment: Compliance has to be sustained by active surveillance because it is situational. Leaders have to keep checking that people are doing the work to a good enough standard. When people are bought-in, they don’t need active oversight or supervision to do what is needed for success.
5. Resilience: When people are forced to comply they will be constantly looking for a way out of the situation. So when things get difficult they are far more likely to abandon the initiative. In contrast, people who are bought-in believe in the cause, so they are more resilient in the face of adversity.

What this means is that people that are engaged in compliance are less emotionally invested compared to those who buy-in. When leaders need to get things done quickly and the situation is short-term, buy-in may not be as important. However, for longer initiatives, getting buy-in is essential for success.

Moving Beyond Compliance

One possible way to move people beyond compliance is to involve them in the design of the initiative. When people feel a sense of ownership in the initiative, they are far more likely to buy-in.

But it is not possible to involve everyone in designing an initiative or in making strategic decisions. In that case, leaders have to find a way to give people a sense of autonomy, even as they are pushing a decision that has already been made. For example, leaders can communicate that a decision has been made, but give people autonomy in how to implement the strategy.

In an article about getting buy-in, Roger Martin describes a situation where, as Dean of the Rotman School of Management, he made strategic decisions by seeking advice from his senior team, students, alumni and university administration. The final decision fell to him as Dean of Rotman School.

When he later communicated the decision to his EMBA director he simply explained his reasoning behind the decision. He didn’t tell the director how to implement the decision, he left those choices to her. She knew more about the EMBA landscape than Roger did. The result was a successful turnaround of the EMBA program at Rotman School of Management.

Getting Buy In

Back to the team that had been voluntold to work with me. At first we had a few awkward exchanges. The conversion got better when I told them that I wasn’t there to tell them what to do. I was there to serve them. They would not have to go back and redo things they had already done. Their project was already on track for success. My role was to meet them where they are. They could use me as a resource for designing and implementing their next steps. This framing gave them back control and thawed the ice in the Zoom meeting. We were able to move beyond the awkwardness and the collaboration went well from that point on.

The key takeaway here is that getting people to comply is not the same as getting them to buy-in. You only have buy-in when people have a positive view of your initiative and are willing to actively contribute to its success.

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