Your Senior Leader’s Buy-in Isn’t Enough

Senior leadership support is necessary and insufficient for creating successful organizational change. Don’t get me wrong – very few things happen in most organizations if the senior leaders don’t support it.

But frankly, their buy-in is not enough.

To illustrate, let’s consider the case of my three-year-old son. 

My husband and I are his senior leadership team. One day we decide he needs to eat more vegetables. We’ve done our research and reviewed industry benchmarks. The data is clear. More vegetables are definitely in his best interest.

So we communicate the change. “We want you to grow up healthy and strong. After reviewing the data, we’ve decided to establish a new KPI for vegetable eating. Your new goal is one vegetable for lunch and one for dinner.” 

And then we redesign the incentive structure to support the new vegetable KPI. “Your dessert bonus will be paid out at 100% target if you achieve 75% of your vegetable goal.”

Does he comply and eagerly gobble up his peas? Nope.

At first, he may simply refuse and wait for us to cave. If we remain resolute, he might learn to game the system over time. He’ll achieve his 75% vegetable consumption target by slipping the dog a carrot under the table when we aren’t looking. 

Isn’t this terribly disappointing and surprising? We are in charge. We shared our vision. We have compelling data. We have designed a clever system of goals and incentives to support the behavior we want. 

As it turns out, we’re going to need a little more than just our buy-in to make things happen.

If we want to see meaningful change, we’ll need to get a bit more curious about our son’s motivations. We’ll need to uncover his reasons for eating (or not eating) vegetables and negotiate a path forward. After all, he’s perfectly content with the status quo.

We might learn that he finds most vegetables unappetizing. So we’ll experiment. Maybe a dip would help? Or a colorful and playful presentation? There could be some vegetables he will eat, and others he won’t.

Or perhaps we’ll discover we’ve appealed to the wrong motive. At age three, he’s not concerned with healthy eating, but he is concerned with fun. Once we start speaking his language, things could change dramatically.

There is also the chance we’ll recognize that we’ve set a goal for him we’ve failed to model well ourselves. Do as I say, and whatnot.

We’ll have to stay attentive, curious, and focused if we want to succeed. We’ll need to humbly inquire and adjust—over and again—to find out what is working and what isn’t.

In sum, leading change requires real leadership. It can’t be outsourced. Signaling your approval and turning your attention to something else will only result in mutual frustration (and perhaps a pile of uneaten food under the table).