3 Phrases to Get Your Team On Board with Anything

How many times have you thought of an exciting new initiative, only for it to get shot down or met with unexpected resistance when you bring it to your team? 🥲

Getting buy-in is critical in bringing about change, but it can be hard work and take much longer than you expected.

Mathias Meyer, an Executive Leadership Coach to CTOs and Technical Founders says “It’s all about providing your team with an image of what’s possible…invite them to contribute on how you can get towards this beautiful future that’s on the horizon.”

Here are 3 go-to phrases to help you get that buy-in you need!

🤔 Ask “What if…” questions

When you position a change as a “what if” it helps people imagine what the future could look like and gets them curious instead of feeling threatened.

For example, when Mathias wanted to propose a new process in his team, here’s what he said:

“Currently our release process happens every month, imagine what we could do if it was happening every week, every day…whenever we want?”

“What if…we could adjust our development process so that we can fix bugs and respond to customers quicker?”

Here’s another question you can ask…

🤷‍♀️ “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

Andrea Stubbe, Head of Product at commercetools, says that “When you invite people to rant about why an idea is horrible and why it can’t possibly be done, it’s both fun and helps to get concerns out in the open, so you can work on them bit by bit.”

When Andrea suggested bringing a major new feature into their product, she knew it would face some resistance. To get everyone in the mood, she kicked things off by saying, “If we do this, we’ll burn out our frontend dev team and they’ll all quit. We really shouldn’t do this”.

Drama and exaggerating what could go wrong helps reveal your team’s deeper fears. This tactic is especially good for those controversial “we tried this in the past” topics.

Here’s one more phrase…

🤩 Yes, and…

There’s a lot of power in these two simple words: They encourage more divergent thinking and help your team to build on each other’s ideas.

Here’s how you might set it up:
“There’ll be plenty of time to explore risks and concerns, but for the sake of exploring the potential, let’s do an exercise: when you hear an idea, try to respond with ‘yes, and…’, and hold back from saying ‘no, but…’

Last but not least…when you commit to the change, frame it as an experiment. 🧪

Ask people to try it out for a week or two, and book in a time-slot in advance to collect feedback on how it’s going. Once the time period is up, get together to decide as a team if you’ll keep, change, or trash the new way of working.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple question to start influencing change. By having a list of questions and phrases in your pocket, you’ll get your team considering the opportunities, which is a great place to start!

Want to build your communication skills to get buy-in from your team more effectively? Download the Bunch AI Leadership Coach app to become a better leader in 2 minutes a day.

Enjoyed what Mathias had to say about this? Check out our Teams at Work Podcast episode featuring his advice on building intentional teams and leading through influence.

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