Baktari MD

Enroll People in Your Vision (2024)

• Jonathan Baktari MD • Season 2 • Episode 40

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Welcome to episode 40 of Season 2 of Baktari MD! In this episode, we talk about how to enroll people into your vision! 🥳 We've briefly talked about building consensus through leadership, but how does this apply to your culture and vision within business? All of the tips and trick you need are right here! Find out all of this and more in the full episode!

one one good way to stress test your decision or what what what you're leaning towards is put all the other options and have people challenge you. Because sometimes as committed as you may be to your vision, you know, occasionally you're wrong. Hi. Welcome to another episode of Baktari MD. This year, we're going to be doing Crash CEO School, where we go over the skill sets that anyone can use in a position of leadership to grow an organization, a company, a small business, a medium business. So today I want to go over this concept of building consensus through leadership. In other words, a lot of people who are new to leadership kind of view leadership as stuff coming from uphill and running downhill in terms of decisions, ideas. And while that may make sense in terms of the hierarchy, often in an organization, it's much better to build consensus without necessarily giving up too much. In other words. I think a lot of people who haven't been in some of these positions think that, well, if I'm going to be a leader and I'm going to be directing sort of like the satellite view of the company in what direction is going to go in a lot of the decisions have to be made on at the top level and then passed down, which of course makes sense. But on another level, the more hierarchical, hierarchial the company is where you're simply transmitting information down. I think you get some potential side effects, such as not enough buy in, for example, the commitment to some of the ideas as well as the the quality of the product people put out when they don't feel connected to the idea or decision. You know, you often see that in many organizations where people say, well, you know, my boss or the higher ups have decided we're going to get rid of this product project, or we're going to, you know, do this more, hire this or hire that or buy this or buy that. Now, on some level, it has to be like that, but on another level, it doesn't have to. I could see the argument saying, well, listen, if I had to go get everyone's buy in in the organization, any decision we made, you know, it would just take up too much time, too much effort. And so we can't really process stuff like that. What I want to talk to you about today is, is there a way to still have things go from top to bottom, but do it in a fashion that allows people to be more involved in it and feel more ownership of some of the decisions that are being made. A lot of that has to do with the culture you build. And what I have found is if this culture is started at the top and continues to go down, meaning from super senior to senior to from senior to mid-level, from mid-level to lower level, if this strategy that I'm going to talk about today is deployed organizationally, you can actually have this concept that everyone feels more bought in than than certainly just decisions being made. And the byproduct of that is many. So I want to kind of go over this and what I call this is enrolling people into your vision. So in other words, you you as a leader come up with a idea. We're going to move more in this direction because our competitors are moving in that direction or we're going to move in this direction because our competitors are not moving in that direction or we're going to try to grow this side of the business, get rid of that side of the business, whatever it is. How do you make that decision? And once you make that decision, you know, how do you convey that decision? I think a lot of organization decision is simply made at the C-suite level or sometimes that, you know, literally by the CEO and then as a memo or in a meeting saying, okay, we've decided this, I want to argue that's probably the worst thing someone can do. Even if you have 100% control authority to go into a meeting and say, you know, based on what I've read or blah, blah, blah, give a quick explanation. I have decided we are doing this. Even if you leave out the word I, but if it's implied that it was you that made that decision, then it's not ideal. And I'm going to go over why. So there are many advantages of trying to enroll people into your vision. You know, it happens even on a personal level when you're talking with your kids or family or relatives. You know, if you take a little time and have them be enrolled in your in your vision of why you're changing careers or why your decided to, you know, do certain things in terms of your investments or whatever. I think if you take a little time and get buy in and enroll people into your vision, there are many benefits which I'm going to go over. But let's talk about the benefits, number one. This strategy creates a culture of inclusivity which has benefits in itself. The more an organization is like this, the more people feel that they're included in the decision making as opposed to just things that are just brought down from the sky. There will be a sense of inclusivity and that is going to help in many levels, including employee retention, staff retention, staff motivation, as well as critical thinking problems solving, dealing with issues. Number two is a sense of ownership it’s kind of similar, number one. But the more people feel like they're part of the decision or they they were included in the decision or the rationale for the decision, the more they're going to feel like this is their organization, their company. By the way, this applies to almost everything nonprofits, any kind of organization. It will increase the pride of ownership. And the other thing is it will create pride in the organization in other words, they'll be proud of the organization or proud of their team in the sense that they will feel that the team is a team and even decisions that may have been made, they were at some level included in it. The other benefit, which is number four, is often if you use this strategy, you're going to try to get a better product out of the team in the sense that, you know, I call the ultimate product that anyone could put out, even if they're working only 8 hours a day, is are they putting out the same product as though they owned the company? And of course, that's a continuum, you know, from someone who's just simply clocking in, and clocking out. And I know I've made other videos about this, but but to get a product that the person who is putting the 8 hours is literally putting in the same product as though they own the company. And that's a lot to ask of someone. But I think these kind of decisions and other things we've talked about in previous videos, to have people have a sense of ownership to see if they would be willing, willing to put out the same product as though they owned the company without, of course, actually owning the company. But in return, there would be other benefits. And then the last probably most important things, if the idea goes bad or if there's obstacles, so obstacles, barriers or if it fails, if something fails and it was a top down decision, the blowback is going to be immense. Whereas if it fails or there were just many obstacles, obstacles that people hadn't thought of, I think they will be handled better and potentially some of these obstacles will be overcome if the person felt that they were, it was partly their decisions. And we all know this from our own the way we think, like we make a decision. And so after we make the decisions, we realize there are some obstacles. Our first instinct is to try to overcome those obstacles because we made the decision right, versus if someone else made the decision, you know, the tendency to say, look, see, I knew was a bad decision right away. We have some problems. So let's say you mandate a new software for the company, a new point of sale software. Right. And it gets deployed and no one was involved except the higher ups and it gets deployed to the whole group. And immediately there's bugs in the software and it's actually creating tremendous more work to set it up. And the learning curve is very high. You're probably going to get a lot of blowback on the learning curve and the pain of implementing this new system or new software. If no, if if only the people in the C-suite were involved in making that decision, if that software had been shown to everybody rolled out, maybe given, you know, everyone had a look see and had an opportunity to give feedback, if there's problems with that software, I promise you it's going to be handled in a much different way and there'll be much more of a motivation not to point out the problems, but to overcome them and come up with solutions and endure whatever pain potentially might be involved for the period that we're talking about. So these are all benefits of enrolling people into your vision, but how do you do it so and when do you do it? Well, the way you do it is you first have to take your idea and stress test it with the people who report to you or your immediate team. And I call it stress testing your vision. So what you want to do is you want to take your idea like, hey, let's I'm thinking about getting a new point of sale software for our team. And the steps, I would say number one is when you do that, you have to explain the opportunity or explain the problem that you're trying to solve. The issue that this is going to address for you or or create more revenue or decrease expenses or improve customer experience, whatever it is that you think your your vision of this new decision is. Today we have a bullet proof system that helps us close up to 80% of those inbound calls. Our High Converting Call Class will teach you how to demonstrate your authority quickly without being pushy. We believe that many businesses out there can benefit from this, and we promise to help you achieve your revenue goals by converting more of your incoming calls into actual sales. For more information, please visit our website at HighConvertingCallClass.com. Stop waiting for the sales to come to you. Put your revenue into your hands. After you do that, then what you have to do is sit with your team and say, But you know what? Before we even make a decision, let's, let's, let's go over all our options. You know, option A, we could keep this software option B, you know, we could look at this software option C is maybe there some more other software softwares we should look at or, you know, maybe we should write a software ourselves, you know, option D, you know, we'll, we'll build the software ourselves. Or instead of buying a third party software, whatever the options are, even if you're pretty much committed to one of the options, one one good way to stress test your decision or what what what you're leaning towards is put all the other options and have people challenge you. Because sometimes as committed as you may be to your vision, you know, occasionally you're wrong. Occasionally you don't have all the information. So getting your team to challenge and stress test your vision or decision or whatever you're trying to do is a good thing. How could you lose? I mean, even if it turns out that you're going to do what you were thinking about, it's only a win if people point out obstacles that may be associated with that. Well, you know, if we change our point of sale software, that's you know, that software is already integrated with three other softwares. And have we ever thought about how that might impact those three other integrations and whether it can even integrate with the other three? So you may not have thought of that. So this whole idea of having people stress test your idea is not simply a ruse to get them to agree with you. It's really meant to, you know, double test your decision making. And I think I talked about this in a previous video where you have to be open to being wrong and encourage your team to have that sort of openness and not fear of challenging these ideas. But again, in a respectful manner. But you certainly want your team to be able to challenge what you're putting out there. And one one the best way to kind of do that is when you look at all the all the options, ask everyone to give you their pros and cons of each one and what they think now, many times, of course, what you wanted is the right choice because of the amount of information you have. Having the satellite perspective. So nine out of ten times, I think you're going to still go and it's going to be obvious to everyone that what you were thinking is probably the best thing. So in many ways, you're you made the decision. And after all this, we're going to go ahead with your decision anyway. But it's very important to get the pros and cons, listen to all the feedback. But after that, then you have to, as a team, agree on the most logical path, given everything you've discussed, all the pros and cons. Okay, so we've gotten that far. We went through all the process stress test your idea, go over the opportunity or problem you're going to try to solve. Go over all the options and choices. The pros and cons, listen to feedback, and then basically at the end of that, if everything goes well, you should be able to say so. I think from what I'm hearing in this room, we're all in agreement that the best course of action is to go with this new software, understanding that there may be some limitations or some problems we may have to overcome. And this gets to the next step. You can't just paint your decision with just a rose, you know, with rose colored glasses and say, and everything's going to be, you know, perfect and blah, blah, blah. The next thing is actually sit down and say, okay, but if we're going to go ahead with this decision, let's talk about the extra work, the extra sacrifice, the extra cost, the extra brain damage, and the more you put that on the table as opposed to fluff it over, say, well, yeah, well they'll there'll be some issues and well, I actually think the more you discuss the pain that it might inflict financially work wise, resources wise, it may take people away from other projects. What have you. I think the better off you are, even to the point of maybe assuming the worst or I don't want to say exaggerate, because that's not what I really mean. But to really say, listen, in the worst case scenario, if we implement this, you know, our system may be down for 48 hours and impact customers, how we're going to deal with that, it's better to paint the worst case scenario rather than, you know, the optimal scenario because if the decision is made, assuming the worst case scenario and it doesn't turn out to be as bad, it could only be good. But if all of these things are discussed now, the whole idea of enrolling people into your vision is meaningful because you're not just selling them on the upside, you're selling them on the whole process. But really at the end of all this brain damage and work, you know, then you have to discuss the payoff, the both the short, short term and long term payoff if you can execute. Okay. If it fails, it fails. But if you execute, this will be the long term payoff. If it fails, this will be the fallout from that, too. So we'll have to go back to the old system, blah, blah, blah, blah. So in essence, everybody's bought into the full cost and effort that's involved in this. Now, when you then roll this out, what you're going to find is that you will have a much, much better sense of buy in. And the most out of all, the advantages, the most important one is if things don't go according to plan, if there are things you hadn't foreseen, I think what you will see is a much more collaborative team, a much more determined team to make it work and a team that's much more likely to endure greater sacrifices in terms of work, low stress level, problem solving, critical thinking. For whatever reason, the amount of critical thinking and willing to overcome obstacles I have found goes dramatically down. If what they're trying to address was something they weren't involved in and it was sort of thrust that upon them. So this type of thing not only increases pride in the organization and the team, which is amazing, of course, but it also helps you if things don't go well, because if it's only because of its decisions, only top down, when things don't go well, there is a sense like, you know who's crazy idea was this any way? I think it's harder to say that when you were in the room when that crazy idea was launched as opposed to forced upon you and I think you will get a better response. And that's when things go negative. Of course, when things go positive, all the more. I think there is a sense of pride, of ownership, of being able to move the ball forward for the organization. If your for profit nonprofit, whatever your goals are, I think there's a bigger sense of pride, of accomplishment and it only gears people up to want to do the next thing. And I think if this is a style of management that you mentor your leaders to do, you know from their level down, I think you will only see good things where you will see a style of management where there's an inclusivity. So when new things are rolled out, new new projects, new trials of different things, you are going to get much more buy in. So thank you so much for watching this video. If you of course, like this kind of content, please comment like and subscribe if you have any thoughts on this. I really welcome your comments, especially about how you lead your organization and if this is prevalent in your organization or and if it's not, how does that impact some of the issues your organization have? Has? All right. Well, thank you so much for watching. And we will see you on the next video. Thank you.