Getting the Boss to Buy Into Your Great Ideas
In these tenuous economic times, it’s more important than ever to toot your own professional horn and make your accomplishments known internally in your organization. This isn’t inappropriate bragging but strategic self advocacy that may help you stay afloat in a potential lay-off scenario since every employee has to prove their worth.
But how do you sell your new initiatives to the powers that be in your company to ensure that they buy into your great ideas? Dawn Brown from JobsDB.com shared some excellent advice to help you get inside your boss’s head and to win her over with your new initiatives.
- Learn your boss’s view on how the organization should operate. Research the strategic plan and mission of your company so you can speak your supervisor’s executive language. It will give you credibility to be in the know and help to further establish your relationship with your boss.
- Understand your boss’s style. Study, watch, and listen to learn how your boss operates. This also involves knowing what message she wants to hear conveyed as well as her preferences in decision making. When you deliver a message in a manner compatible with how she hears things you’ll be better able to communicate.
- What does your boss want to hear? Are they a big picture or detail person? Theoretical or practical minded? Hard/quantifiable data or soft/qualifiable data kind of person?
- How does your boss make decisions? Understand how she comes to a conclusion by knowing about her preferences. Is she autonomous/dictatorship or consensus/team based? Does she employ centralized control or decentralized empowerment? Is she a risk taker or risk averse?
- Pull it all together to make your pitch. When structuring your proposal or new idea – develop a clear, succinct message that has purpose, details the benefits of the plan, outlines the risks of not implementing the plan, and exactly what you need from your boss to support the initiative.
After you have determined how your boss communicates, makes decisions, and deals with risk you will be empowered to pitch your new ideas to a more receptive audience. Don’t forget to come to the table with a well thought out plan that includes the cross functional work you may do in the organization so you can rally support from colleagues internally.
By pointing out what you have done well in the past it will pave the road for future initiatives and instill confidence in your boss about your abilities and value in the organization. Lastly, give you boss the option of supporting the new initiative by having a hand in the planning or design phase. A potential collaboration can help create buy-in from your boss since she can share in the success of your great idea.
