How to get buy-in and navigate impatience

"How do we stick to long-term strategies when stakeholders are looking for short-term results?"

As a leader, I guarantee you've experienced a version of this in your organization.

A new strategy is set... but stakeholders demand to see short-term results and abandon initiatives that don't show up in the P&L immediately.

An AI and automation transformation is started... and it's scrapped or reduced a few months in when there isn't a clear cost savings.

Investments in people development are made... and then questioned when performance improvements aren't quantifiable in the first 6 months.

So long-term strategies get abandoned far too soon, and you and your organization don't reach your potential because of it.

Often, the #1 thing that derails organizations from executing great long-term strategies is impatience. And as a leader, your ability to manage impatience is critical.

Here's how I've learned to navigate impatience to allow long-term strategies to produce outsized results.

Getting buy-in.

Look, this might sound a little backward, but sometimes the greatest way to instill patience in your stakeholders is to be patient yourself.

I'm the first to admit this doesn't come naturally to me. I'm an instant gratification guy, and I want to see results on the P&L as much as anybody else.

Years ago, in another CEO seat, I wanted to implement an entirely new organizational strategy. How long do you think it took me to get buy-in across our leadership team?

A few weeks? 6 months?

2 years.

In other words, don't expect everyone to take the leap with you just because you present a new strategy or want to implement a new initiative.

You're trying to shift people's mindsets. That is extremely hard and takes time.

I'm seeing the same thing at Nichols Cauley right now. We're asking our leaders to use our forecasting and pipeline data to make our month, our quarter and our year, instead of looking back at how last month went.

When I walked some of our senior leaders through it recently, what I was saying made a lot of sense, but I could see their gears grinding, because it was such a different way of thinking. Nobody argued about it, but understanding and doing are different things.

I like to call this marinating time.

Just like a good piece of meat tastes better when it's had time to marinate, bringing your strategy to life will have a greater chance of success if you give it time to marinate within your organization.

Explain the thinking behind the strategy, hear people's concerns, and express why you believe this strategy will lead to a desired outcome you can all get behind.

Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, so let it marinate.

Setting proper expectations.

Nothing destroys a well-designed strategy like misalignment about expectations.

All stakeholders need to be clear on:

• What we're trying to accomplish

• Why it's important we accomplish it

• The desired end state

• What success will look like along the way

That's the baseline.

Seems simple, right? Well, it is…

And sometimes I find it's so simple that leadership teams skip the simple things in pursuit of more complicated things.

Something else to consider... if you have designed an effective strategy that describes where you are headed 3-5 years from now, you have to have some conversation about timing.

It's not a one-year strategy for a reason: the desired results aren't going to happen immediately. It's a strategy, not a plan.

Expectation setting is critical to managing the impatience that will inevitably come up along the way.

Creating milestones.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting you should try to convince people they have to wait 3-5 years to see ANY results.

That's unrealistic and you'll never make it there.

That's where milestones (or plateaus) come in.

These are the short(er)-term indicators that we're making progress toward our long-term goals.

Sometimes these are quantitative measures. Often, they are qualitative measures that indicate we're on the right path.

So ask yourself and your leadership team:

What will be evidence we are making meaningful progress toward our long-term strategy?

Remember: You read a book first page to last page. You run a company last page to first page.

So when determining these milestones, start with the end in mind and define the steps to achieve the end goal.

Without these milestones, you're asking people to follow you down a multi-year journey based on blind faith alone, and I can tell you, that's not going to work.

Identify the small wins because small wins add up to big wins over time.

Managing impatience.

From my experience, you can do everything I've mentioned to this point right, and people will still get impatient.

When impatience and concerns about the strategy come up (and they will), one of the most helpful exercises is to look at whether it's the strategy or the execution that is lacking.

Here's something I've found that makes this analysis easier:

You will know your strategy is wrong when your customers, clients, or the marketplace tell you it's wrong. Not when you internally decide it's wrong.

So if the impatience is coming from internal stakeholders and is based on feelings and opinions, that alone isn't a reason to change the strategy. Look at execution first.

This is where data comes into play. Data can be a good indicator of execution because data is objective, and people's opinions and impatience are not.

So, when looking at data or key indicators, what is being communicated?

If you're starting to see qualitative and quantitative signals of progress, bring everyone back to the expectation and milestone conversations that were had early on.

And if you're not seeing the metrics start to move, what else about execution is lacking and can be tweaked?

It's easy to blame the strategy. Most times, tweaks to the execution will make all the difference.

What to do next.

Set aside time this week to think about your long-term strategies and where you might be running into impatience.

• Are you trying to rush something into place that is asking people to change a long-standing mindset?

• Is there a conversation you need to have with someone (or a few people) about expectations?

• Are you getting pressure about short-term results because you haven't identified milestones along the way?

• If the pressure is coming internally, do you need to take a look at the execution of the tactics to see where you might be missing the mark, or do you have data to support the progress you are making?

Learn to navigate the impatience that often accompanies these long-term strategies and you're well on your way to achieving differentiated results.

See you next time.

With intention,

Alan Whitman
CEO at Nichols Cauley

ps… where are you running into impatience with a long-term strategy right now? Would enjoy hearing from you, and we can all get better by discussing things with other leaders.

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