Creating Buy-In

In your opinion, what is the most essential element of creating and sustaining change for your team or organization and kind of getting everybody on board with all that is transforming in the workplace?

I think taking the time to bring people along. So I came into my new role about nine months ago and spent a fair amount of time meeting with each person in the department, people outside the department to both gain perspectives but also get buy-in for some of the changes that I wanted to implement.
So we are in the midst of an evolution in terms of the way that we work and the way that we partner with the business. And for me, it was really important to work closely, in particular with each of the leaders to make sure that we had alignment and that once we settled on our new mission statement and our new strategic objectives, to know that it wasn’t a one and done, to know that it wasn’t going to be, we’re going to roll these out, as in all hands, and then they’ll just take hold. I mean, we spend a lot of time reinforcing them with teams continuing to tweak as we learn what’s working and what’s not.

Can you give an example of the changes in mission and objectives and how did you get buy-in?

Sure, so definitely through a lot of conversations, both one- on-one and in smaller groups and we spent two days together as a leadership team to talk about okay, here are the things that we do really well, here are the things that we think to improve, here are the risks that we see coming around the corner, and then thinking about capability gaps.
So, we looked at the organizational structure, created some new roles and then spent the time to really define the supporting behaviors, how we expect people to show up. And then creating the tools such that each of the leaders could go and cascade them with their team and have repetition throughout the year.