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Why the Pursuit of Buy-In Can Kill Innovation

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From Larry Osborne’s excellent book Sticky Teams: Keeping Your Leadership Team and Staff on the Same Page:

Leaders and leadership teams can easily get sidetracked by the endless pursuit of buy-in. The reason for this is also one reason we overuse surveys and polls: we’re looking for a way to get everyone aboard.

Certainly, leaders and leadership teams need broad buy-in for their current mission and methods of ministry. But when it comes to setting a new direction or starting new initiatives, it’s seldom needed.

Buy-in is overrated. Most of the time, we don’t need buy-in as much as we need permission.
Buy-in is usually defined as having the support of most, if not all, of the key stakeholders (and virtually all of the congregation). It takes a ton of time to get. It’s incredibly elusive.

Permission, on the other hand, is relatively easy to acquire, even from those who think your idea is loony and bound to fail. That’s because permission simply means “I’ll  let you try it,” as opposed to buy-in, which means, “I’ll back your play.”

I’ve found that most people will grant the pastor, board, or staff permission to try something new as long as they don’t have to make personal changes or express agreement with the idea.

For instance, when we started our first video-venue worship service in 1998, most of the staff and the congregation thought it was a nutty idea. They’d never seen one before, and no one else in the country had yet started one. All they could imagine was a glorified overflow room, and we all know what an overflow room is: it’s punishment for being late. They couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to go to one.

Frankly, if I had believed the buy-in myth (or if our board had), I’d still be trying to convince everyone that video cafes can work. And they’d still think I’m nuts. But since all I asked for was permission to try it, I got the okay; as long as their names weren’t on it, they didn’t have to sell it or go to it, and it didn’t cost too much money.

Needless to say, on this side of the multi-site revolution, video venues proved to be a good idea. But the key to getting it off the ground was my willingness (and that of our board and staff) to settle for permission rather than buy-in.

No "Theys" Allowed

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A good point from Sticky Teams: Keeping Your Leadership Team and Staff on the Same Page:

Leadership-oriented teams don’t succumb to the tyranny of the “theys.”

When I came to North Coast, our board leaned heavily to the representative side of the scale. As a result, whenever we dealt with a controversial issue, we spent a great deal of time discussing an apparently large and influential group of people known as “they.”

No one seemed to know who they were, and those who did seem to know weren’t too keen on identifying them. But boy, did they have clout. It seemed to me that they were the largest power block in the church.

As a result, before making decisions, we spent hours worrying how “they” might respond. And afterward, we second-guessed ourselves whenever someone reported, “I’ve been talking to some people about this, and they have some real concerns.”

To make matters worse, I could never find out who “they” were, or how many of them there were. It was strange. For a group as large and powerful as they appeared to be, they sure valued their anonymity.

Finally, I’d had enough. I told the board that as far as I was concerned, the “theys” no longer existed. I’d happily listen to comments and critiques from people with real names and faces. But nebulous theys who didn’t want their identity known and hypothetical theys we couldn’t identify would no longer have any sway.

The board agreed. So we instituted a “no theys” rule. It immediately pulled the rug out from underneath the biggest group of resisters we had and eventually exposed them to be a tiny minority (and at times, a mere figment of our imagination).

Our “no theys” rule applies not only to the board; it also applies to every staff meeting and to all of my dealings with the congregation. Now whenever someone says that they’ve been talking to some people who have a concern, I always ask, “Who are they?”

If I’m told that they wouldn’t be comfortable having their names mentioned, I respond, “That’s too bad, because I’m not comfortable listening to anonymous sources. Let me know when they’re willing to be identified. I’ll be happy to listen.”

Is Your Organization Developing Leaders?

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Two key points from John Kotter’s classic article “What Leaders Really Do“:

Successful organizations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential.

And:

Organizations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. In many organizations, decentralization is the key.

In other words: Be intentional about identifying and developing leaders. And you need to do this with young people, rather than thinking that nobody can do anything significant until they’re 40.

One more point from the article:

Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.

Great Leaders are Strengths-Based

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The Gallup Management Journal has a good interview with Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, authors of Strengths-Based Leadership, about some of their key findings from the book. Here’s one that stands out and should be encouraging: effective leaders don’t try to be someone else or even become well-rounded; instead, they know their strengths and focus on leading from those — which means that there are all sorts of different ways to lead. (Note: That doesn’t mean you can just do anything and be effective; the key point is that your particular style emerges from your strengths, not from a random or uninformed decision.)

It looks like you have to register to read the whole thing, but here are a few key highlights.

1. Concentrate on developing your talents into strengths, not fixing weaknesses or imitating others:

Here are some questions that leaders often ask themselves: How can I fix my weaknesses to be a more complete leader? How can I emulate the traits of the great leaders who preceded me? What should I focus on — vision or strategy? Here is the answer to all those questions: Don’t bother.

Concentrating on those issues will only distract you from the most important aspect of leadership: your natural talents, which can be developed into strengths. According to Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, coauthors of Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, strengths are what make leaders great.

We all have natural talents, of course, but the greatest leaders are highly aware of theirs. They know what they’re good at and spend countless hours making themselves better at what they do best. They don’t try to make themselves well-rounded or like some other leader. Nor do they devote their energies solely to the relentless pursuit of strategy, vision, or any other ideal. And what they don’t do well, they hire someone else to do.

2. If you’ve taken the “Strengths Finder” test to examine your talent themes, these themes don’t of themselves say anything about whether you can be an effective leader. You lead effectively by harnessing your unique talents, whatever they may be:

GMJ: Of the thirty-four talent themes that the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment identifies, which are the most common among great leaders?

Barry Conchie: I’ve got a problem with the question.

GMJ: Why?

Conchie: There is no single characteristic or set of characteristics that would enable us to determine an effective leader. The most effective leaders are the ones who figure out how best to use what they’ve got. So it matters less what the strengths are in terms of the themes; what’s key is that the leaders understand the strengths they have, how those strengths help them to be effective, and that they use strategies and methods to deploy their strengths to the greatest effect

Rath: I think that from all the research that Gallup’s done on leadership over the last three or four decades, the broadest discovery is that there is no universal set of talents that all leaders have in common. As we looked through these data and ran through hundreds of transcripts and individual interviews, we were struck by just how different all these leaders are.

If you were to sit down with each of the four leaders we featured in the book [Brad Anderson, vice chairman and CEO of Best Buy; Wendy Kopp, CEO and founder of Teach For America; Simon Cooper, president and CEO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC; and Mervyn Davies, chairman, Standard Chartered Bank], you’d notice that they do things very differently based on their strong awareness of their unique talents.

I expand about this a bit more in my post “Leading From Your Strengths May Look Unusual,” where I quote from their chapter on Brad Anderson’s unique leadership style at Best Buy.

I would want to qualify one thing from their point here, though. While you can lead effectively with any of the talent themes identified by the Strengths Finder test, there are two qualities (not measured by the test) which, following Marcus Buckingham (see his excellent discussion in The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success), I would argue are essential to leadership. The qualities are optimism and ego.

“Ego” doesn’t have to have the negative connotations we often associate with it; it simply means you believe that you are the one to lead and are fiercely committed to the task. Optimism is necessary because the essence of leadership is to rally people to a better future, and nobody will want to follow someone who doesn’t believe that they can make the future better. (Thinking that you can’t make a difference would be contrary to the nature of leadership altogether — where are you leading if not to someplace better?)

Understanding the nature of leadership as rallying people to a better future also enables you to focus on your strengths more effectively. For, as I talk about in my post “What Does a Leader Do?,” you don’t have to focus on developing long lists of recommended attributes for leaders when you know the core of the matter. Instead, focus on the core, and develop your own unique strengths.

3. Seeking to be well-rounded leads to mediocrity:

GMJ: You wrote: “If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity.” Why is that?

Conchie: The great leaders we’ve studied are not well-rounded individuals. They have not become world-class leaders by being average or above-average in different aspects of leadership. They’ve become world-class in a relatively limited number of areas of leadership. They’ve recognized not only their strengths but their deficiencies, and they’ve successfully identified others who compensate for those deficiencies.

The concept of well-roundedness is illusory. It might sound desirable from a developmental perspective, but really all that happens when people try to fix their weaknesses is that they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to become marginally better in an area that will never be particularly strong for them. So they’ll get far less of a return by trying to shore up relatively mediocre capabilities because they’ll probably always be below average in those areas. Leadership is not a construct of well-rounded attributes; it’s nearly always the consequence of some pretty incisive talents that are relatively specific and slightly narrow in focus being leveraged to the maximum.

Leading from Your Strengths Will Sometimes Look Unusual

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This is a theme that you see again and again. Here’s an example from Best Buy’s CEO Brad Anderson, from the book Strengths-Based Leadership:

Anderson’s career continued to advance during this time of transition, and he was named Best Buy’s president in 1991. From the day Anderson assumed this leadership role, it was clear he wasn’t going to fit anyone’s preconceived notions of a top corporate executive. Instead of conforming to the new role, this self-described “odd duck” decided to do things quite differently.

While Wall Street analysts, among others, expected Anderson to take a more conventional approach as Best Buy’s new president, that’s not what he did. Much to their consternation, Anderson would simply disappear for weeks on end in search of new ideas. Instead of poring through trade or business books, he read everything from Rolling Stone to historical biographies. Anderson attended non-electronics conferences in search of bigger ideas. He brought in countless outside experts to challenge Best Buy’s thinking. His Ideation, Input, and Learner themes were always at work. By Anderson’s own admission, he challenged conventional wisdom to the point where it was “radically complained about by my peers.” . . .

While studying successful leaders like Anderson, one of the most revealing items we asked leaders to respond to was: “Please describe a time when you felt like you were ‘in a zone,’ where time almost seemed to stand still.” Anderson told us that he feels this way almost any time he is learning something, whether it is from a person, a book, or solving a puzzle. He said, “I find it amazing that I can be fifty-eight years old and seem to know less every day. No matter how much you learn, it just continues to open up more substantial questions and relationships.”

Anderson went on to tell us about how, the night before our conversation, he had stepped out of a dinner early so he could spend some quality time at a nearby Barnes & Noble before heading home. The voracious learner, who reads several books each week, said that he found at least 28 books he wanted to take home that evening. “It’s a disease,” he said with a smile.

We suspect that there are millions of Best Buy employees, customers, and shareholders who are glad that Brad Anderson let this lifelong curiosity run its course. While his strategic thinking led to a few experiments that did not pan out, Anderson’s unconventional approach helped create unprecedented growth. Had you invested $1,000 in Best Buy’s stock in 1991, when Anderson took over as president, it would have been worth $175,000 by 2008. Not bad for a guy who started at the ground level and spent the next 25 years soaring with his strengths.

So one of the lessons here is: lead from your strengths, even if it means being unconventional. You will be more effective being who you are than who you are not. In fact, it’s often the most unconventional minds that make a difference because what seems unconventional is often simply counterintuitive wisdom (for more on which see, for example, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win and What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management).

How Not to Lead

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From Seth Godin’s article for Catlyst Monthly, The Spectacle, the Shouter, and the Door to Door Salesman:

For far too long, leadership has been about management and management has been about control.

We push those that follow us to fit in, to do as they are told. We decide who is good enough, who is obedient enough, who is acceptable.

Many institutions have been built by strong-willed men who think they have the right answer, and aren’t afraid to be bullies if it helps them achieve their goals.

CT Interview with Jim Collins

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Christianity Today has a really good interview with Jim Collins, from back in 2003 — shortly after Good to Great was released.

Here’s the intro, which captures part of the reason that Collins’ ideas resonate with me and many other Christians:

Jim Collins, a former professor at Stanford Business School and founder of his own management research laboratory, had already become well-known in management circles for his first book, Built to Last.

But with his recent book Good to Great, he became an even more established name in the Christian business world—quite an accomplishment given that Collins has no affiliation with Christianity.

Many of his findings resonated with the Christian audience, however, particularly the concept of Level 5 Leadership. Collins and his research team discovered that leaders who took their companies from good to great were not larger-than-life figures that typify today’s celebrity CEO culture, but instead were characterized by a unique blend of humility and resolve. As Collins explains in his book, “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.”

Read the whole thing.

If You Don’t Like Your Work, Here’s What the Problem Might Be

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Daniel Pink makes the case very well in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that there are three components to motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

If you find your work unfulfilling or draining, it may be because it is lacking one of those components.

Autonomy
If you don’t have control over how you go about your work, or input in setting your overall objectives, you might be lacking the freedom necessary to feel ownership (and interest) in your work. People don’t like to be (or need to be) controlled. In general, when freedom diminishes, motivation contracts as well. When freedom increases (supported by helpful structure and systems), motivation tends to increase.

Mastery
If your work is either too challenging or not challenging enough, it is likely to become miserable for you. We like to be good at things. This isn’t some bonus luxury; it’s how we are designed. If you aren’t good at what you are doing — or if it is too easy to be a challenge — you will likely be unfulfilled.

If you feel like you don’t have mastery in your work, don’t automatically conclude that you are somehow innately incapable of achieving competence. Often, the issue is simply a lack of training or feedback. It’s unfortunate that many organizations are not proactive in offering helpful training (especially training targeted to the real needs of today’s knowledge worker, who often operates in highly ambiguous environments with very few structured and routine tasks). So you may have to get creative here in figuring this out. But the point is: don’t automatically blame yourself. More than likely, you can improve and accomplish mastery.

They key is to have work that hits you in the sweet spot — not too easy, not too hard. It should be a challenge for sure, but not so challenging that you are lost and spinning your wheels. The challenge should in fact be continually increasing, but only as you organically gain expertise and mastery so that you are up for the increased challenge.

Purpose
Last of all, you might not see or value the purpose in your work. Lots could be said here. Ultimately, you’ll want to find work where the purpose jibes with what you feel you were made for. But even if you are not in such a role, the doctrine of vocation can be helpful here.

The doctrine of vocation means that everything we do (that is not illegal or immoral!) is valuable to God and accepted by him if done in faith. The arena for serving God is not the fortressed life of the monk, but the everyday real world of work, home, and society. If we do our work as unto the Lord (Ephesians 6:7) it is valuable and accepted by him. This infuses even the most mundane, everyday activities with meaning.

Leaders Have a High View of People

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Jim Collins rightly notes in Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company:

Like such a teacher [there is much overlap between leading and teaching], a leader idealizes people and has resolute conviction that people can rise to this ideal. A leader grabs the spirit in people, pulling it forward and waking it up. A leader changes people’s perceptions of themselves, getting them to see themselves in the idealized way that he sees them.

This idealized view of people that the leader has is not groundless, but is based in truth. People really are of immense worth and capable of incredible things because they are created in the image of God. A leader’s high view of people is fully justified and based in truth.

Related to this: If you don’t have a high view of people, you shouldn’t lead. If leadership involves lifting people up to do and become more than they realized they could, then you can’t do this if you look down on people or think that most people are not capable of much.

This, in turn, reminds me of Marcus Buckingham’s excellent point that one of the essential talents for leadership is optimism. This is because leaders rally people to a better future. If you don’t believe that the future can be made better, then nobody will want to (or should want to–that would be strange) go to the future that you have in mind. Like a high view of people, this optimism is not groundless, either. Rather, it is ultimately based in providence.

What these two characteristics have in common is that they show us that leaders, while acknowledging the size and difficulty of the environment and challenge before them, are fundamentally positive. They believe that the future can be made better and that people are able to rise to the task to create this better future. Further, even though many leaders may not be thinking in these terms, there is good grounding for these beliefs in the doctrine of man and the doctrine of providence.

John Piper on Productivity

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This a great paragraph from Piper’s article The Marks of a Spiritual Leader:

A leader does not like clutter. He likes to know where and when things are for quick access and use. His favorite shape is the straight line, not the circle. He groans in meetings that do not move from premises to conclusions but rather go in irrelevant circles. When something must be done he sees a three-step plan for getting it done and lays it out. A leader sees the links between a board decision and its implementation. He sees ways to use time to the full and shapes his schedule to maximize his usefulness. He saves himself large blocks of time for his major productive activities. He uses little pieces of time lest they go to waste. (For example, what do you do while you are brushing your teeth? Could you set a magazine on the towel rack and read an article?) A leader takes time to plan his days and weeks and months and years. Even though it is God who ultimately directs the steps of the leader, he should plan his path. A leader is not a jellyfish that gets tossed around by the waves, nor is he an oyster that is immovable. The leader is the dolphin of the sea and can swim against the stream or with the stream as he plans.

(HT: Eric McKiddie)