How to build executive consensus and buy-in

Know your audience and prepare a compelling narrative

Nov 17, 2023

Have you ever felt like your efforts to secure agreement on an important decision are falling flat?

Have you ever noticed minimal engagement or responses to your emails or messages when communicating about a major project or initiative?

Have you ever left a meeting with senior leadership only to be unclear about the actions or decisions ahead? Or maybe you've received a vague promise to "think about it and get back to you"?

If any of these situations sound familiar, don't fret; we've all faced them. It might be a good time to reconsider your approach to gaining consensus from stakeholders.

Outlined below are a few strategies to garner essential buy-in from your executive and senior stakeholders.

1. Understand your stakeholder motivations

The first step of understanding how your executives could buy-in to your product/project/idea is to understand their influence, motives, and interests.

Conducting a stakeholder mapping exercise goes a long way to help visualise all the stakeholders of your product/project/idea on a single page. The main benefit is to gain a summary of all the people who can influence your project and how they are connected.

A simple method I have advocated in the past is the use of a Power vs Interest grid, where:

Power — where a stakeholder has influence, authority or access to higher authorities, can impact the future conditions of your project/work, can vote and change your environment, or may even have their hands on the purse strings (i.e., can easily cut your budget or resources).
Interest —the level of attention by a stakeholder often manifested as a keen want to know or learn about your project/product.

Knowing where your stakeholder sits relative to another group of stakeholders will allow you to best prioritise your efforts and time in influencing certain people to understand your position and be aligned with it. Roman Pilcher recommends four actions depending on the situation.

A 2 by 2 matrix of Power vs Interest — Power vs Interest Grid adapted from Roman Pilcher.

Collaborate with Players, those who have high power and interest. Innovation, critical feedback and insights are standard here.
Consult with Context Setters, those with low power but high interest. Those who are keen on progress but less power (or influence) to impact product or project priorities fall in this group.
Involve Subjects, those with high power but low interest. Subjects are those who aren’t keen on making decisions, but potentially could have an influence on your product/project in ways you wouldn’t anticipate.
Inform the Crowd, who are those with low power and low interest. The Crowd simply needs some frequent updates as they don’t usually have the power to influence product decisions.

Needless to say, you should be spending much more time with Players, as they will have the most significant impact on your product or idea. While you are unable to solely focus on their needs all the time, ensuring they are consulted and empowered with the ability to participate and contribute to decision making, the better your relationships and decision making capability.

2. Ensure a common understanding of shared goals

In parallel to understanding your stakeholder needs, you also have the challenge of ensuring a common understanding of shared goals, whether be organisational or at the project/product level.

I’ve written about this previously in a separate article; however, in short, strong Product Leaders continually communicate vision, purpose and strategy so that it is heavily engrained across the company. It’s not enough to send out a set of PowerPoint slides every six months with a vision statement. Communicate your “why”, your purpose, your north star, frequently and often.

When you have aligned objectives across a team, teams do the following, best summarised by John Cutler:

[Aligned teams] row relentlessly in the right direction, even when that point on the horizon shifts. — John Cutler

3. Communicate strong with strategic themes rather than implementation specifics

While a product manager needs to know the specifics on the features that are in the scope of the project/product discussion, a more compelling way to communicate is by focussing on the strategic theme that your product or project is aiming to address.

In their simplest form, themes are groupings of similar initiatives, epics and their underlying features. These Themes ideally describe customer value in their broadest sense — what customers will receive or what tasks or jobs that you’ll be helping them accomplish.

A theme is a placeholder for well-defined strategy, focused on outcomes driven by an aspect of your product — Jon Dobrowolski

Speaking about how to achieve the strategic objective/theme keeps executives and stakeholders on the same page and focused on the big picture. It also moves any disagreements away from detailed implementation specifics and towards more fundamental decisions around business strategy.

An image of strategic Themes, mapped to Epic and User Stories — Image from Knowledgehut’s article on the art of writing user stories.

An example strategic Theme could be:

Improve the shopping cart experience
Simplify the merchant onboarding experience
Improve transaction processing margins
Reduce reliance on 3rd party processors

Themes are outcome led. They help you keep your strategy and roadmaps at a high level, especially for longer-term less certain/fuzzier initiatives. By focusing on the Themes, you can replace any products and features as needed during your engagement so long as you stay aligned with your executive stakeholders on the themes, which are just another way of ensuring you have the correct strategic direction and outcomes.

4. Communicate passionately using visual narratives

I love to watch TED Talks. There are so many great stories to listen to, all of which are highly gripping, informative, and emotive. Whether I’m tearing my eyes out at a tale of lost love, or smiling and laughing at highly comedic sketches that comment, I can always trust TED to give me the dose of interesting speakers that I need.

One of my more favourite talks is one by Andrew Stanton, a filmmaker responsible for Pixar greats of “Toy Story,” “WALL-E”, among many more. In his speech, he explains the different ingredients it takes for creating a compelling story that builds upon your audiences curiosities on character development and overall narrative.

Picture of Wall-E looking into the camera — Photo by Lenin Estrada on Unsplash

From the many points made in his talk, perhaps the most memorable for me was that he believed the best stories are the ones that invoke the purest sense of wonder possible. One of the places to start is within yourself: to look into yourself and use your sense of values and beliefs to create an emotional connection with your audience.

Use what you know draw from it; it doesn’t always mean plot or fact, it’s means capturing truth from your experience, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. — Andrew Stanton

Stanton also gave tips on how to create character arcs through the concept of character “spine” — an that a character cannot scratch, or perhaps an unwavering purpose or belief. For example, Wall-E’s spine was to find beauty. Marlin from Finding Nemo was to prevent harm. Woody from Toy Story, was to do best for his child.

The concepts of ‘character spine’ and ‘invoking wonder’ can also be translated to your executive audience. You, the presenter, can appeal to an executive’s empathy and interest through a visual narrative, describing your customer’s ordeal and their spine, and finish with a sense of wonder once their problems have been solved by a solution you are pitching for buy-in.

Should you have presented without emotion, you may as well have just sent an email asking for approval for some action — however, this lacks gravitas and impact, and doesn’t bring your stakeholders along the journey.

Another excellent opportunity to create a visual narrative for an executive audience is when you need to gain buy-in for product strategy or vision. There are some methods to do this, but one I find the most helpful is a framework that was introduced to me a few months ago, The Hills Method, created by the IBM Design Team. If you’d like to know more about this method, check out a previous post where I curated a Product Talk tank that spoke precisely about this subject.

5. Reinforce your narrative with data and insight

Presenting data to justify decisions allows you to not only gain more confidence in your communication but also gain crucial trust from your executives. Decisions without data are simply guesses. As William Edwards Deming says:

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” — William Edwards Deming

You must choose the correct data to reinforce the right information when necessary. When communicating a strategic direction, it’s ideal to have sufficiently exhaustive data points — that is, not to overload the executives with all the data you can find, but to only present the data that we believe is sufficient to prove our hypothesis.

Image of Minto Method MECE pyramid and how to structure logic / data — MECE supporting arguments diagram from Mckinsey

Barbara Minto’s concept of “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” (MECE) is perhaps the most useful ways to classify your data into a handful of logical arguments that are distinctly different to each other and speak in the same language as your executive stakeholders. The Minto Pyramid is somewhat similar to having an Issue Tree, where each branch is distinctly different and does not overlap in content or message than any other part of the tree.

6. Front load consensus building before holding major meetings to converse

Trying to get all of your executives to agree to every argument you make within the same meeting has the opposite effect of what is intended. It may look like you haven’t prepared the stakeholders adequately for any crucial decisions that need to be made in the room. There is also the chance that you lose credibility when you don't compromise on specific ideas when you receive critical feedback that should be considered.

Perhaps the best place to learn about building consensus early on in management is in Japan, where there is a management technique is wholly respectful to gaining consensus of every level of the organisation before it is signed off at the top by the CEO. This management method is called the “Nemawashi” (根回し), one that we can all learn from in adapting our plans to ensure the minimally needed consensus needed for decision making.

Nemawashi is a term traditionally used by farmers when they had to transplant a tree (根 = root, 回 = round). The literal meaning would be “to go around the roots, that means to dig around the roots of the tree we want to transplant”. A Nemawashi allows you to inform stakeholders about the upcoming proposed changes and gather their feedback, to make the idea better for everyone.

In a business context, Nemawashi conversations are either one-on-one or in small groups, to avoid the public display of differences of opinion, and its goal is persuasion. An employee would consult all his department people outside of meetings. Once the employee is sure their proposal is ok with everyone, they will talk with the department leads. The lead would then proceed to do a Nemawashi with their colleagues and the next level above, continuing in gathering consensus until the final approval from the CEO.

Nemawashi diagram showing the cycle of consensus and when decisions are made. — Nemawash diagram from Intense Minimalism

An important distinction needs to be made, according to Product Experience designer, author and mentor, Erin Casali: building consensus is different from gaining agreement from all stakeholders on ideas that are solely your own or aren’t open for change. The aim of a Nemawashi is not to make people change their mind forcibly, but to allow stakeholders to contribute their parts to it. And if the idea isn’t ideal nor deemed significant enough, stakeholders can criticise it early so that the team does not spend too much time on delivering it.

The documents and artefacts needed to influence your stakeholders during Nemawashi differ depending on the organisation, and there is no single template out there; however, here are some common questions to consider:

What is the current condition?
What are the root causes?
What does it cost us to do business this way?
What are possible countermeasures?
What is the implementation plan (Do, Check, Act)?

Typically this is performed on a single A3 page so that all the necessary details can be provided to all stakeholders for consensus and approval. An example A3 pager can be found at this link: A3 Problem Solving Report. I find that these templates are rather difficult to absorb and can be rather wordy at times.

While a well written A3 paper can convey the required data, I would actually advocate for a set of presentation slides that take you through a visual narrative, as per point 4 in this Story. The slides can help explain the current condition and root causes while also appealing to an executive’s emotions. After that, you can provide a robust set of options and plans to invite critical feedback before moving to full-blown design mode.

Final Thoughts

In highly agile fast-moving technology companies or startups, the ability to sway influential decision-makers towards your desired outcome can be challenging at the best of times, let alone times of uncertainty and lower tolerance for failure. Provided above are a handful of ways to build crucial stakeholder buy-in from your more senior executive stakeholders:

Understand your stakeholder motivations
Ensure a common understanding of shared goals
Communicate strong with strategic themes rather than implementation specifics
Communicate passionately using visual narratives
Reinforce your narrative with data and insight
Front-load consensus building before holding major meetings to converse

I’m keen to find out which of these resonate the most with you and whether there are other methods or techniques that I’ve overlooked in the write-up above. Leave a comment below with your thoughts, and I’ll do my best to get back to you promptly!