COMMON TRAPS

Tilting markedly in either an appreciative or an authoritative direction can hobble efforts to create buy-in. Resistance builds unchecked. Team members see you as either too weak to implement the changes needed or too arrogant to listen to other points of view. Either way, they have little incentive to cooperate.

Women taking on new leadership assignments risk springing traps in two ways. Because their natural leadership ability may be questioned, they can try to impose it without earning the authority first. Perhaps they overcompensate and want to appear strong from the start or perhaps they consider their mandate sufficient grounds. Team members resent the imposed solutions and their resistance grows. Alternatively, recognizing that they do not have implicit authority, women new to leadership emphasize consensus and fail to set concrete expectations or provide direction. To subordinates , who have concerns about change to begin with, an undiluted communal approach can be unsettling. They question the new leader's ability to lead them through the changes. Neither approach gives team members any incentive to get on board and back the new leader's agenda. Here are four common traps in negotiating buy-in that we isolated from our interviews.

• "I know what I'm doing is the right thing to do." Few take on a new role without having some specific ideas about on how it should be played . They glean these notions from past experiences or from watching others in similar roles. Nor do new leaders want anyone to think that they are unprepared and have not thought enough about the problem. So they ponder and ponder and come to the assignment armed with an action plan that frames not only what they want to accomplish but how they are going to go about it.

  Thoughtful preparation does not spring the trap. That preparatory work is vital . The trouble arises when the new leader becomes so enamored of her plan that she cannot hear what others are saying. There is nothing wrong with my plan, she thinks. If people resist or disagree , I must not be communicating effectively. I haven't been persuasive enough. So she starts to persuade ”and the one she persuades most is herself. The disagreement is treated as a failure of communication, and in a certain way it is. The communication is going only one direction.

  It is not unusual in any disagreement for people to think that the basic problem is one of communication. If only I can explain things clearly, they think, the others will agree. Unfortunately, many objections are not the result of miscommunication . The other parties simply do not agree with you and can substantiate their differences of opinion with solid reasons.

  The risks of attributing disagreement to faulty communication are twofold. First, chances are slim to none that people can be persuaded to get behind an agenda they consider misguided, overly ambitious, or insufficient. Second, because their concerns or doubts have not been heeded, their resistance is likely to harden.

  Denise, a marketing executive at a manufacturing company, had been with her firm a long time. When she was recruited internally to handle procurement, a problematic area, she brought a full-fledged strategy with her.

  The company was in trouble. Although I was new to procurement, it was clear to me that they needed someone to take a strong stand against the vendors . I quickly put into place a new set of cost-control systems. Procurement would become a policeman in curtailing costs. You don't need Mont-Blanc pens when the company is in financial difficulty.

  Denise made a series of presentations to senior management and the people in her group . Professional and clear, they showed the logic behind her approach. Procurement, however, had relationships with vendors and with department heads throughout the company that went back twenty years . Denise's team members had maintained those relationships and wanted a solution that tempered her draconian measures with the realities of their day-to-day interactions. They saw themselves as service providers who negotiated good deals with vendors and talked department heads out of unnecessary purchases. Denise threatened that collegial atmosphere, and they moved surreptitiously.

  Denise found that it was easier to call for a policing function than to make it a reality. More experienced than she, department members found ways around her policies. Discouraged, she resigned.

  Denise had a big strike going against her when she took over as head of the department. She knew little about procurement. In the best of times, it would have been difficult for her to establish her credibility. Instead, she assumed she knew best and that the department members would come around if only she were persuasive enough.

  This trap does not catch only women leaders. Critics of New York's mayor, for example, charge that he trips on it with alarming frequency. In the estimation of a former minority leader of the City Council, Mayor Bloomberg is so captivated by "the power of the flowchart" that he has failed to provide effective leadership: "His attitude is 'Look, I believe this is the right thing to do; if you don't like it, get used to it.'" ^{[ 8]} The problem is that people do not get used to it.

  When real differences exist about a change agenda, no repackaging of the message can make them disappear. Buy-in only evolves if the differences are allowed to surface and are confronted. Attempts to impose the agenda simply send the resistance underground .

• "This is really my problem. I have to work through it to protect my people." A new leader has a full plate. Generally there are more than enough problems to command her attention. But she has been given responsibility for solving the problems. She is not responsible for the problems. Yet women can sometimes forget this critical distinction. Wanting to make things better, to shield others from difficulties and to nurture them, they can internalize the problems. Somehow their accountability stretches to the problems themselves. Thinking of the problems as their problems, they hold them close. They fail to solicit other opinions or ask for help. Not only does this approach keep team members in the dark, it cuts off avenues for possible resolution.

  Moreover, it is a great mistake to underestimate the acuity of subordinates. They have especially keen antennae and usually know a good deal more about what is going on in an organization than their bosses assume. ^{[ 9]}

  Three weeks after Sylvia took the reins of a new initiative at her bank, it was acquired by a much larger institution with a national footprint.

  All our planning for the new initiative was suddenly in jeopardy. Everyone was preoccupied with the merger. Nobody wanted to know about our plans. All the time my friends were calling me: "The Street says it's all over for you. Start looking around."

  The new parent had always grown by acquisition. After a spate of mergers it had little practice in organic growth or the customer-oriented program development that had characterized Sylvia's organization. Sylvia put on a bright front and kept these headaches to herself. Little by little, the nascent trust within the new team began to wane. They had heard the rumors. They knew the parent's reputation for not valuing people and cutting right to the bottom line. What they did not understand was Sylvia's reluctance to dig in with them and develop a convincing sales pitch for the initiative.

  Sylvia thought that the bad news would compromise her leadership position and demoralize members of her team. Quite the contrary. They would have welcomed the chance to participate in solving their particular segment of the integration puzzle. Instead, they interpreted Sylvia's silence as an ominous signal. When she finally had a chance to meet with the parent's head of new business development, she got a green light for the initiative. But by then the damage had been done, and she had some fences to mend within her own team before the project could be mainstreamed.

• "I have the support of senior management; people will fall into line." Backing from top management can get a new leader off to a strong start. But that is what it is ”a strong start ”and assumptions to the contrary can lead unwary new leaders astray. The strength of their mandate can lull them into complaisance or they can exaggerate either the level of support or the impact it wields on their team members. If they have been overly optimistic in judging the strength of their backing, they can get caught off guard when their backing disappears with the first sign of a problem. Alternatively, what they consider a strong plus can turn out to be a liability if their team thinks top management does not grasp the realities in the field. Claire, a regional executive recruited to lead a large sales force, found out the hard way that a mandate from the top was no guarantee that her team would embrace her agenda.

  Coming from another company in the industry, all I could see was opportunity. The company had a strong, established brand; nationwide market trends seemed to be great; yet the region I was recruited to manage had not been making its sales targets. Top management recruited me aggressively and pretty much gave me free rein to shape things up. That's what I tried to do.

  What Claire did not know was that the sales force had been working hard and had accomplished as much as they could in a difficult economy. Managers and salespeople alike were convinced that top leadership was completely out of touch with the local market. They had been hit hard by the cuts in the manufacturing sector. When Claire raised their quotas despite deteriorating market conditions, they tarred her with the same brush they used for top management. She was, they concluded, out of touch and unconcerned. At every opportunity, they bucked her decisions and continued to conduct business as usual. Their reaction influenced the CEO. While he didn't know much about the market, he looked at the numbers carefully . When he saw no improvement in the region, Claire's mandate evaporated.

  For team members to get behind a new leader's agenda, they have to make a judgment that it fits with their sense of the situation. By itself, a strong mandate from the top may not be sufficient to convince them. They require some proof that their new leader's agenda can add to their effectiveness and is not simply imposed from above.

• "Avoidance is my best short-run strategy; no sense in rocking the boat unnecessarily. " New to a position and on unsure territory, it is tempting to think that things will work out with time. Eventually, fence-sitters will see the advantages of the new agenda and get behind it. Eventually, even the resistant will be convinced. It is better to let things settle down before attempting to do much.

Avoidance does not make the difficulties disappear, and time can favor those who hold out. The longer you delay in confronting resisters ”whether the opposition is overt or covert ”the more likely it becomes that others will coalesce around them and threaten to block your agenda.

When Tricia, a tax partner in a national accounting firm, was promoted to managing partner for the western district , she took on responsibility for top-line services in the marketplace . Tricia knew, when she accepted the promotion, that she would have issues with certain partners in the district. She was also venturing into new territory. She had never had responsibility for generating revenues or developing new business opportunities. Bill (one of the district partners), however, had extensive experience and had actively campaigned for the promotion. Tricia worried about him at first, but then he welcomed her warmly. She assumed she would have time to get their relationship on an even keel. If she could not, she would ask that he be reassigned. Tricia's first hint of real trouble came with her plans for a retreat.

The partners in the district all acted as independent agents . They were a freewheeling group. To meet my growth targets, that culture had to change. As soon as I arrived, I scheduled a retreat for the group. That would be an opportunity to get to know one another and for me to lay out my expectations.

People were excited about the retreat. It would be a first for the district and give them a chance to do strategic planning as a group. The day before the retreat, however, Tricia got a voice mail from Bill. He could not attend . He had an important meeting with a client. Tricia was furious, but decided not to make an issue of his defection.

Tricia expected that her efforts to build team cohesion would gather momentum after the retreat. Instead they stalled. She started to have problems getting information from two of the other senior partners. Bill took credit for new business she brought in. Conversations broke off suddenly when she came into a room. Associates began to go to Bill for approval.

I didn't know what to do. If I confronted him, he would get defensive. If I was too accommodating , he would continue to undermine me.

Once resistance solidifies into open opposition you have two choices. Avoidance is not an option. You can try to neutralize the resisters by raising the costs of continued obstruction, or you can take steps to transfer them somewhere else. Allowed to remain in place, they can poison the rest of the group and stall any effort to build cohesion. Not only does unwillingness to confront resisters signal weakness, it gives the rest of your team cause to doubt your ability to make other hard choices.

^{[ 8]} Elizabeth Kolbert, "Around City Hall: The Un-Communicator."

^{[ 9]} Ironically, Jean Baker Miller attributes the extra acuity or sensitivity to what is going on around them that women are presumed to have to their traditional subordinate status. "Subordinates. .. know much more about the dominants than vice versa. They have to." Toward a New Psychology of Women , 10 “11, 31 “32, 135.