3 Phrases to Get Buy-in for a New Direction

3 Phrases to Get Buy-in for a New Direction

How many times have you thought of an exciting new initiative, only for it to get shot down when you bring it to your team?

It can be hard work to get buy-in, but it's critical for change. Mathias Meyer, Leadership Coach to CTOs and Technical Founders says “It’s all about providing your team with an image of what’s possible…invite them to contribute towards this beautiful future on the horizon.”

Here are 3 go-to phrases to help 👉

1. What if…? 💭

Asking “What if…” helps people imagine what the future could look like and gets them curious instead of feeling threatened.

For example, when Mathias wanted to propose a new process in his team, here’s what he said:

"Currently our release process happens every month, imagine what we could do if it was happening every week, every day...whenever we want?"

"What if...we could adjust our development process so that we can fix bugs and respond to customers quicker?"

2. What's the worst thing that can happen? 😈

When Andrea Stubbe, Head of Product at commercetools, suggested a major new feature, she knew it would face some resistance. She asked this question and kicked things off by saying, “If we do this, we’ll burn out our frontend dev team and they’ll all quit. We really shouldn’t do this”.

Andrea says “When you invite people to rant about why an idea is horrible and can’t possibly be done, it’s both fun and helps to get your team’s deeper fears out in the open, so you can work on them bit by bit.”

This tactic is especially good for those controversial “we tried this in the past” topics.

3. Yes, and… 🙋

These two simple words encourage more divergent thinking and help your team to build on each other’s ideas. Here’s how you might set it up:

"There’ll be plenty of time to explore risks and concerns, but for the sake of exploring the potential, let's do an exercise: when you hear an idea, try to respond with 'yes, and...', and hold back from saying 'no, but...'"

🧪 Frame it as an experiment

Lastly, when you commit to the change, ask people to try it out for a week or two and book in a timeslot in advance to collect feedback on how it’s going.

Once the time period is up, get together to decide as a team if you’ll keep, change, or trash the new way of working.

🤲 Lead by influence

Sometimes all it takes is a simple question to start influencing change.

By having a set of phrases in your pocket, you’ll get your team considering the opportunities, which is a great place to start!