Selling a Winning Vision

Once you have new ideas, you still have to create buy-in, right, among the other people who didn’t come up with the idea. Maybe there’s some resistance. How do you make sure that there is buy-in and that these ideas will actually come to life?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think there are a variety of different ways. But probably the most important thing is I think, as a leader, you have to accept the fact that a big part of your responsibility is sales. And I’m not talking about selling just products to customers, I’m talking about selling a vision to employees, selling shares to investors, solutions to customers, a strategy to your board of directors.
And not saying this is something that comes easily for everybody, but I do think as a leader, this is a skill that you must acquire. If you want a buy-in to the mission, the vision that you are charting for your company, you have to convince people, you have to take every opportunity that you have, whether you’re in company all-hands meeting or smaller one-on-one conversations, to talk about what that vision is, and to convince people that this is the winning playbook for the company. And that’s a skill that I’ve honed over the years just how to sell; sell to everybody that you talk to in any circumstance that you have the opportunity to.