Harvard Business Review
Need Buy-In? Invite the Lions In
John Kotter
Consider the following scenario: You've got a good idea. You believe in it because you know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it with confidence, hoping for enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what's hit you, your idea is dead, shot down.
Sound familiar? It doesn't have to be like this. There are clear, simple ways to protect your good idea, or to come to the rescue of someone else's, and win the support needed to make a positive change. The key? Understand the unfair attack strategies that naysayers and obfuscators deploy with great success time and time again:
- Death by delay. Endlessly putting off or diverting discussion of your idea until all momentum is lost.
- Confusion. Presenting so much distracting information that confidence in your proposal dies.
- Fear mongering. Stirring up irrational anxieties about your idea.
- Character assassination. Undermining your reputation and credibility.
Avoiding or attempting to quash attackers doesn't work. It's far better to respectfully engage these adversaries and stand your ground with simple, convincing responses that save the day. By "inviting in the lions" to critique your idea, and preparing yourself for what they'll throw at you, you'll capture busy people's attention. You'll help them grasp your proposal's value. And you'll secure their commitment to implementing the solution — winning their minds and hearts.
I know that's easy to say and not so easy to do because I have spent a great deal of time researching, thinking, and writing about it over the past two years. In the process, I came to realize that the competent creation and implementation of good ideas is a basic life skill, relevant to the twenty-one-year-old college graduate, the fifty-five-year-old corporate CEO and virtually everyone else. This skill, or lack of it, affects the economy, governments, families and most certainly our own lives.
The challenge is that the amount of thought and education put into creating good ideas is far higher today than the knowledge and instruction on how to implement those ideas. In this blog, I hope to make a start to fill that gaping hole and I invite you to add your ideas and comments. Together we can meet the challenge.
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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