Wouldn’t it be great if the workplace where harmonious and 100% aligned?
Meaning, within a team, everyone had one mind? Across teams, everyone shared a common objective?
Unfortunately, that kind of unity rarely happens.
Which means, even if you have an initiative which is best for the company, perhaps even sponsored by a senior executive, going out on your own with the concept can be fraught.
An example from one of our recent Cohorts:
We have an operations team, and when asked what the product roadmap should look like, they focused entirely on what would meet operations needs. But many of the suggestions didn’t address the executive’s needs, which was to reduce headcount while continuing to scale. Our business is hyper-localized, and currently has an operational intensity (real estate, repairs, logistics and coordinaton). If we cannot find a way to scale, we cannot hit hypergrowth. But the resistance is too great.
The solution that could work actually emerged from a separate member of a Cohort, who wanted to roll-out an initiative across all of the sales teams.
But he needed the SVP of sales to get behind it, instead of him rolling it out (avoiding a common mistake).
Our suggestion: go back to the SVP, affirm and confirm the SVP had a broad initiative. Acknowledge it’s top of mind and then offer the roll out plan as a solution. See if he agrees. Then, slowly socialize the idea as his with some version of the following:
I agree with your initiative of 2021 is about scale, and it seems the rollout plan we just reviewed helps you. That’s a great idea. Seems like achieving that outcome would benefit from you sharing it in an email and announcing it at the upcoming sales kick off. Would me drafting both pieces of content for you help?