A Guide for Getting Stakeholder Buy-In for Your Agenda

You’re ready to have a greater impact on your company’s strategic direction, but you don’t know where to begin with your ideas. You see an opportunity to open a new market for your company, but you’re unsure what levers to pull. You want to drive an important initiative that spans several business units, but you don’t know how to position yourself for it.

This is where we meet many of our clients. They are successful leaders who can run their business units and lead their teams. They are experts in their domain, but when it comes to driving an agenda across the enterprise, they falter. While our clients have accepted the utility of playing politics, which is often the first hurdle, the “how-tos” remain frustratingly vague.

As a result, they procrastinate. They’re pulled toward urgent but less important tasks. Conquering the small stuff is just so much easier and provides more immediate gratification.

This article aims to help leaders avoid this trap and become effective political operators. We offer you four domains to cultivate along with practical questions to assist you in advancing your strategic objectives within your organization.

Mastering the Four Agenda-Setting Domains

Before you begin, make sure you’re clear on what you want to accomplish and why it’s important to you. For example, consider writing an objective statement. This isn’t necessarily a simple exercise, and will require some time and thought. But once your objective is clear, you can dive into the four domains: adopting an enterprise perspective, leveraging your strategic mindset, cultivating stakeholder awareness, and considering your personal motives and risks.

Adopting an enterprise perspective

After your goal is formulated, the first domain for you to consider is an enterprise perspective — thinking in terms of the larger organization, and not only your expertise, team, functional area, or business unit.

Ask:

• What will the enterprise gain if you accomplish your objective?

• How will achieving your objective specifically benefit different enterprise stakeholders?

One of our clients, a senior VP, credited her rapid rise to her enterprise perspective. Over the years, she cultivated the habit of taking 10 minutes before every meeting or important conversation to consider who was attending, what their agenda or needs might be, and how to connect her point of view to both their goals and the company’s. This way of connecting her needs to others and the company’s gave her the reputation of being a team player, someone who was striving for collective wins. She rewarded her teams for doing the same, which broke down silos and amplified the power of their efforts. Her company continued to grow and, as a result, she was offered resources because it was clear that her success meant the success of the wider organization.

Leveraging your strategic mindset

The second domain to consider is your strategic mindset — understanding that advancing your agenda is not a linear path from point A to point B. Rather, like a game of chess, it will mean strategizing and planning. Achieving your goals requires patience, making sacrifices, taking a step backwards, or making a lateral move to ultimately reach your objective.

Another component of a strategic mindset is identifying the limits of your knowledge and considering where you may be falling prey to cognitive biases, hearsay, outdated, knowledge, following the easier (but not necessarily advantageous) path, or being unduly influenced by sunk costs.

Ask yourself the following to cultivate your strategic mindset:

• In what ways is your objective a departure from business-as-usual? How does that departure from business-as-usual impact key stakeholders?

• How have others attempted a similar objective or embarked on a similar transformation?

• What are the enterprise risks and rewards involved with attempting this objective?

• What are the enterprise risks and rewards of not attempting this objective?

• What resources do you need to reach this objective? What will it take to access these resources?

• What information have you accepted/discounted without having done your due diligence?

• What direction might you be disregarding because it seems arduous or complicated?

After you’ve answered these questions, your job is to assess if you’re ready to proceed with your agenda or if you need to address gaps in your thinking.

One of our clients, a highly accomplished leader with experience in direct-to-consumer business (B2C), was recently recruited to a company that was only a wholesale business. To remain competitive during the pandemic, the company proposed establishing a B2C channel. Given her expertise, our client was very enthusiastic about the potential contribution she could make to this new line of business. She dove in energetically but was quickly met with a strong resistance.

When she reflected on the questions outlined above and cultivated greater strategic awareness, she realized the magnitude of the change she was trying to drive. This helped her to slow down and put her attention on the long-game. She took time to analyze how her B2C channel objectives would impact the various stakeholders, what would be required from them, and what they would stand to gain and lose from this new direction. In repeated conversations over six-months, she was able to help them see how they would benefit from this new channel, and ultimately gained their support.

Cultivating stakeholder awareness

The third domain you have to cultivate is your stakeholder awareness. This refers to truly understanding the stakeholders involved — their needs, motivators, states of mind, and methods for reaching them.

First, identify the stakeholders needed to achieve your objective. Who are your:

• Active supporters

• Passive players (those who are indifferent)

• Skeptics

• Active opponents

Then, ask the following:

• How does achieving your objective most benefit your active supporters?

• What central concern can you expect from your passive players?

• What central objection can you expect from your skeptics?

• What central objection can you expect from your active opponents?

In addition, assess each stakeholder in terms of:

• The amount of direct involvement they will have with your objective. Rate them high, medium, or low.

• The amount of influence they have over other stakeholders. Rate them high, medium, or low.

• The resources they control. Rate them high, medium, or low.

Finally, identify how each stakeholder needs to be approached to get them on board:

• With data?

• By linking it to enterprise impact?

• With endorsements from other key stakeholders?

• By aligning it with their values?

• By linking it to their potential win, their ego, or their advancement?

• By linking it to a reduction in a risk that they care about?

• By now you should have a clear sense of what it will take to recruit your stakeholders and with whom you need to continue to build trust and alignment.

As a result of the supply chain disruptions, one of our clients, a senior director of global procurement, had an idea that would dramatically reduce outsourcing, and therefore reliance on the global supply chain. Knowing his idea was a radical departure from the company’s existing process, and having identified his boss as a passive player, one motivated by risk reduction, our client decided to bring up his objective in stages. This gave his boss time to acclimatize himself to the conversation. First, he shared his idea at a high level to gauge his boss’ openness. In their next discussion, he gave a broad overview of the problem and the risk it posed to the enterprise. He gave his boss time to digest that, and only when he felt his boss was sufficiently engaged with the issue, did he bring up his change agenda.

Considering your personal motives and risks

The final domain you want to consider is your personal motives and risks — knowing what’s at stake for yourself, what’s required of you, and what you’re willing to settle for.

To accomplish this, there are two realms of consideration: one around the objective itself, and one focused on what you will (or won’t) get from it.

First consider what constitutes achievement of this objective for you. If you can’t achieve the full objective, what compromises are you willing to make? And where do those compromises end; in other words, what’s your bottom line? Finally, if you fail, what are the consequences — professionally and personally?

Once you have a clear sense of what success looks like for you, and whether it’s worth the risk, go a little deeper to connect it to your own motives. Start by thinking about why you are attempting this challenge in the first place. Is it for learning? Career experience? Connections? Or for the thrill of the pursuit?

• With your answers in mind, and if indeed you decide you want to advance your agenda, ask:

• What character strengths or values will I need to achieve this objective?

• What beliefs will limit me in achieving this objective?

• What personal priorities or challenges are competing for my time and energy?

• What personal support do I have or need more of?

One of our clients is the CFO of a startup, poised to go public in the next couple of years. The CEO, who is also the founder, brought her in to help the company get fiscally positioned for their IPO. This was very exciting for her as she had the skills and was eager to pursue the challenge and add this experience to her resume. Pretty quickly, however, it became obvious that the founder/CEO was committed to his own ways of doing things and was particularly hard to influence. She noticed that going public became less and less of a priority as other market concerns came to the foreground for the company. She came to us frustrated that she couldn’t see the IPO to fruition. In conversation with us she realized that learning was her key value, and that regardless of going public, what she could learn in her role would give her great meaning. Once she embraced the learning opportunity, the timing of the IPO became less relevant to her, and she was able to focus on other ways to make the company more fiscally sound.

. . .

It’s common for leaders to initially bristle at the idea of playing politics. It’s also natural to avoid hard or new endeavors because they arouse feelings of uncertainty and potential failure. Thus, to advance your agenda for the organization’s benefit, you need a structure for strategizing; a template to be politically skillful. By thinking through these four domains and their corresponding questions, we hope you will feel empowered to drive objectives that maximize your contributions and serve your organization.

Copyright 2024 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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