What Is Buy In And How Do You Know When You Have It?
Leaders and teams often assume they have buy-in when they don’t. Here are two common scenarios where this mistake happens:
- When a team is working with you, because they are complying with a request from their line manager.
- When the CEO endorses your initiative in a board meeting, but leaves you to rally the rest of the company
Neither of these situations represents true buy-in. Yet, I’ve heard managers say things like:
We have to make that team buy-in, they have to buy-in, this is important.
The problem is you can’t make people buy-in. That is an oxymoron!
A thumbs up from a leader is not buy-in either. Yet, I have worked with teams who believe that an endorsement from the CEO is all they need to succeed:
We have a mandate from the CEO — everyone has to fall in line.
But a mandate from the CEO does not give your initiative legitimacy.
Stakeholder Management ≠ Buy-In
Stakeholder management is important for the success of innovation and transformation initiatives. This works as a process for identifying, engaging and working on relationships with the people who influence or are affected by our initiative.
A popular tool for mapping stakeholders is Mendelow’s Power-Interest Matrix, which classifies stakeholders into four categories:
Low Power, Low Interest: You have to monitor these stakeholders to check if their levels of power or interest change. But you don’t need to spend excessive resources and time engaging them.
High Power, Low Interest: You have to keep these stakeholders satisfied. Since they have power, you don’t want to antagonise them. But the level of engagement does not need to be high.
Low Power, High Interest: These stakeholders are to be kept informed. This engagement can help us learn if there are any issues with our initiative. But they don’t have the power to stop our initiative.
High Power, High Interest: These are the stakeholders that you have to manage closely. You have to build close relationships with them and make the most effort to ensure they are happy with your work.
Once you have mapped your stakeholders, you can develop a strategy to manage them. But here is the problem:
Stakeholder management is NOT the same thing as getting buy-in.
It is possible to map and manage your stakeholders; and still fail to get buy-in. This is because getting buy-in is an outcome of stakeholder management done well.
Managing Stakeholders, Getting Nowhere
I once worked with a team that was rolling out an innovation program in a FTSE100 company. We had a quarterly ritual where we updated the CEO and his executive board on our progress. Our goal was to manage these key stakeholders and ensure that they still supported our initiative.
So every quarter we went to the executive board and gave them our update. They congratulated us on our progress and gave us permission to keep going. We would leave those meetings feeling good. But we were missing the point.
The whole time I worked with this team, I never heard a single member of the executive board publicly advocate for our work. In fact, when we faced resistance from colleagues in the business, it was up to us to mend those bridges. The CEO and executive board never stepped in to back us.
We were managing these key stakeholders but getting nowhere. We had their endorsement but not their active contribution to our success.
Not Managing Stakeholders, Still Getting Nowhere
I am not suggesting that stakeholder management is not important. I’ve also seen what happens when it is ignored.
During my time with the FTSE 100 company, I had the pleasure of running workshops for people that had been told to attend and didn’t want to be there. This was not fun. At one workshop in New York, an attendee was so pissed at being there that he spent the entire session texting company leaders, then reading their replies out loud to the group.
In one of the texts, he asked a senior VP whether it made sense to test value propositions before they were fully developed. This was a concept I was teaching them. The VP replied that doing such testing was deceptive — which the attendee proudly shared with the room.
I remember finding it hard to fall asleep that night. As a psychologist, I should have known better. Research on psychological reactance shows that people do not like it when their autonomy or freedom is restricted. Even online recommendation engines have been found to trigger psychological reactance. When people feel that they are being forced to do something, they are motivated to reassert their control.
So, What Is Buy-In?
After a decade of working with companies and diving into the research, I have learned that buy-in consists of two key elements. If you have only one of these elements you don’t have buy-in. You absolutely need both
1. Evaluation: People viewing your initiative as a good idea for the company and accept it as legitimate.
2. Participation: People willing to advocate for your initiative to others and actively contribute to its success.
When you combine these elements you get four scenarios:
1. Resistance: When people don’t have a positive evaluation for your initiative and they are not willing to actively participate.
2. Compliance: When people don’t have a positive evaluation for your initiative, but they are being made to participate by an authority figure.
3. Endorsement: When people have a positive evaluation for your initiative, but they are not willing to actively participate.
4. Buy-In: When people have a positive evaluation for your initiative, and they are willing to actively participate.
You Know You Have Buy-In, When You Have Champions
There are different stakeholder personas that are connected to each of the four scenarios presented above:
Opponents actively resist our initiative,
Prisoners comply only because they are forced to
Supporters endorse our initiative but don’t contribute
Champions fully buy-in — they will advocate on our behalf and contribute
Not every stakeholder in your business has to buy-in, but you need to have a critical mass of champions. If you have no champions, it will be very difficult for your initiative to succeed. All you will be doing is fighting resistance, managing reluctant compliance, and trying to make things work with passive supporters. I have been there and I promise you that it is not fun.
Final Thoughts
Getting buy-in isn’t about forcing people into compliance or relying on executive mandates. It is building legitimacy by working with people who eventually view your initiative as valuable. You can then leverage this positive evaluation and drive participation with a group of champions who will move your work forward.
When you achieve this you realise that buy-in isn’t something you make people do — it’s something they freely give you.
So if you want to secure buy-in for your next big initiative, start by asking:
Who are my potential champions?
Are people participating willingly, or are they being forced to?
Do we only have verbal endorsement from leaders or true buy-in?
How can we increase both evaluation and participation?
Because once you have champions, buy-in isn’t just a possibility — it’s inevitable.
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