How to Get Your Team's Buy In
Can you get your team’s buy-in?
As the owner of a small business, you’re constantly making changes, trying new things, new equipment, etc. When rolling out changes like that, it can be difficult to get your team’s buy-in.
Making changes, and managing changes are hard. But completely necessary to grow your business.
How do you get employees to care as much as you do, or see the bigger picture as to why you are making this change?
How do you get your team’s buy-in? Their discretional effort?
If you’ve ever been an employee, I bet you have some opinions on what not to do 😉
Or maybe it’s just been too many years since you were an employee, and you’re looking for a refresher.
I myself have been an employee, working for an excellent boss, for 15+ years.
I was lucky enough to work for a guy who cared about his employees, and today I feel like a lot of the changes that happened over the years were managed in a great way. I’ll point to the number of 10+ year employees that work there today as “proof” that it works.
Ingredients to getting your team’s buy-in
- Share the bigger picture, the “why”
- Ask them what they think
- Provide proper training
- Listen to their ideas and suggestions
Sharing the bigger picture
First, when you are considering making a change, also stop to consider how you will roll this out to get your team’s buy-in. For some changes, you’re not “asking”, you’re “telling” them what the change will be. Regardless, pause for a moment and think about how you can share the bigger picture and the “why” behind this change.
Let’s look at an example such as rolling out a new change on how the employees will track their time for instance.
Bad approach
A bad approach would be to simply show up on Monday, announce that you’re now tracking time differently, stick the new app under their nose, and tell them to figure it out.
That won’t work.
It feels like unnecessary, additional work to them.
You’ll get resistance along the lines of: What was wrong with the old way? Why can’t they just text you their hours every Friday? Or use the paper time sheets at the shop? How do I even do this new process?
And, they’re fair questions. As the owner, do you expect them to just figure it out on their own? Did you look to see what their workflow would look like?
Unfortunately, the scenario I’m painting out here isn’t from my imagination. It’s a true story about the owner of a landscape business, that was trying to launch a new time-tracking process for his team. He just sent the link to the app to his guys the night before a snowstorm and told his guys to use it. 4 a.m. the next morning wasn’t pretty. Suffice it to say it failed. He definitely didn’t