Let’s be the first to send a man to the moon.

Let’s make cameras digital.

Let’s set up a network of private drivers who’ll take people wherever they want to go.

We need $250 000 and four new staff to upgrade our customer database system.

We should trial driverless cars.

I need management to support a 5 per cent pay rise for my team next year.

Darling, I’d really like to have another child.

Let’s make another Police Academy movie!

Every one of these ideas needed the instigator to bring other people willingly and enthusiastically on board to breathe life into it. Each required some careful persuasion, a lot of negotiation and probably some persistent nagging, but the outcome couldn’t be a reluctant ‘All right, do what you want’. To be successful, the outcome had to be ‘I’m with you on this … Let’s do it … Sign me up’. Head and heart had to be on board and action had to follow closely behind.

In your own organisation, you probably hear comments like these every day:

• » ‘I know what it will take to improve team performance.’

• » ‘I know how to improve our product so we’ll get fewer customer complaints.’

• » ‘We know what our new strategic direction needs to look like.’

• » ‘I know how marketing can better support us in the field.’

• » ‘I know what we need to do to stop losing market share.’

• » ‘We know why morale is low and what to do about it.’

• » ‘I know how to make sure everyone puts their cup in the dishwasher.’

Yet how many of these ‘I know’ statements make it from idea to implementation? Too often they are accompanied by an exasperated ‘If only I could get others to think or feel the same way’.

A great idea will stay just that — an idea —  unless you can get others to work with you to turn it into a reality.

This is especially true in the context of the modern organisation, where your idea is competing for attention with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others.

Politicians need us to buy into their policies and vision in the same way that senior executives need their shareholders to buy into the vision of their organisation. Managers need the buy-in of their teams, while team members need the buy-in of people across the business to implement new ideas and projects. The implications of getting this wrong are too great to ignore.

The cost of getting it wrong

In his book Leading Change, renowned thought leader John Kotter reports that 70 per cent of change initiatives fail. That’s a lot of wasted money, time, energy and resources — not to mention the sheer frustration! One reason for this type of failure is a lack of buy-in from the people needed to bring that change to life.

In 2005 Australian airline Qantas learned this the hard way when its leadership team announced it was introducing a new parts management system called Jetsmart. Things did not go smoothly for the senior leaders, who were heavily criticised for failing to engage with engineers, operational staff and unions. As a result, Jetsmart (nicknamed ‘Dumbjet’ by Qantas engineers) became mired in endless disputes and problems, all of which took place in the public spotlight. Three years and $40 million later, Qantas announced that it would retire Jetsmart and start over.1

The costs associated with a lack of buy-in from the right people can be huge.

Here are some more examples to get you thinking:

• » The product development team in a company I was working with had created a very nifty piece of software designed to help its customers manage their account with the company. The software promised to make customers’ lives easier and to help retain customers. Yet the only way to get customers to use the software was for the sales team to introduce them to it. Despite promises to the contrary, the folks in sales simply weren’t signing customers up for the tool. The software sat on a shelf gathering dust, while tensions between product developers and the sales team quickly escalated.

• » A professional services firm, another of my clients, once announced a series of workshops for its staff designed to equip people with the skills to improve their productivity. The only problem was, no one enrolled. After some investigation, initially aimed at finding more suitable dates, it became clear that the people who had purchased the workshops hadn’t done enough to get buy-in from the different parts of the business. In fact, it turned out that the announcement to run the program had been taken as an insult by many of the managers, who felt they were being told they weren’t productive enough!

• » Craig, a software engineer new to his company, wanted to shift his team to a new project management methodology. Against the backdrop of a fast-changing industry, Craig saw it as critical that project teams worked at a much faster pace, trying new things and finding ways to experiment with new approaches. Craig had experienced the benefits of the change first-hand in his previous job, and thought it was a no-brainer. But several months later, Craig found his efforts stalling in the face of a lack of buy-in from his leadership team and also from many long-standing staff, who couldn’t see how the change would be good for them. Craig’s frustration led him to leave the company less than twelve months after starting there.

Do these scenarios sound familiar? Have you experienced something similar in your own world?

In each of the above examples, what started out as an idea, ripe with potential, ended up becoming a problem that failed to achieve buy-in. And the cost? Large amounts of money being spent trying to bring projects to life that were doomed to failure — or to rescue them from the clutches of defeat. Add to that the lost value of the failed opportunity, and you already have a pretty hefty price tag.

The costs continue to add up, including the strain on people’s time, energy and relationships, as they battle into various stages of resistance. This dampens everyone’s morale and causes disengagement, resulting in a learned helplessness that eventually has people shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘What’s the point? No one will listen, so I may as well just stop trying.’ People disengage, resign or — worse still — hang around giving off one hell of a bad vibe.

Change doesn’t happen in the executive boardroom, as all of these examples show. It happens on the frontline of an organisation and involves a number of people, from board members to employees. Without buy-in from all of those involved, you’re hammering a round peg into a square hole.

What is buy-in really?

For those who can win buy-in to their ideas and initiatives, the world is their proverbial oyster. But to understand how to build buy-in you first have to look at what buy-in is and what it is not.

The online Cambridge English Dictionary defines buy-in as ‘the fact of agreeing and accepting something that someone suggests’. But that’s not enough.

True buy-in requires willing and enthusiastic commitment. Creating buy-in is about building a genuinely voluntary choice, getting people to the place where they say ‘Yes!’ not because they have to, but because they want to.

Real buy-in goes much further than achieving compliance or conformity. It’s the ultimate form of influence. It creates intellectual and emotional alignment between two or more people. It wins a share of someone’s devotion, of their passion and energy. If you want others’ creativity, engagement, participation, advocacy and championship then you need to affect them under the surface, through their skin.

To get to this holy place, there can be no tricks of the mind, no manipulation, no threats, no forced hands and no hypnosis. These moves may sometimes work to influence people to act in the way you want them to act, but if it’s genuine buy-in you seek, then people will subscribe to that only when they choose to and feel it’s safe to do so.

Here’s a simple example we can all relate to (whether parents or not):

Do you think Dad is winning? Perhaps....