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Leadership and Managing People

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Collective Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2by Linda A . Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2by David A . Garvin and Joshua D . Margolis

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Collective GeniusNo longer casting themselves as solo visionaries, smart leaders are rewriting the rules of innovation.by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

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3 Harvard Business Review June 2014

COLLECTIVEGENIUS

No longer casting themselves as solo visionaries, smart leaders are rewriting the rules of innovation.by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

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oogle’s astonishing success in its first de-cade now seems to have been almost in-evitable. But step in-side its systems infra-structure group, and you quickly learn oth-erwise. The compa-ny’s meteoric growth

depended in large part on its ability to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineer-ing, led the group from 2003 to 2011. His 1,000-person organization built Google’s “engine room,” the sys-tems and equipment that allow us all to use Google and its many services 24/7. “We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing,” he says. “So when a problem happened, we couldn’t just go out and buy a solution. We had to create it.”

Coughran joined Google in 2003, just five years after its founding. By then it had already reinvented the way it handled web search and data storage mul-tiple times. His group was using Google File System (GFS) to store the massive amount of data required to support Google searches. Given Google’s fero-cious appetite for growth, Coughran knew that GFS—once a groundbreaking innovation—would have to be replaced within a couple of years. The number of searches was growing dramatically, and Google was adding Gmail and other applications that needed not just more storage but storage of a kind different from what GFS had been optimized to handle.

Building the next-generation system—and the next one, and the one after that—was the job of the systems infrastructure group. It had to create the new engine room, in-house, while simultane-ously refining the current one. Because this was Coughran’s top priority—and given that he had led the storied Bell Labs and had a PhD in computer science from Stanford and degrees in mathemat-ics from Caltech—one might expect that he would first focus on developing a technical solution for Google’s storage problems and then lead his group through its implementation.

But that’s not how Coughran proceeded. To him, there was a bigger problem, a perennial challenge that many leaders inevitably come to contemplate: How do I build an organization capable of innovat-ing continually over time? Coughran knew that the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and

motivate others to follow it. It’s to create a commu-nity that is willing and able to generate new ideas.

The Link Between Leadership and Innovation Few companies have the resources of Google at their disposal, but most of them can relate to Coughran’s fundamental challenge. In 2005 we joined together to study exceptional leaders of innovation—how they think, what they do, and who they are. We found them across the globe—in Silicon Valley, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Korea. And we explored businesses as varied as filmmaking, e-commerce, auto manufacturing, professional ser-vices, and luxury goods. We didn’t think the world needed more research on leaders or on innovation. Rather, we wanted to study a topic much less un-derstood: the role of the leader in creating a more innovative organization.

The executives we studied are a diverse lot, but they all think about leadership in a similar way. They have moved away from the conventional view. Direction-setting leadership can work well when the solution to a problem is known and straight-forward. But if the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. By definition, then, leading innovation cannot be about creating and selling a vision to people and then somehow inspiring them to execute it. So common is the notion of the leader as visionary that many of the people we studied had been forced to rethink and recast their roles before their organizations could become truly and consis-tently innovative.

In the way they behave and structure the orga-nizations where talented people work, leaders can draw out the slices of genius in each individual and assemble them into innovations that represent col-lective genius. The question is not “How do I make innovation happen?” but, rather, “How do I set the stage for it to happen?”

Why Innovation Requires a Different Kind of LeadershipThe rhetoric of innovation is often about fun and creativity, but the reality is that innovation is hard work and can be a very taxing, uncomfortable pro-cess, both emotionally and intellectually. In fact, in-novative problem solving may feel unnatural and even dangerous in many organizations if their lead-ers are not skilled.

COLLECTIVE GENIUS

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Innovation usually emerges when diverse people collaborate to generate a wide-ranging portfolio of ideas, which they then refine and even evolve into new ideas through give-and-take and often-heated debates. Thus collaboration should involve passion-ate disagreement. Yet the friction of clashing ideas may be hard to bear. It can create tension and stress—particularly in groups of talented, energetic individu-als who may feel as if there are “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Often organizations try to discourage or minimize differences, but that only stifles the free flow of ideas and rich discussion that innovation needs. Leaders must manage this tension to create an environment supportive enough that people are will-ing to share their genius, but confrontational enough to improve ideas and spark new thinking.

Innovation also requires trial and error. Innova-tive groups act rather than plan their way forward, and solutions emerge that are usually different from anything anyone anticipated. Most organiza-tions and the people in them prefer to move sys-tematically toward a desired outcome. They set a goal, make a plan, assign responsibilities, work through the steps, and track progress until the goal is achieved. Isn’t that approach just good manage-ment? Not when it comes to innovation. Leaders of innovation create environments that strike the right balance between the need for improvisation and the realities of performance.

Finally, creating something novel and useful in-volves moving beyond either-or thinking to both-and thinking. But this also can be challenging. All too often, leaders and their groups solve problems through domination or compromise, resulting in less-than-inventive solutions. Innovation requires integrating ideas—combining option A and option B, even if they once seemed mutually exclusive—to create a new and better option. It also requires that leaders be patient enough to let great ideas from

people in all parts of the organization develop. At the same time, they must ensure that a sense of urgency and clear parameters allow integrative deci-sion making to actually occur.

Fostering a Willingness to InnovateTo build willingness, leaders must create communi-ties that share a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement.

In 2009, when Luca de Meo joined Volkswagen AG as the head of marketing communication (by the end of 2010 he had become the CMO of the VW Group), his task was to transform a fragmented mar-keting department into an innovation powerhouse. De Meo was energized by the ambitious goal that VW’s CEO, Martin Winterkorn, had set just a year earlier: to surpass Toyota and General Motors and be leading the industry within a decade. This goal was about some-thing deeper than being number one: It was about leveraging a near-century of VW history to create cars that made the world better—by delighting customers, limiting environmental impact, and pioneering what it means to be a 21st-century automaker.

De Meo’s mandate was to build a marketing de-partment that could support this audacious ambi-tion. Although the Volkswa gen brand was strong in many markets, de Meo knew it could be stron-ger. Moreover, the brand was not unified. It was perceived differently across the world, especially in emerging markets, where VW was looking for

Idea in BriefTHE CHALLENGECompetitiveness depends in great part on the ability to innovate. The perennial challenge, then, is to build an organization capable of innovating again and again.

THE KEYTraditional, direction-setting leadership can work well when the solution to a problem is known and straightforward. But if the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. So the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and motivate others to follow it. It’s to create a community that is willing and able to innovate.

THE APPROACHFostering willingness means creating communities that have both a sense of purpose and shared values and rules of engagement that are designed to encourage collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision making. Fostering ability requires developing three organizational capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.

he rhetoric of innovation is often about fun

and creativity, but the reality is that innovation can be very taxing and uncomfortable.



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dramatic growth. A former board chairman of Fiat and CEO of Alfa Romeo, de Meo knew, as he puts it, that “you build a brand from the inside out.” VW’s brand elements—innovation, responsibility, and value—had to be more than rhetoric. The company and its people had to live them day in and day out.

VW operated in 154 markets, and its marketing was highly decentralized. Most of the company’s marketers had worked only within their home coun-tries and had had limited opportunity or incentive to interact with their colleagues in other countries or at corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg. The silos and the “highly linear processes” the marketers followed to do their work discouraged them from speaking with “one voice,” de Meo told us.

Perhaps more concerning, de Meo found that at VW innovation was considered the province solely of engineers in product development, not of people in marketing—a common problem we see in engineer-ing- and product-focused firms. De Meo believed that everyone at a world-class company has to be an innovator, a strategist, a global thinker. If his team was to create a powerful global brand, the market-ers had to feel like citizens of a cohesive, collabora-tive community. Facing a desperate need for new capabilities and a ticking clock, de Meo nonetheless focused first on building that sense of community. Without it, his experience had taught him, people would be unwilling to innovate.

Purpose. One of his first steps was to create Marketing Worx!, a series of two-day “codesign labs” that brought together people, many of whom had rarely interacted before, to work on marketing prob-lems. De Meo believed that the mutual trust and re-spect needed to create a community could come only from interaction and dialogue. He wanted his mar-keters to grow familiar with one another and with the innovation process, from collaborating to experi-menting to integrating ideas. But more than that, he wanted to put his people in new situations that would force them out of old behaviors and catalyze new pat-terns of interacting. There would be no PowerPoint presentations and few seated activities. Rather, the labs would be a place for prototyping, testing, and arguing until the best solutions came to life. Some at-tendees were enthusiastic, but many were skeptical. De Meo had to push them into participating.

Purpose is not what a group does but who is in it or why it exists. It’s about a collective identity. Purpose makes people willing to take the risks and do the hard work inherent in innovation. At

The Hard Work of Innovation

ABILITYOrganizational willingness is necessary but not sufficient for innovation to flourish. The group also needs three specific capabilities.

CREATIVE ABRASIONTHE ABILITY TO

GENERATE IDEAS THROUGH DISCOURSE

AND DEBATE

CREATIVE RESOLUTION

THE ABILITY TO MAKE INTEGRATIVE DECISIONS

THAT COMBINE DISPARATE OR EVEN

OPPOSING IDEAS

CREATIVE AGILITY

THE ABILITY TO TEST AND EXPERIMENT THROUGH QUICK

PURSUIT, REFLECTION, AND ADJUSTMENT

PURPOSEWHY WE EXIST

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

HOW WE INTERACT WITH ONE ANOTHER

AND THINK ABOUT PROBLEMS

WILLINGNESSInnovative organizations must nurture a sense of community—which rests on three elements.

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

The role of an innovation leader is to create a community that is willing and able to innovate over time.

SHAREDVALUES

WHAT WE AGREE IS IMPORTANT

COLLECTIVE GENIUS


Marketing Worx!, de Meo encouraged his team members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them. They didn’t hold back: They said they were proud of the company’s history as the maker of the

“people’s car,” of providing the freedom of mobility, of VW’s role in driving technological and economic progress, of its environmental focus (in the 1970s, long before “sustainability” became a buzzword, the company had established a department for envi-ronmental protection). They were excited to be part of an effort to build the industry’s leading brand.

He also encouraged the team to think about the department’s reason for being. “Why are we all here?” de Meo would ask. A group purpose soon emerged: Marketing’s job was to reflect VW’s pow-erful legacy and build a brand that spoke with one voice around the world. This purpose lifted its work from “necessary but not crucial” to “strategic.” As de Meo told the group, “Brand is not fluff. There is very concrete evidence of what great brands do. It’s real business, not just magic.” At VW, which was trying to revolutionize its industry, de Meo’s team would have to play a central role.

Shared values. To form a community, members have to agree on what’s important. By shaping the group’s priorities and choices, values influence indi-vidual and collective thought and action. They vary from community to community, but we found four that truly innovative organizations all embrace: bold ambition, responsibility to the community, collabo-ration, and learning.

At VW, de Meo encouraged marketers to use the three components of the VW brand—innovation, re-sponsibility, and value—to guide their work. At one Marketing Worx! session he encouraged a team to flesh out a sustainability initiative ultimately called Think Blue, a concept that unified VW’s previous efforts and focused its future ones. An expression of “responsibility,” Think Blue built on both the rich heritage that de Meo’s team cared about deeply and VW’s bold ambition for social, economic, and tech-nological progress. At the end of Marketing Worx! all the participants signed a “manifesto” declaring per-sonal commitment to Think Blue.

Rules of engagement. Together with purpose and values, rules of engagement keep members fo-cused on what’s imperative, discourage unproduc-tive behaviors, and encourage activities that foster innovation. After the success of Marketing Worx!, de Meo turned to changing the way his group did its on-going work. Getting talented people to function as a

team is far from easy, but Marketing Worx! served as a “positive shock,” he says, pushing people together. The tensions inherent in collaboration may not only slow down progress but even threaten to tear a cre-ative community apart. Rules of engagement can help control those destructive forces—for example, by keeping conflict focused on ideas rather than per-sonalities. In every organization we studied, we saw leaders foster and enforce the rules, even becoming directive when the need arose.

Generally, the rules of engagement fall into two categories. The first is how people interact, and those rules call for mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual influence—the belief that everyone in the community has a voice and that even the inexperi-enced and less tenured should be allowed to influ-ence decisions. The second category is how people think, and those rules call for everyone to question everything, be data-driven, and see the whole.

Consider how the VW marketing group re-vamped its approach to rolling out a new car. It created cross-functional launch teams responsible for developing integrated marketing strategies for the entire life cycle of each new model. No longer would marketing operate like a bucket brigade, with separate teams respon-sible for each phase of a car’s maturity.

One team, for in-stance, focused on a new model in the up! series of small cars. It reported directly to de Meo, who set high expectations but with-held specific direction. The team had never experienced that kind of autonomy and re-sponsibility before. De Meo made it clear that the members were to take risks and play out their own ideas, according to the rules for “how we think.” Keeping them on track were key performance indicators that the marketers had defined in the codesign labs.

After some time, when the team was unable to reach conclusions without the formal authority of a senior manager, de Meo named a young leader from outside the group to act as “the first among peers” and facilitate the decision-making process. The up!

ules of engagement can help control

the tensions inherent in collaboration, which sometimes threaten to tear a creative community apart.



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team delivered: Its 130-page plan was “probably one of the most integrated launch strategies done re-cently at Volkswagen,” according to de Meo.

Like all the other leaders we studied, de Meo took a comprehensive approach. He transformed VW’s marketing department culture and capabilities—de-veloping cross-functional teams, establishing cen-ters of excellence, instituting quarterly roundtables to connect marketers globally. Those steps may not sound particularly revolutionary. What was unique about de Meo’s approach was that he used such seem-ingly mundane changes not as ends in themselves but as mechanisms with which to build a community.

De Meo’s efforts are clearly having an impact. Marketing began to challenge other functional ar-eas at VW and now plays a catalytic role throughout the company worldwide. Think Blue grew into a guiding principle for the whole organization, with

employees in other functions and more than 40 countries launching their own innovative Think Blue projects. Some 600 such projects were in the works by 2013. One, the Think Blue Factory—un-dertaken by the manufacturing function—aimed to reduce environmental impacts by 25% at every VW plant by 2018. “Blue marketing,” as de Meo de-scribes it, is truly “at the heart of the organization.”

Building the Ability to Innovate Willingness is necessary but not sufficient for inno-vation to flourish. Companies also need the ability to innovate. That requires developing three orga-nizational capabilities: for collaboration, creative abrasion, or the ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate; for discovery-driven learn-ing, creative agility, or the ability to test and ex-periment through quick pursuit, reflection, and adjustment; and for integrative decision making, creative resolution, or the ability to make decisions that combine disparate and sometimes even oppos-ing ideas. To see how this works, let’s return to Bill Coughran at Google.

As Coughran began talking with his staff about the need for a new storage system, two self- organizing groups of engineers emerged, coalescing around two promising alternatives: One wanted to add systems on top of GFS that would handle the new storage needs. This was the Big Table team. The other believed that Google’s new storage require-ments were so different from those of search alone that GFS had to be replaced, not adapted. This was the Build from Scratch team.

Coughran managed the two teams in a manner that he describes as “deliberately loose.” He gave as much freedom as possible to his engineers, all the while “keeping the reins in enough so that we didn’t degenerate into chaos.” He and his engineering di-rectors—a “brain trust” of tech-savvy managers and top engineers that he had assembled to help him lead the group—conducted regular review meetings

“to force teams to assess their progress relative to their goals.” He avoided giving direction and instead tried to ask penetrating questions to “inject tension” and “intellectual reality” and to drive debate.

Coughran set certain clear expectations: that each team would move forward through rigorous testing of its ideas, and that its members would respond to challenges and disagreement with objective data. He rarely had to say “Don’t do that”—words that he believes destroy talent and

Paradoxes of Innovation

In our research we identified six innovation paradoxes. The challenge for leaders is to help the organization continually recalibrate between:• affirming the individual…and the group• supporting…and confronting• fostering experimentation and learning…and performance• promoting improvisation…and structure• showing patience…and urgency• encouraging bottom-up initiative…and intervening top-down

Leaders who stay on the right side of these paradoxes will never unleash the full genius of their people; they will have few or no ideas to harness. Those who stay on the left side will have lots of ideas and options to work with, but won’t be able to turn them into new and useful solutions; instead, conflict and chaos will reign. The correct position at any moment will depend on the circumstances. But the goal will always be to take whatever position enables the collaboration, experimentation, and integration necessary for innovation.

The leaders we studied understood how to adapt their behavior according to the situation at hand. Conventional notions of leadership, discomfort with conflict or loss of control, and personal preferences can all limit a leader’s willingness to shift strategically across the paradoxes. Many leaders find it hard not to favor one extreme over the other. Continually recalibrating requires superb judgment, courage, and persistence.

Finding solutions that are truly new and useful is not easy, in part because the process of innovation is so messy and full of the tension embodied in each of these paradoxes.

At the heart of innovative problem solving is the need to both unleash individual slices of genius and harness them into collective genius. Unleashing talent is essential to developing promising ideas and options. Harnessing talent is essential to shaping those ideas and options and selecting new and useful solutions from among them.

COLLECTIVE GENIUS


motivation. Nor did he answer questions directly, in spite of his expertise. “You want to challenge people to think for themselves,” he says.

Creative abrasion. Coughran made sure that the review meetings were forums where ideas were put to the test. Honest discourse and rigorous debate were the goals. He encouraged both teams to grapple seriously with the apparent limits of their systems—scalability for the Build from Scratch team, and ser-vicing an ever-growing number of applications with different systems requirements for the Big Table team. He wanted both teams to question their as-sumptions. Coughran was supportive, but he knew that if creative abrasion was to occur, he had to inject some confrontation into the system. He explains:

“You don’t want an organization that just salutes and does whatever you say. You want an organization that argues with you.”

The two ingredients necessary for creative abra-sion are intellectual diversity and intellectual con-flict. Coughran encouraged diversity by allowing teams with fundamentally different approaches to move forward. He ensured that conflict was produc-tive through his intense questions and challenges. He and the other leaders decided to remain “delib-erately vague.” He realized that “90% of the value of having the engineers speak with me was the fact that they did not know what I was going to ask,” he says. “If they knew I was going to ask 12 specific questions, they’d be less likely to ask themselves broadly, ‘What are we doing?’”

Coughran was also sensitive to the drawbacks of bringing the two teams together for debate too early or too often. “If one team was building the per-fect left-handed thing,” he says, “and the other was building the perfect right-handed thing, and you put them in the same room, you might not get anywhere, even with a respected mediator.”

Creative agility. Coughran expected the mem-bers of both teams to proceed through the three phases of creative agility that virtually all our lead-ers encourage. First, he pushed them to pursue new ideas quickly and proactively with multiple experiments. That involved some planning, but he placed much greater emphasis on gathering data about how their ideas actually worked. Second, he expected them to reflect on and learn from the out-comes of those experiments. Third, he expected them to adjust their plans and actions on the basis of the results and to repeat the cycle incorporating this new knowledge—until a solution ultimately

emerged or it became clear that the basic approach was not going to work.

Creative resolution. After two years, Coughran had to admit that Build from Scratch was not stable enough for Google’s needs, and Big Table couldn’t handle the growing array of Google apps, including YouTube. However, he believed that the Big Ta-ble approach was more viable in the short term.

His conclusion was a tough call. “It was easy to make a decision when something failed com-pletely or succeeded completely,” Coughran says. “The ambiguous cases were the hardest to deal with, and that was where a lot of the complexity of our systems showed up. We were con-stantly considering and reconsidering our systems. Something that worked well at one scale would likely fail at another. There were few certainties, and since Google was pretty unique in terms of computing re-sources, there were no precedents.”

Coughran enlisted Kathy Polizzi, his engineering director for storage and a member of his brain trust, to help him persuade the Build from Scratch team that its system had major limitations. The two encour-aged the team to test its approach and “bump up”—as Coughran loves to say—against reality. Polizzi pressed the team to bring its system to a semi- operational state and to run performance and scalability tests. She set a time frame within which it would have to elimi-nate concerns about its system’s ability to handle the massive scale at which Google operates. She also put team members in joint meetings with the operations teams that were responsible for keeping Google up and running—the people whose pagers summoned them in the middle of the night when something went wrong. As Polizzi says, those people “put a human face” on the problems, issues, and priorities that any new storage system would have to deal with. Finally, she says, “the team started to see the limitations of the system they were building.”

Ultimately, the storage stack developed by the Big Table team was implemented throughout the company. But Coughran confronted his initial chal-lenge anew: This system would be able to handle Google’s storage requirements for only a few years.

reative agility involves quickly pursuing

multiple experiments, learning from the outcomes, and then adjusting plans.



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So he asked the two most senior engineers in the systems infrastructure group to work on a next- generation system that would eventually replace it. He invited the Build from Scratch team to join the effort, and indeed, some of the ideas developed by its members played key roles in the next-generation system—for example, by allowing it to handle a dra-matically larger set of data objects and files than had ever before been possible, and by safeguarding data in the event of drive or server failure.

By taking the course he did and avoiding a top-down decision, Coughran helped the company de-velop the best solution to its near-term problem. He also made progress on creating the disruptive new storage system Google would need for the future. But to him, the most important concern was foster-ing a community that would be capable of innovat-ing time and time again. “I never wanted to pull rank

and tell a team to stop working on something they were passionate about,” he says. “We hire innovators, and if I were to forbid a motivated team to do some-thing, it really would misuse their talents.”

Consider how the approach of a more conven-tional leader would have stifled innovation in this situation. Preserving harmony by muffling creative disagreement would have limited the number of good options considered. Exercising discipline and control by marching the group to a predetermined solution would have discouraged the trial-and-error efforts that led to the best short- and long-term an-swers. And making choices early and often would have prematurely shut down work that led to the most creative and thoughtful solutions.

Developing Leaders Who Can Create Collective GeniusIf the point is to foster organizations that are willing and able to innovate over the long haul, then tomor-row’s leaders of innovation must be identified and developed today. Consider: At Google, Coughran be-lieved that the problem he faced was more a people challenge than a technical one. For all Google’s riches, it suffered from a dearth of innovation leaders. To him, individuals who understood that leadership is about creating collective genius were absolutely crucial to expanding and sustaining the innovation capacity of his organization.

Great leaders of innovation, as we’ve said, see their role not as take-charge direction setters but as creators of a context in which others make innova-tion happen. That shift in understanding is critical to fostering the next generation of innovation lead-ers and must permeate the organization and its tal-ent management practices, because those with the potential to lead innovation, we have found, are of-ten invisible to current systems. We should let them take roles that put their skills on display and provide them with the experiences and the tools they need to both unleash and harness the individual slices of genius around them. HBR Reprint R1406G

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business

School and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. Greg Brandeau, the longtime head of technology at Pixar, is a former EVP and CTO for the Walt Disney Studios. Emily Truelove is a researcher and a PhD candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Kent Lineback has spent more than 25 years as a manager and an executive. They are the authors of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

Are You an Innovation Leader?Start by asking yourself these questions about your organization:

• Do members of my organization feel part of a community?

• Does my organization have a shared purpose—one that binds us together and compels us all to do the hard work of innovation?

• Does it live by rules of engagement supportive of a set of core values: bold ambition, responsibility to the community, collaboration, and learning?

• Do we have the ability to generate ideas through candid discourse and debate?

• Do we have the ability to test ideas through quick pursuit, reflection, and adaptation?

• Do we have the ability to make integrative decisions, rather than compromising or letting some groups dominate?

Ask yourself some questions about your own leadership mind-set and practices:

• Do I think my primary job as a leader is to create a context in which my team can innovate?

• Am I comfortable serving as the “stage setter” as opposed to the visionary leading from the front?

• Do I have the courage and patience required to amplify differences, even when discussion becomes heated and when ambiguity and complexity loom?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no” or even “I don’t know,” it’s probably time to look again at your own leadership role and at the leadership potential that may be hiding in your organization. Many of the remarkable innovation leaders we studied had to encourage others to rethink their ideas about leadership and to recognize that operating in the ways we’ve described is far from easy—especially for those who may be passionate geniuses themselves.


COLLECTIVE GENIUS

June 2014

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SPOTLIGHT ON SOFT SKILLS YOU CAN’T NEGLECT

The Art of Giving and Receiving Adviceby David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis

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SPOTLIGHT ARTWORK Mauro Perucchetti Jelly Baby 1, 2, 3, 2004 Urethane, 51.5" x 21.6" x 13"

S


The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice

expert advice often creates an implicit debt that recipients will want to repay.

But advice seekers and givers must clear signifi-cant hurdles, such as a deeply ingrained tendency to prefer their own opinions, irrespective of their merit, and the fact that careful listening is hard, time- consuming work. The whole interaction is a subtle and intricate art. On both sides it requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, restraint, diplomacy, and patience. The process can derail in many ways, and getting it wrong can have damaging conse-quences—misunderstanding and frustration, deci-sion gridlock, subpar solutions, frayed relationships, and thwarted personal development—with substan-tial costs to individuals and their organizations.

Because these essential skills are assumed to emerge organically, they’re rarely taught; but we’ve found that they can be learned and applied to great effect. So we’ve drawn on extensive research (ours and others’) to identify the most common obstacles and some practical guidelines for getting past them. Though heavily disguised, the examples in this ar-ticle are based on interviewees’ real experiences in

by David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis

EEKING AND GIVING advice are central to effective leadership and de-cision making. Yet managers seldom view them as practical skills they can learn and improve. Receiving guid-

ance is often seen as the passive con-sumption of wisdom. And advising is

typically treated as a matter of “good judgment”—you either have it or you don’t—rather than a competency to be mastered.

When the exchange is done well, people on both sides of the table benefit. Those who are truly open to guidance (and not just looking for validation) de-velop better solutions to problems than they would have on their own. They add nuance and texture to their thinking—and, research shows, they can overcome cognitive biases, self-serving rationales, and other flaws in their logic. Those who give ad-vice effectively wield soft influence—they shape important decisions while empowering others to act. As engaged listeners, they can also learn a lot from the problems that people bring them. And the rule of reciprocity is a powerful binding force: Providing

David A. Garvin is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Joshua D. Margolis is the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration at HBS and the faculty chair of the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning.

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a range of settings. Of course, advice takes different forms in different circumstances. (See the sidebar

“Know What’s Called For.”) Coaching and mentoring are covered extensively elsewhere, so here we focus on situations that involve big, risky, or emotionally charged decisions—those in which you might con-sult with someone multiple times—because leaders struggle with such decisions and must learn to han-dle them well.

Why This Is Harder Than It LooksWhether you’re receiving or giving advice, flawed logic and limited information complicate the pro-cess. Advice seekers must identify their blind spots, recognize when and how to ask for guidance, draw useful insights from the right people, and overcome an inevitable defensiveness about their own views. Advisers, too, face myriad challenges as they try to interpret messy situations and provide guidance on seemingly intractable problems.

Below we describe the biggest obstacles on both sides. One reason they’re so common is that they’re basic—people often don’t realize they’re getting tripped up—so you may find it helpful to do a reality check of your behavior against these lists.

When you’re seeking advice, watch for these obstacles:

Thinking you already have the answers. As people are deciding whether they need help, they often have difficulty assessing their own competence and place too much faith in their intuition. The result is overconfidence and a tendency to default to solo decision making on the basis of prior knowledge and assumptions. A related tendency is to ask for advice when one’s real goal is to gain validation or praise. People do this when they strongly believe they’ve solved the problem but still want to “check the box” with bosses or peers. Or they do it when they have lurking doubts about a solution but dread the time and effort it would take to do better. It’s a dangerous game to play—they risk alienating their advisers when it becomes evident (and it will) that they’re requesting guidance just for show or to avoid additional work.

Choosing the wrong advisers. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, decision makers stack the deck by turning to like-minded advisers. In a study of CEOs, for example, those at compa-nies with poor financial performance (measured by market-to-book value) were more likely than

those at high-performing ones to seek advice from executives in the same industry and with a similar functional background. The result was limited stra-tegic change—less product-market and geographic diversification. What’s more, several field stud-ies confirm that advice seekers are more receptive to guidance from friends or other likable people. Though friendship, accessibility, and nonthreaten-ing personalities all impart high levels of comfort and trust, they have no relation to the quality or thoughtfulness of the advice.

Seekers also fail to think creatively enough about the expertise they need—which fields might bring valuable insight, who has solved a similar problem before, whose knowledge is most relevant, whose experience is the best fit—or cast a wide enough net to find it. Unfortunately, to make sense of a messy, volatile world, leaders often shoehorn peo-ple into tidy categories that don’t reflect their full range of wisdom. That’s a mistake President John F. Kennedy made leading up to the Bay of Pigs in-vasion. He didn’t consult Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg for advice, assuming that Goldberg lacked a background in military matters. But as the jour-nalist David Halberstam describes in The Best and

Know What’s Called ForBy understanding the different types of advice, seekers can make requests with greater precision—and advisers can give more-targeted guidance.

We present the types separately here for clarity, but they frequently overlap in practice. For instance, one-off requests for guidance often segue into requests for counsel. And we’ve included coaching and mentoring, even though they aren’t discussed in the article, in order to round out the picture of advice seeking and giving.

COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.15 Harvard Business Review January–February 2015


the Brightest, Goldberg had run guerrilla operations during World War II, so he understood that guerril-las were “no good at all in confronting regular units.” He explained to the president: “Whenever we used them like that, we’d always lose all our people….But you didn’t think of that—and you put me in the category of just a Secretary of Labor.”

Defining the problem poorly. Seekers frequently have trouble reaching a mutual under-standing with their advisers—sometimes because of imprecise or ineffective communication, and some-times because of cognitive or emotional blinders. When communicating ineffectively, they may tell

a lengthy, blow-by-blow story that causes listeners to tune out, lose focus, and perhaps misidentify the core of the problem that needs solving. Or they may omit details that reflect badly on them but are central to seeing the big picture. Many seekers also take for granted background essentials (often about past in-cidents or organizational politics) that their advisers don’t know. Or they may misdefine the problem by placing arbitrary boundaries around it and exclud-ing important data, which skews their own and their advisers’ assessments (a pitfall that the decision-making experts Max Bazerman and Dolly Chugh call bounded awareness).

Idea in BriefTHE PROBLEMLeaders must learn how to give and receive advice effectively to do their jobs well, but the exchange is hard work on both sides of the table. Doing it badly can lead to flawed decisions, strained relationships, and stalled careers.

THE SOLUTIONFortunately, you can master the art of advice by adopting a framework of best practices, drawn from a substantial body of research.

THE BENEFITSBy seeking advice from the right people—and in the right ways—you can develop smarter solutions to problems, deepen your thinking, and sharpen your decision making. And by becoming a better adviser, you’ll extend your influence and learn from the people who come to you for guidance.

TYPE ACTIVITIES DESIRED OUTCOMES EXAMPLES

Discrete advice

Exploring options for a single decision

Recommendations in favor of or against specific options

Which of my managers should I promote?

Where should we build the new factory—in China, Brazil, or Eastern Europe?

Counsel Providing guidance on how to approach a complex or unfamiliar situation

A framework or process for understanding and navigating the situation

How should I approach price negotiations with our overseas supplier?

How should I handle my domineering supervisor?

Coaching Enhancing skills, self-awareness, and self-management

Task proficiency; personal and professional development

How can I run more-effective meetings?

How can I work more collaboratively with peers?

Mentoring Providing opportunities, guidance, and protection to aid career success

A relationship dedicated to building and sustaining professional and personal effectiveness and to career advancement

Should I accept the position in Mumbai?

How can I get more exposure for my project?

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Discounting advice. Once seekers have advice in hand, their most common mistake is to undervalue or dismiss it. This is a strong, recurrent finding in or-ganizational behavior research—so it’s pretty safe to assume that you’re at least susceptible to this prob-lem. For one thing, “egocentric bias” often clouds seekers’ vision—even when people lack expertise, they put more stock in their own opinions than in others’ views. For another, seekers understand their own logic but may be unaware of advisers’ reasoning. Or they may become so anchored in their preformed judgments that they can’t adjust their thinking when they receive feedback to the contrary. Over time, dis-counting advice can damage important relationships. Advisers notice when they’re repeatedly not being heard, and it generates mistrust and ill will.

Individuals in powerful positions are the worst of-fenders. According to one experimental study, they feel competitive when they receive advice from ex-perts, which inflates their confidence and leads them to dismiss what the experts are telling them. High-power participants in the study ignored almost two-thirds of the advice they received. Other participants (the control and low-power groups) ignored advice about half as often.

Misjudging the quality of advice. Most seekers who accept advice have trouble distinguishing the good from the bad. Research shows that they value advice more if it comes from a confident source, even though confidence doesn’t signal validity. Conversely, seekers tend to assume that advice is off-base when it veers from the norm or comes from people with whom they’ve had frequent discord. (Experimental studies show that neither indicates poor quality.) Seekers also don’t embrace advice when advisers disagree among themselves. And they fail to com-pensate sufficiently for distorted advice that stems from conflicts of interest, even when their advisers have acknowledged the conflicts and the potential for self-serving motives.

When you’re giving advice, be on the lookout for these tendencies:

Overstepping boundaries. Though many peo-ple give unsolicited advice, it’s usually considered intrusive and seldom followed. (That stands to rea-son. We all know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of “helpful suggestions” we haven’t invited and don’t really want.) Another way advisers overstep is to chime in when they’re not qualified to do so. It can give them an ego boost in the short run—but at

a significant cost. People who liberally offer base-less advice quickly lose credibility and influence in their organizations. Even a single instance of bad ad-vice normally leads to a rapid decline in an adviser’s standing.

Misdiagnosing the problem. Advisers must gather intelligence to develop a clearer picture of the problem to be solved. Here they can slip up in a couple of ways, as Edgar Schein, of MIT’s Sloan School, has pointed out. First, they may define the problem prematurely because they think they see similarities with challenges they’ve faced. (Often those analogies don’t hold up when the full scope of the problem is revealed.) Second, they sometimes forget that seekers are self-interested parties who may—deliberately or not—present partial or biased accounts. Taking such accounts at face value leads to inaccurate assessments and flawed advice. All this is compounded by an irrational but compelling fear of looking incompetent: Advisers tend to avoid asking

Advice on Advising

William Lee is one of the foremost intellectual

property attorneys in the United

States, a former co-managing partner at WilmerHale, and the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard University’s governing board, so he gives a lot of advice for a living. Because he’s earned a reputation for doing it so skillfully, Garvin and Margolis included him in their research sample for this article. HBR spoke with Lee about his approach to advising and what he’s learned with experience.

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HBR: How would you describe your advising style?Lee: I try to understand what the other person faces and provide guidance that makes sense from that perspective. My firm represents large clients such as Apple and Intel, but when we’re advising insti-tutions like that, we’re also advising in-dividuals who work there. They have the company’s best interests in mind, but they have a boss to think about, their own goals, their personal lives, their ups and downs. Our advice has to work for them as well as for the institution. If we have something to say that the client CEO won’t want to hear, we take the heat. If we’re saying ex-actly what everyone wants to hear, we let an inside person report that.

How do you approach less formal advis-ing—for instance, when you’re mentoring someone? Mentoring is the most impor-tant kind of advising, in my view. You have to really get to know the person. I like to begin with a simple, open-ended question: “How are things?” That lets you know what’s on the other person’s mind,

so you can better understand what the is-sue is and how you might help.

What do you look for in an adviser? Someone who is open and candid. Someone who gives advice that people can act on. (Otherwise it’s like telling them, “Get taller” or “Get smarter.”) Also, someone who recognizes that every situation is different. I advise clients. I also advise folks about their careers. A lot depends on the circumstances a person faces. When I was younger, and often on the receiving end, I was prob-ably more inclined to believe that there’s one way to think about problems. Over time I’ve realized it’s more complicated than that. I’ve learned how important listening is.

Listening is a big theme in this article—but how do you home in on the right de-tails? At times the conversation has to be guided. Asking “Have you thought of the issue this way?” or “How would so-and-so think about the problem?” can turn the conversation in a different direction.

The hardest thing to resist is simply cut-ting off a wandering narrative and giving the advice. It’s much better to ask ques-tions that allow people to reach conclu-sions themselves. If they do, they’ll feel much more confident in the process and the choices they make.

What were some of your toughest experi-ences? About 25 years ago I was the lead trial lawyer in a major case. My second chair was younger, a fine lawyer and a great person. We worked well together. When he came up for partner, we both knew that the decision was largely up to me. He had great presence, but his skills weren’t the best match for the direction the firm was headed. Over lunch one day, we talked openly about it. I told him he’d be enormously successful in a dif-ferent environment, but not if he stayed with the firm. He went somewhere else and really thrived there. It was the most difficult conversation I’ve ever had at work, and he later told me the same. But he also said it was the best conversation he’s ever had.

Advice on Advising

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GAA

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basic, probing questions because they don’t want to jeopardize their expert status.

Offering self-centered guidance. Advisers often frame their guidance as “how I would respond if I were in your shoes.” This approach is both off-putting and ineffective, because they’re clearly not thinking about how the seeker feels, perceives the situation, and understands the choices ahead—the kinds of insights that lead to empathic understand-ing and useful recommendations. Advisers may also share personal stories and experiences that fail the

“doability test” because they simply don’t accord with the seeker’s level of power, negotiating skill, organi-zational savvy, or situational constraints.

Communicating advice poorly. Several mis-takes fall under this rubric. Advisers may provide vague recommendations that can easily be miscon-strued. (For example, “Align behaviors with goals” might refer to unit goals or company goals, and it’s not at all clear what behaviors are in question.) Or,

when providing specialized expertise, they may use jargon or other inaccessible language. They may also overwhelm seekers with too many ideas, alterna-tives, action plans, perspectives, or interpretations. Nothing causes paralysis like a laundry list of options with no explicit guidance on where to start or how to work through and winnow the list.

Mishandling the aftermath. Though the final decision is not theirs to make, many advisers take of-fense when their guidance isn’t accepted wholesale, curtailing further discussion. This has both short- and long-term costs: in the moment, lost opportunities to provide a general sense of direction even if some of the seeker’s choices are not to their liking; and over time, a growing distance between adviser and seeker that may limit the trust and intimacy that lie at the heart of effective advising. The reality is that recipi-ents rarely take one person’s advice and run with it. More often they modify the advice, combine it with feedback from others, or reject it altogether—and



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advisers often fail to treat these responses as valuable input in an ongoing conversation.

Best Practices for Seeking and Giving AdviceAs a leader and a decision maker, you must “give as good as you get,” and vice versa—but how can you overcome all those obstacles? We’ve identified some guidelines by combining lessons from academic re-search with the practical wisdom of experts on the ground—people we interviewed because they are known for their skill at advising. Although they come from a variety of fields (technology, financial services, law, politics, educational administration, consulting, and not for profit), we found striking parallels in their behavior throughout the five stages of advising. (See the sidebar “Guidelines for Each Stage of Advising.”)

Stage 1: Finding the right fit. Each request for advice is unique, reflecting a distinctive combina-tion of circumstances, personalities, and events. But

because time is often of the essence, you won’t want to search anew for potential advisers in every situa-tion. Put together a personal “board” in advance, in-cluding people you value not only for their judgment and their ability to keep confidences but also for their diverse strengths, experiences, and points of view. All of them should have your best interests at heart and a track record of being really willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear. Try to find at least one person you can turn to in a variety of situations, be-cause that adviser will develop a multifaceted sense of the problems you face and your natural proclivities and biases.

When selecting an adviser (or multiple advisers) from that board for your immediate needs, deter-mine how you’d like her to help and why. (See the sidebar “What Advisers Can Do.”) Sometimes you’ll want a sounding board—someone who can listen carefully to help clarify and sharpen your thinking. At other times you’ll want to test a path or an alternative

Guidelines for Each Stage of Advising

FINDING THE RIGHT FIT

IF YOU’RE A SEEKER• Have a preexisting “board” of diverse,

complementary advisers • Determine what type of advice you

are seeking • Choose one or more advisers who

fit your current needs

IF YOU’RE AN ADVISER• Assess fit: Do you have the time,

expertise, and experience to help? • Identify other potential sources of

guidance

DEVELOPING A SHARED UNDERSTANDING

IF YOU’RE A SEEKER• Provide just enough information

about your problem• Acknowledge uncomfortable truths

IF YOU’RE AN ADVISER• Set the stage for effective advising: Allow

ample time, and choose a place that’s free from distractions and ensures privacy

• Listen actively and suspend judgment • Ask open-ended questions to broaden

understanding and then shift to more- detailed probes

• Once you have a complete picture of the problem, agree on what type of advice is needed

CRAFTING ALTERNATIVES

IF YOU’RE A SEEKER• Contribute actively to the development

of options• Ask questions to understand: - the costs, benefits, and rationale of each option-the relevance and applicability of the advice -the approach to implementation

IF YOU’RE AN ADVISER• Understand and articulate your role as

providing guidance, not making the decision• Push to generate several viable choices • Spell out the rationale, personal experiences,

and principles behind your advice

2STAGE

1STAGE

3STAGE



you’ve tentatively chosen. Or you may want someone who can expand your frame of reference, drawing on rich experience and expertise to unveil dimensions of the problem that you did not see. Or perhaps you’re looking for process guidance—a way of navigating through a ticklish situation—or help generating sub-stantive ideas. The better you understand what you need, the better your selection will be—and the bet-ter equipped your adviser will be to support you.

Take this example: A regional supply chain head at a medical supply company was asked by the chief procurement officer to play hardball with a lo-cal government that was perpetually late paying for purchases. As the accounts receivable kept stacking up, the CPO suggested choking off supply—but the manager worried that government officials would turn that into a cause célèbre. It was a high-stakes situation, and he needed guidance. When consider-ing potential advisers, he knew he wanted people who could provide calibration. Were his concerns

justified or blown out of proportion? The person with the most-relevant experience, he decided, was a manager who oversaw supply chain in a similarly sensitive region. He also turned to a colleague with experience analyzing risks across borders. As a result, he was able to make a balanced recommendation to the CPO: that they canvass multiple regional heads about his proposed plan to choke off supply. And on the basis of their input, the CPO decided not to move ahead with his plan.

As the supply chain manager realized, no single adviser can be helpful in all situations, and the most readily accessible one might not be the right fit. Try to pinpoint what you don’t know and how that accords with the knowledge and experiences of the people you might turn to. As the Harvard Business School professor C. Roland Christensen frequently observed,

“When you pick your advisers, you pick your advice.” Your goal is to find a match between your deficiencies, limitations, or uncertainties and their experiences,

CONVERGING ON A DECISION

IF YOU’RE A SEEKER• Beware of uncritical and dismissive reflexes • Consider soliciting a second or third opinion • Develop hybrid solutions

IF YOU’RE AN ADVISER• Ensure that all the options are evaluated;

don’t jump too quickly to a solution • Pause frequently for reactions • Convey your availability for further

clarification and elaboration

PUTTING ADVICE INTO ACTION

IF YOU’RE A SEEKER• Be sensitive to changes in the situation

or context and any need for midcourse corrections

• Follow up and seek additional guidance if necessary

IF YOU’RE AN ADVISER• Reaffirm that the decision and the

consequences are the seeker’s• Convey your availability for additional

guidance and support

5STAGE

4STAGE



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expertise, or knowledge base. Avoid picking advisers primarily for their confidence, likability, friendship, or reinforcing points of view—as noted earlier, those are not proxies for quality.

When the roles are reversed and you’re ap-proached for advice, ask yourself whether you are indeed a good fit. Do you have the right background to help in this particular situation? Can you dedicate enough time and effort to attend to the seeker’s con-cerns? It’s much better to decline the request than to give uninformed advice, rush the advisee, be dis-tracted in meetings, or discover late in the process that you have little of value to offer. Ask why the advisee sought you out—but remember that you are in the best position to assess whether your judgment and experience are relevant. Saying no is a service too, and you can further help by identifying other sources of expertise. Even if you are well qualified to serve as an adviser, consider recommending some other people to bring in complementary or alterna-tive views. That will give the seeker a more textured understanding of the challenges and choices.

Stage 2: Developing a shared understanding. At this stage your primary goal as an advice seeker is to convey just enough information for your adviser to grasp the problem you face, why it poses a chal-lenge, and where you hope to end up. That will allow her to offer informed, unbiased recommendations without getting lost in the weeds. So ground your

narrative with telling details and provide context—but avoid taking her on a lengthy tour of antecedents, diverse interpretations, and potential consequences. Otherwise you may distract her from the central is-sues or lose her interest.

In the telling, you may need to acknowledge some uncomfortable truths about your behavior or weak-nesses. Your discomfort with revealing certain infor-mation may actually signal its importance to fleshing out the story. An adviser can be only as good as the personal and organizational portrait she has to work with, so share all key details—even those that are unflattering or difficult to discuss. It will help her get past your biases and blind spots.

As an adviser, you’ll want to get a complete pic-ture while also expanding the seeker’s understanding, all in a reasonable amount of time. So set the stage for openness and efficiency: Pick a place that will free you both from distractions and allow sufficient (but not unlimited) time for a robust discussion. Privacy and confidentiality are essential. Create a “safe zone” where you can both speak openly. Hear the seeker out, allowing his story to emerge with minimal in-tervention. Suspend judgment and resist the urge to provide immediate feedback and direction: You don’t yet know enough to offer thoughtful advice. Jumping to conclusions or recommendations typically signals a flawed or incomplete diagnosis, so gather more in-formation. Begin with broad, open-ended questions—such as “How are you feeling about this?”—because they establish rapport, uncover what is truly on the seeker’s mind, and often take you right to the heart of the matter. (Anthropologists call these “grand tour questions” and suggest using them as a starting point for interviews.) Follow up by drawing out support-ing details and additional context to help the seeker move beyond a self-serving account.

In our interviews with advisers, two people shared stories about seekers who had come to them for affirmation, already intent on a course of action. Both seekers had (and thus articulated) only a par-tial view of the problem; the advisers said they had to tease out the rest through patient inquiry before they could begin to formulate sound advice and move the seekers from affirmation mode to a dawn-ing and genuine understanding of the challenges they faced.

Determine the seeker’s personal interests and goals and compare them with those of the organi-zation. Consider, in the words of one of our experts,

When you’re approached for advice, ask yourself whether you’re indeed a good fit. Do you have the right background? Can you dedicate enough time and effort to attend to the seeker’s concerns?



giving “homework assignments” to further the seek-er’s thinking (“Come back to me next week with five reasons why moving to Dallas would be a good idea”). Finally, deepen your own understanding as well, by inquiring about root causes, potential consequences, and other pertinent issues not explicitly mentioned. They’ll speak volumes if you can get them out in the open. The stated problem may be only a symptom of these underlying issues.

Once you’ve done all that, you’ll be well enough informed to agree or disagree with the seeker on a key question that is seldom asked: What role should you play? Should you serve as a sounding board, pro-vide reassurance, flesh out the picture the seeker has of this sort of situation, or present fresh insights and options? Discuss your conclusions with your advisee to ensure a shared understanding of what’s needed.

Stage 3: Crafting alternatives. Because deci-sion making improves dramatically when diverse options are available, seekers and advisers should work together to come up with more than one pos-sibility. Even go/no-go decisions yield improved re-sults when nuanced alternatives are described and considered.

Take this example from our interviews: A con-sumer products division head at an electronics com-pany decided to relocate his marketing group to im-prove collaboration with engineering. He was eager to adopt this industry trend because of its potential to speed up product development and get every-one thinking about more-targeted offerings. But his marketing VP felt it would put too much distance be-tween her staff and sales.

So the division head turned to a trusted colleague, the chief operating officer, for advice on how to deal with marketing. The COO agreed that the move made sense and worked with the division head to generate ideas for getting the marketing VP on board—without resorting to fiat. For instance, the division head might try sharing the proposal at small cross-functional meetings so that the VP could hear her direct reports discuss the merits of being closer to the engineers. They could also meet with major retail customers or Wall Street analysts—either could comment on how competitors were benefiting from this approach. Talking to the COO expanded the division head’s per-spective—he could now see options beyond one-on-one conversations with the VP.

What Advisers Can Do Depending on what’s needed, advisers might:

Restate and play back arguments to sharpen the seeker’s understanding of the situation and the conclusions she has drawn

Scrutinize the reasoning behind the selection of an option and elaborate on the potential consequences

Provide greater breadth and depth of understanding about the nature of the problem the seeker faces—and the implications for action

Suggest how to approach and manage a complicated, delicate, or high-stakes situation

Increase the number and range of options being considered

Asking a few well-chosen questions that probe the seeker’s underlying rationale and motivation—and listening attentively

Assessing the seeker’s thinking, often using hypotheticals and critical questions to achieve a deeper understanding

Sharing key details and tendencies from prior experiences in similar situations to flesh out the larger context

Examining the interests involved, the possibilities for action, and alternative steps the seeker might take

Brainstorming with the seeker

Serve as a sounding board

Test a tentative path

Expand the frame of reference

Provide process guidance

Generate substantive ideas

KEY PRACTICES



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If you’re a seeker of advice, don’t hesitate to solicit a second or third opinion—particularly if you remain uncertain. This can offset any biases or conflicts of interest your adviser may have.

If you’re seeking advice, adopt an analytic, prob-ing mindset to identify and weigh multiple choices. Certainly offer up your own ideas, but also listen to your adviser’s suggestions, especially those that may take you in a different direction altogether. Imagine how you might apply those recommendations—but subject them to a lot of poking and prodding as well. You want to play out what you would actually do. Ask pointed questions about the costs and benefits of each, the underlying rationale, the relevance of the advice to your situation (to confirm that your adviser isn’t forcing his preferred principles and prior experi-ences to fit), the tactics for implementing the ideas, what repercussions might follow, and any contin-gencies you should prepare for. In short, scrutinize the advice as closely as your adviser scrutinized your description of the problem to be solved. The ensuing discussion will prepare you to overcome implemen-tation hurdles.

If you’re the adviser, think of yourself as a driving instructor. While you provide oversight and guidance, your ultimate goal is to empower the seeker to act independently. Our interviewees were unanimous in saying, essentially, “It’s the seeker’s job to find the path forward.” You can never fully step into the advisee’s shoes, and it is important to acknowledge that clearly. As you’re helping her generate viable choices, spell out the thinking behind each possibility. Describe the principles that are shaping your advice, along with any experiences you are bringing to bear or using as analogies. Articulating your thought pro-cess—and your possible biases—can help both you and the seeker determine how well your reasoning and perspective fit the situation. If you are senior to the seeker, you can shrink the power difference and increase the likelihood that your advice will be use-ful by explicitly asking what doesn’t seem quite right.

Stage 4: Converging on a decision. When it’s time to narrow down options and choose a course of action, seekers often fall prey to confirmation bias, picking the “easy way out,” or other forms of flawed reasoning. So test your thinking by reviewing discarded or briefly considered options and by ask-ing your adviser to play devil’s advocate. And don’t hesitate to solicit a second or third opinion at this stage—particularly if you remain uncertain. This can offset any biases or conflicts of interest your adviser may have. Experimental evidence suggests that two opinions are generally enough to yield most of the benefits of having multiple advisers. But for complex,

ambiguous, highly visible, or contested problems, or when implementation is likely to be complicated, a few additional points of view are often helpful. No matter how unsettling or urgent the situation, resist the impulse to jump on the simplest, most readily available solution.

You may want to combine recommendations from multiple advisers with your own insights to form a hybrid solution. A team leader at a consulting firm did this when she was having a hard time managing project meetings. Veterans and newcomers would engage in endless debate, each faction convinced that the other didn’t “get it.” Because the leader com-municated well with everybody one-on-one, she considered reducing the group meetings and manag-ing the project in hub-and-spoke fashion.

Her advisers provided a range of reactions. One emphasized the importance of allowing the group to discuss the client’s challenges rather than just argue about competing solutions. Another said that the two camps needed to hear each other to broaden their perspectives. And a third suggested openly dis-cussing the team’s dysfunction. The leader drew on all three pieces of advice. After explaining in a series of one-on-ones how the next project meeting would be run and why, she brought her team together and asked individuals with varying levels of expertise and experience to share their views of the client’s challenges. Debate didn’t disappear, but it was far more constructive: Team members arrived at a col-lective understanding of the problems to be solved.



At the end they talked about how they might have more meetings like that one.

If you’re an adviser, your goal at this stage is to work with the advisee to explore all the options at hand before she makes a choice. Talk through the most likely outcomes of each possibility, assess-ing the relative pros and cons and ensuring that the conversation remains a dialogue rather than a mono-logue. Pose hypotheticals—“Imagine it’s a year from now, and you did fire that talented but difficult man-ager. What might happen? How bad, or good, could things get?”—to tease out likely implications. Then focus the discussion on a course of action. This might entail making the case for a single option, or you might suggest experimenting with a few ideas.

Pause frequently to gauge how comfortable the seeker is with the proffered advice and the extent to which she accepts the underlying rationale. Work together to bring to the surface unstated assump-tions, lingering doubts, and unresolved questions. At the same time, recognize that “I don’t know” is a fine answer if you can’t predict the impact of certain op-tions, especially if you make clear recommendations on how to learn more about the alternatives.

Follow-up meetings are often essential for firming up advisees’ choices and developing detailed action plans. So make yourself available for clarification and elaboration. That said, seekers sometimes come back for more and more conversations to delay decision making. If you suspect that’s happening, either say so and ask what might be done to move things for-ward, or encourage the seeker to try out a solution and check in with you about how it went.

Stage 5: Putting advice into action. As a seeker, you’ll need to act on the advice you’ve re-ceived and make real-time adjustments. Advice is best treated as provisional and contingent: It should be a cycle of guidance, action, learning, and further guidance—not a fixed path forward. Especially if the advisory process has occurred over an extended period, circumstances may have changed by the time you are ready to act.

So follow up for further advice if needed. You may benefit from multiple meetings, especially if you have gleaned new information from your first steps forward or have a series of decisions to make. It’s also considerate and helpful to let your adviser know what you’ve done and how it’s working out. It’s a way of expressing your gratitude, strengthening the rela-tionship, and helping the adviser learn as well.

If you’re the adviser, step back from the process at this stage. Reaffirm that it’s up to the seeker to move forward. Both the decision and the conse-quences are his, not yours, and must be recognized as such. That will help ensure personal account-ability and prevent misplaced blame if things don’t work out as hoped. But remain open to providing additional guidance as events unfold. Especially in fluid, rapidly changing situations, even the best advice can quickly become irrelevant. To the extent that you’re willing to help with midcourse correc-tions, convey your availability.

THOUGH SEEKERS and advisers work together to solve problems, they have different vantage points. Recent social psychology research shows that people in an advisory role focus on overarching purpose (why an action should be performed), whereas recipients of advice—who usually face an impending decision—are more concerned with tactics (how to get things done). An individual is likely to think idealistically as an adviser but pragmatically as a seeker, even when confronting the same challenge.

Suppose a hiring manager must decide whether to fill a key role with an outside candidate or promote an ambitious employee from within. If you’re advis-ing that manager, you may see the merits of bring-ing in a fresh perspective and the healthy shake-up it could provide. But if you’re the one seeking guid-ance, you may be more inclined to see the challenges of getting an outsider integrated and poised to de-liver and also the time saved and the boost to morale of going with an insider. Keeping both perspectives in mind, no matter which is yours, will help you achieve mutual understanding, identify the key pri-ority driving the decision (reducing time and effort to integrate? bringing in a fresh perspective?), and prepare for the downsides of any option.

Overall, our guidelines for both seekers and ad-visers amount to a fundamental shift in approach. Although people typically focus on the content of advice, those who are most skilled attend just as much to how they advise as to what they advise. It’s a mistake to think of advice as a one-and-done transaction. Skilled advising is more than the dis-pensing and accepting of wisdom; it’s a creative, collaborative process—a matter of striving, on both sides, to better understand problems and craft promising paths forward. And that often requires an ongoing conversation. HBR Reprint R1501D



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HBR.ORG JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2015 REPRINT R1501E


Get the Boss to Buy InLearn to sell your ideas up the chain of command. by Susan J. Ashford and James Detert

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Get the Boss to Buy In

ARTWORK Mauro Perucchetti, Notre Dame (detail), 2003 Acrylic and urethane jelly babies, 76" x 76"SPOTLIGHT



Learn to sell your ideas up the chain of command. by Susan J. Ashford and James Detert

N ENGINEERING MANAGER at an energy company—we’ll call him John Healy—wanted to

sell his boss on a safer and cheaper gas-scrubbing tech-

nology. This might have been an easy task if his boss, the general manager, hadn’t se-lected the existing system just a year before. Instead it was, in Healy’s words, “a delicate process.” Fortunately, user reviews of the new technology had become available only in the past several months, which Healy tact-fully mentioned in his presentation to the GM and other senior executives. He also included a detailed comparison of the two systems, drawing on implementations at comparable plants; the data suggested that the new sys-tem would remove contaminants more effi-ciently and reduce costs by about $700,000 a year. Because the GM was still on the fence, Healy brought in a bio-gas expert his boss trusted and respected to talk about the new technology’s merits. The company made the investment and adopted the new system.

Organizations don’t prosper unless man-agers in the middle ranks, like Healy, identify and promote the need for change. People at that level gather valuable intelligence from

direct contact with customers, suppliers, and colleagues. They’re in a position to see when the market is ripe for a certain offering, for instance, or to detect early signs that a part-nership won’t work out. But for many reasons, ranging from a fear of negative consequences to compliance with a top-down culture, they may not voice their ideas and concerns. As we know from our research and others’ work in this area, not to mention recent news stories, such silence can have dire consequences—like “regulatory capture” in banking and un-checked product safety risks.

Even when they do speak up, most man-agers struggle to sell their ideas to people at the top. They find it difficult to raise issues to a “strategic” level early in the decision-making process—if they gain entry into such conversations at all. Studies show that senior executives dismiss good ideas from below far too often, largely for this reason: If they don’t already perceive an idea’s relevance to organizational performance, they don’t deem it important enough to merit their attention. Middle managers have to work to alter that perception.

Their task is easier if certain contextual fac-tors are in place—for instance, a track record



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of strong individual contributions, which enhances credibility, and a culture in which it’s safe to speak up. Whether or not those stars are aligned, managers can improve their odds of success by using powerful methods of persuasion. Consider John Healy’s ap-proach: He presented his idea with emotional intelli-gence (making sure the GM didn’t look bad for buying the current system), supported it with strong evi-dence from similar companies, and brought in a care-fully chosen outside expert to bolster his argument.

Since Jane Dutton and Susan Ashford (a coauthor of this article) introduced the concept of “issue sell-ing” into the academic discourse, more than two decades ago, many studies have proposed tactics for effectively winning support for new ideas. In a recent study of our own, we examined what actually works in organizations, across a range of roles and indus-tries. Our participants described their experiences selling three basic types of ideas: new products, pro-cesses, markets, or customers to pursue; improve-ments to existing products or processes; and ways of better meeting employees’ needs.

Issue sellers who accomplish their goals, we found, look for the best ways, venues, and times to voice their ideas and concerns—using rhetorical skill, political sensitivity, and interpersonal connections to move the right leaders to action. In particular, they employ seven tactics significantly more often than people who don’t succeed in gaining buy-in. In this article we pull those tactics into a practical frame-work that managers can use to gain traction for their ideas, and we illustrate them with examples from our research. Each tactic should be part of an extended campaign to win attention and resources.

Tailor Your PitchMore than any other tactic in our re-search sample, tailoring the pitch to decision makers was associated with success. It’s essential for issue sellers to familiarize themselves with their audi-

ence’s unique blend of goals, values, and knowledge and to allow that insight to shape their messages.

That’s how one regional sales manager in the Canada division of an international oil company persuaded senior executives to restructure the sales organization and change its approach to attracting and motivating talent. Although sales teams in the oil industry are usually organized by customer, at this company each one covered a region. Because

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many customers had offices in multiple regions, teams often undermined one another’s efforts by offering competing deals to the same clients. The organization’s poor structure led to misaligned in-centives and a fragmented customer experience. Making matters worse, most of the reps worked for salaries rather than commissions. “That’s why a competitor managed to poach more than half my division’s sales force,” the regional manager said. Unsurprisingly, nearly all the top performers had left. Having a sales structure so inefficient and out of touch with standard practices made such attri-tion practically inevitable. Although the executives who had created the structure were competent, they lacked sales experience. The remaining sales team, similarly, was technically knowledgeable but inex-perienced, and the force was too small to sustain the business, let alone grow it.

When the regional manager initially shared his concerns with his boss and a few other executives, they disagreed, saying that the solution was simply to push people harder. “That sounded very risky to me, given that the division had just lost more than half its sales team,” he told us. He made little progress until he asked other leaders in the division—those with greater decision-making power—what they ex-pected from sales. He met with the new vice presi-dent of marketing and sales for Canada, for example, who wanted to prevent teams from working against one another and damaging credibility with clients.

In light of the feedback he’d gathered, the regional manager drafted recommendations and explained how they would help the division double revenue within four years (a target the CEO had re-cently announced to shareholders). Assigning sales teams to clients rather than to regions, he pointed out, would keep reps from stepping on one anothers’ toes—which addressed the Canada VP’s concerns. The manager also argued that attracting and retain-ing seasoned salespeople was essential to increas-ing revenue within the CEO’s desired time frame. He emphasized the division’s high attrition rate for reps—about 40% walked out the door each year—and described how that could be fixed by follow-ing the industry’s best practices for recruiting and managing sales talent. Commission-based compen-sation would attract experienced people and give them a reason to stay. Training would help greener reps develop important skills for managing customer relationships.

Middle managers are more likely

to speak up when they:

Identify with the organization

Have a positive relationship with

their audience

Feel psychologically safe in the

organization

Think someone above them will take action

Care enough about the issue to invest energy in selling it

COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.28 Harvard Business Review January–February 2015


The Canada VP approved the plan and, more important, provided the resources to carry it out.

“We added a dozen experienced people to the sales organization,” the regional manager said. “And after implementation we had only one person leave in four years.” That reduced the once-sizable turnover costs to almost nothing. The division also invested $75,000 in training, which more than paid for itself with a contest to see who could sell the most using the methods learned. (That alone brought $2.7 mil-lion in new business in one week.) Although the division missed its four-year target, it doubled revenue in five years.

In light of those benefits, executives no longer blamed laziness for the problems the sales force had experienced. And good people stopped leaving in droves, thanks partly to the shift in mindset at the top and partly to the improved structure and talent practices.

The regional manager attributed the inroads he made to his carefully tailored pitch. In addition to speaking directly to the Canada VP’s and other lead-ers’ goals, he said, “I had to show how my ideas could help meet the CEO’s revenue expectations.” That allowed him to move from one-on-one and small group meetings to a written proposal and a presentation he could share at a more senior level, where the initiatives got the support they needed.

Frame the IssueAn issue’s place on your organization’s list of priorities depends heavily on how you package the idea. A new tech-nological development might seem like techie trivia until you explain

how it supports a strategic goal, such as increasing responsiveness to customers. It then becomes im-portant. Once people see how your initiative fits into

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the big picture, they’ll be more willing to devote resources to it.

Similarly, if you’re a unit head presenting one of your directors to top management for promotion, you’ll want to say that she exceeded her targets and spell out how she can contribute to key goals. You can describe how moving her into a more strategic role will help turn around a struggling department, for instance, or bring energy and creativity to a modestly performing part of the business. By fram-ing her as a leader the organization needs instead of simply letting her impressive work speak for itself, you create a sense of urgency for decision makers. This isn’t just someone who has accomplished a lot and deserves to advance, whenever and however that’s convenient. It’s someone with the skills and drive to make changes that matter now.

As these scenarios show, it’s often effective to highlight an idea’s business benefits; the success-ful sellers in our research took that approach sig-nificantly more often than those who’d failed. For example, a chief investment officer at a financial firm described how he very gradually made the case that subscribing to a proprietary real estate database

Idea in BriefTHE PROBLEMMiddle managers glean valuable insights from their contact with customers, suppliers, and colleagues—but they struggle to sell their ideas to decision makers at the top. As a result, their organizations fail to seize opportunities and solve problems.

THE SOLUTIONResearch shows that managers who gain buy-in from senior executives use seven tactics more often than managers whose ideas don’t go anywhere.

THE BENEFITSThese tactics provide a powerful framework for leading change from the middle ranks. By using them in an extended campaign for support, you can persuade senior leaders to take action and accomplish your goals.

A new technological development might seem like techie trivia until you explain how it supports a strategic goal.



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was “a need and not just a want.” Every six months or so, over a period of about five years, he would float the suggestion at a moment when access to the database would be useful, and a tech-savvy ally in the asset management department would vocally agree. But they needed broader support for the idea, because most people viewed it as a luxury. “We are a lean-running organization that has historically re-sisted adopting new technologies,” the chief invest-ment officer explained. Eventually he identified a relevant need in another part of the business: The database could help the accounting department meet its public-reporting and audit requirements. That was the tipping point. He’d spelled out the business benefits for multiple departments. The firm decided to subscribe.

Moral framing appears to be less powerful than business framing. In our research, the few instances of moral framing were associated with failed at-tempts or uneven results. When issue sellers peddle their principles too aggressively, people may react negatively to what they perceive as a judgment of their character.

Although focusing on business benefits is often safer, sellers may need to underscore the urgency. They might, for instance, present the idea as an op-portunity that shouldn’t be missed. Our successful sellers were significantly more likely than the others to explain what the organization stood to gain from their ideas. Emphasizing the positive can give your audience a sense of control over the situation and inspire optimism and buy-in.

Highlighting a threat—a consequence of not adopting your idea—can also create pressure to act. But it can backfire: When decision makers focus on potential loss, they sometimes then bury their heads and avoid the issue. The amount of threat framing did not differ between successful and un-successful selling attempts, perhaps because it was viewed as a mixed bag: It’s hard to predict whether it will spur action—the classic “fight” response—or result in “flight.”

Finally, issue sellers often find success by bun-dling their ideas with related ones. For instance, someone lobbying to increase leave time for employ-ees caring for aging or sick family members might allude to efforts to increase parental leave. When attached to a larger initiative, a small idea can gain prominence. It’s no longer just an elder-care issue; it’s a work/life balance issue.

Manage Emotions on Both SidesBecause issue selling is an interpersonal activity, often involving high stakes, it inevitably stirs emotions. Passion, if ap-propriately expressed, improves sellers’

chances of gaining attention and triggering action. There’s a fine line, however, between passion and anger. People sometimes propose initiatives because they are fed up with existing conditions or behavior. And as they encounter roadblocks to their selling efforts, their frustrations may intensify.

Though strong emotions can be channeled into a rousing appeal for action, when unregulated they’re more likely to diminish the seller’s influence. Decision makers who detect negative emotions from subordinates offering input tend to perceive those employees as complainers, not as change agents. Further, recent research by Wharton’s Adam Grant shows that people who keep their emotions in check—or at least control what they display to others—feel more comfortable raising issues and re-ceive higher performance evaluations.

Our study supports Grant’s finding: Successful issue sellers paid much more attention to emotional regulation than those who failed. Indeed, the latter sometimes understood that their runaway emotions were partly to blame for their failures.

Important as self-regulation is, it’s equally criti-cal to understand and manage the decision maker’s emotions—they, too, can make or break your case. John Healy, the manager in our opening example, did that especially well. Anticipating how his boss might feel about having selected the more hazard-ous and more expensive gas-scrubbing system, he was careful to point out that user reviews of the new technology hadn’t been available when that decision had been made. Sellers hoping to have their issues heard should seek to inspire positive emotions in the decision makers—by focusing on benefits, for instance, or showing how action is possible. In our sample, successful sellers reported doing this far more often than others.

Get the Timing RightIt’s critical to find the right moment to raise your ideas. That moment might be when organizational priori-ties shift, when certain players leave or join the company, or when a boss’s

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Tailor your pitchWhere does my audience stand on this issue?

What does my audience find most convincing or compelling?

Frame the issueHow can I connect my issue to organizational priorities?

How can I best describe its benefits?

How can I link it to other issues receiving attention?

How can I highlight an opportunity for the organization?

Manage emotions on both sidesHow can I use my emotions to generate positive rather than negative responses?

How can I manage my audience’s emotional responses?

Get the timing rightWhat is the best moment to be heard? Can I “catch the wave” of a trend, for example, or tap into what’s going on in the outside world?

What is the right time in the decision-making process to raise my issue?

Issue-Selling Prompts

These questions will help you use the seven tactics

effectively:



preoccupations change. Successful sellers in our study reported greater sensitivity than others to tim-ing, by a wide margin. The best sellers notice when more and more people are beginning to care about a larger topic or trend that’s related to their issue, and they position their idea to “catch the wave.”

For example, the managing director of an Ecuadoran holding company’s luxury division chose just the right time to persuade his CFO and board to tap an unexplored market in Peru. He’d got-ten the idea in 2007. Though it was a viable option then, he held off on proposing it, given Peru’s recent civil unrest and the fact that his division still had room for growth in its home market. In 2009, after the recession, “Peru had the best-performing stock market in the world,” the director said. So his team took a trip to assess the potential. “We looked at new construction developments, and the modern mini-malism was in stark contrast with the high-walled constructions from the guerrilla and terrorist era.” It seemed that Peru was not just doing well but primed for growth. “There was only one prominent shop-ping mall, and ‘hard’ luxury items such as designer-branded bags, watches, and sunglasses were scarce or sold informally,” he explained. “Yet Starbucks cafés were full every day and expanding.” The di-rector and his team decided that a luxury boutique carrying various products but focusing on watches would be the best project to pursue. They knew that department stores wouldn’t cover the demand, be-cause customers would want the luxury experience.

“We thought Peru was ready for it,” he said. The tim-ing was excellent for another reason: The market in Ecuador had become saturated by then.

The director got the approval he needed, and the company opened two luxury stores in November 2010. “The day we opened our first boutique we sold the entire inventory of perfume we had bought from the pharmacy next door,” he said. “One customer came in and bought all our stock of ink for his luxury writing instrument out of fear of not finding the ink again.” That store accounted for 40% of the divi-sion’s profits over the following three years. By 2011 all the most prestigious luxury brands had entered the Peruvian market—but this company had gotten there first.

In addition to keeping a close eye on larger trends and events, it’s important to be mindful of deadlines. If an idea relates directly to an imminent product launch or software release, by all means

speak up—now is the time to be heard. But as recent research shows, when a deadline is far away and decision makers are still in exploration mode, open-ended inquiry can be more effective than proposing a specific solution. Of course, sellers can’t always know their audiences’ deadlines. If you discover an imme-diate challenge, though, you can try to address it in your proposal—and shelve other ideas until people have time to really think them through.

Involve OthersIssue sellers usually are better off bring-ing others into their efforts than going it alone. Building a coalition generates organizational buy-in more quickly and on a larger scale as more people contrib-

ute energy and resources. One person might have access to important data, for example, and another might have a personal relationship with one of the top managers you’re trying to persuade. Perhaps rec-ognizing these advantages, our successful respon-dents were more likely than the others to involve colleagues in pitching their ideas.

Negotiation experts would tell you to mobilize your allies, persuade your blockers to support the issue or at least back off, and show the fence-sitters why they should care about your idea. When building a coalition, you can reach out to experts in relevant areas to add to your credibility, though a recent study of reactions to issue sellers suggests that it’s just as important to include individuals the target audience trusts. Certainly tap members of your network, but also involve people whose networks don’t overlap with yours. That will expand the pool of people who might advocate for your idea or lend their expertise.

Adhere to NormsThe tactics we’ve covered so far draw on two types of knowledge that successful issue sellers need: strategic (under-standing the organization’s goals, the plans to achieve them, and the roles

decision makers play in those efforts) and relational (figuring out who will be affected by your issue, who cares about it, who might object to it, and so on). Here we’ll discuss a third type: knowledge of organiza-tional norms, such as what kinds of data your lead-ers like to use to make decisions, how they prefer to receive information, and whether they tend to get behind issues similar to yours. Grasping such norms

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Involve othersWhich allies from my network can help me sell my issue, and how can I involve them effectively?

Who are my potential blockers, and how can I persuade them to support me?

Who are my fence-sitters, and how can I convince them that my issue matters?

Adhere to normsShould I use a formal, public approach to sell my issue (for example, a presentation to upper management)? Or an informal, private approach (casual one- on-one conversations)? Or a combination of the two?

Suggest solutionsAm I suggesting a viable solution?

If not, am I proposing a way to discover one instead of just highlighting the problem?



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can give you a sense of how effective the other tactics described in this article will be. For example, a study of employees selling environmental issues found that the use of drama and emotion worked only if the organization already had a strong environmental commitment.

One important norm to understand is whether it’s generally best to use formal or informal approaches. Casual conversations allow issue sellers to get an off-the-record read on their ideas and avoid putting their target audience on the spot in public. But formal approaches can convey seriousness and apply help-ful pressure on decision makers to respond. Issue sellers need to consider these trade-offs in light of what’s expected in their organizations. In one company we studied, senior managers claimed to want innovative thinking but were described, even at “blue sky” meetings, as chastising those who didn’t present slide shows using company-approved templates. Not surprisingly, their employees reported selling in very formal ways while acknowl-edging the dampening effect this probably had on innovation.

Successful sellers used more formal—and fewer informal—tactics than those whose pitches failed. So it seems that many business settings require a certain level of convention and decorum, and that the best sellers adapt their behavior to fit that norm. Our qualitative data suggests that sequencing mat-ters, though: People who succeeded tended to roll out their ideas informally early on, in order to gauge interest, and then switch to formal presentations.

Suggest SolutionsClearly, people believe that if they’re going to speak up about problems, they’d better suggest thoughtful fixes: This was the most frequently used tactic among both types of sellers,

successful and not. And those who succeeded used it significantly more often than those who didn’t. They pointed to specific solutions, such as adding a busi-ness operations team to address a systems flaw. They often included funding ideas when selling the need for something new.

Proposing a solution signals that the seller has put thought into the issue and respects leaders’ time. Indeed, recent laboratory research shows that people think more highly of issue sellers who suggest solutions.

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But here’s the hitch: If people are less likely to raise issues for which they haven’t identified a solution, as our data shows, organizations where problems crop up faster than people can devise fixes are at a considerable disadvantage. What’s more, some problems are best solved by a group of people who bring diverse knowledge, experience, and ex-pertise to the table. In these cases, expecting issue sellers to have solutions in hand may lead to poor decision making.

Sellers who feel strongly about an issue but don’t see a solution can suggest a sensible process for dis-covering one. That way they follow the norm of being solution-focused while getting others constructively involved in a timely manner.

Create a Tactical CampaignThere’s more to a pitch than a big presentation and a yea-or-nay decision. Those are just the most visible steps in the process. Leading up to them, you should carefully lay a foundation for your argument, tactic by tactic, as you acquire resources and knowledge. Here are some principles to help you make the most of the tactics we’ve described.

Choose your battles. Some ideas are just plain tough to sell—those that are too far ahead of the au-dience’s current understanding, for instance, or too much of a stretch beyond the organization’s norms. That’s especially true of any idea that may seem an indictment of the status quo or, worse, of the audi-ence’s intelligence, judgment, or morality. In such

To determine whether to invest resources and social capital in selling an issue, ask two questions: How important is this to my company? And how important is it to me?



cases, you may have an uphill battle no matter how skillfully you frame the issue and manage emotions.

Even the best issue sellers can’t win every time, and sometimes the payoff isn’t worth the effort. To determine whether to invest resources and social capital in selling an issue, ask two questions: How important is this to my company? And how impor-tant is it to me? That will help you assess how much risk to take on. Raising concerns about a company’s approach to foreign labor practices or about manag-ers’ treatment of employees will probably elicit much more pushback than ideas for enhancing products or improving processes. But if the former issues are crit-ical to the organization’s well-being or your own pro-fessional identity, you might sensitively pursue them even if you know you won’t succeed in the short term.

Combine tactics. In our regression analysis, we found that campaigns using multiple tactics succeeded more often than those using any single tactic. Indeed, the combined use of all seven tactics accounted for about 40% of the difference between successes and failures. We saw the same kind of impact in individuals’ descriptions of their selling efforts. The engineering manager at the energy com-pany managed the GM’s emotions, suggested a solu-tion backed by data, and turned to an outside expert for further support. The Ecuadoran managing direc-tor also combined tactics: In addition to choosing the right moment to launch the luxury goods stores, he adhered to his conservative organization’s norms for proposing projects—starting with informal conversa-tions, looking at proxy businesses in other industries (in this case, Starbucks), talking with customers and partners to gather insights, and finally building up to the formal review process, using traditional financial tools and outsourced market studies for analysis.

Approach the right audience. It’s a common dilemma: Should you air your idea with your boss

and risk getting nowhere because he or she lacks suf-ficient power or interest to back you up? Or go straight to decision makers who will care—and quite likely pay a price for bypassing your manager? Wishing to avoid trouble, many sellers start with their boss and hope their ideas make their way up the hierar-chy. But their issues often die right away or languish until senior management becomes aware of them. Sometimes the immediate boss doesn’t even bother escalating the issue; other times the messenger isn’t as skilled as the initial seller at making the case.

So ask if you can accompany anyone selling on your behalf, whether that’s your manager or a colleague who has an “in” with a formal decision-making body. If that’s not possible, do everything you can to prepare that person to sell effectively: Work out the details of the business case, help identify the right time and venue for presenting it, and so forth. If you decide to approach decision makers directly, keep your boss in the loop. Otherwise you’ll need to have a very good answer when senior leaders ask why you’ve come to them instead of to your manager.

NO SET OF PRESCRIPTIONS can capture the nuances of every environment or remove the risks and disap-pointments of issue selling. But sellers who routinely and effectively use these tactics enjoy greater success than those who don’t.

Issue selling isn’t a discrete event; it’s an ongo-ing process that requires groundwork, pacing, and patience. When midlevel managers do it effectively, their ideas get decision makers’ attention and make a real difference. HBR Reprint R1501E

We surveyed 77 men and 24 women, ages 24 to 52, and, with the help of research assistant Evan Bruno, interviewed 10 of them. Our respondents had 14 years of work experience, on average—about six years in their organizations and about two and a half in their current roles. They held a variety of jobs, from business analyst to director of marketing to principal engineer,

and worked in industries ranging from software development to consumer goods to law.

About half the respondents (randomly selected) were asked to describe a time when they successfully pitched an idea to decision makers; the other half, a time when they failed. All indicated how they knew that their efforts had succeeded or failed and rated the extent

to which they’d used each of the tactics in this article. We examined whether each tactic appeared more frequently in the success stories than in the failure stories, testing for statistically significant differences between the two groups. We also identified which tactics played the largest role in each success or failure.

Susan J. Ashford is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor of Management and Organizations at the

University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. James Detert is an associate professor of management and organizations at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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