What's in it for me?
Leading projects with incentives
Have you ever had a project that got stuck because the business users weren’t on board? You kept trying to get them engaged and gain their buy in but they refused? Whether you’re on the sales team, project management or the implementation team, you’ve probably faced this problem. And this may seem like an easy problem to overcome, especially if you have support from organizational leadership but it can be a tricky situation to navigate.
But don’t worry, in this newsletter I’m going to share some tools I used to get projects unstuck and gain buy-in from everyone.
A few years ago I accepted a promotion that seemed pretty straight forward on paper. But once I got in the role I realized that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
You see I thought the promotion was just taking me from being a lower level project manager to being put in charge of a medium sized team. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this team was responsible for organizational change. And not just minor changes. No, this team was responsible for completely changing how a 300 person organization operated. From how they took work in from customers, to how they categorized which work was a priority all the way to how they executed approved projects.
This was a huge scope to manage and I was totally unprepared for it. I faced so much pushback any time I tried to get other teams to adopt the new processes. And it wasn’t until I found this first tool that I was able to make progress. So what is this tool?
It’s a business case document. Sometimes called a use case document. If you’ve been involved in the full life cycle of a project you might be familiar with this. In short, it defines what business objectives a project will create. You can think of it as the sales pitch for a project that is used to gain buy in from sponsors.
I’m not going to walk through how you create one, there’s plenty of guides out there. No, I'm going to focus on how you can use it to gain buy-in from stakeholders.
But to understand that, you need to know about the second tool.
One of the hardest parts about being a project manager is you have the responsibility to get buy-in from people who you have no authority over. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve had that one stakeholder who refused to stay engaged in the project no matter how hard you tried to keep them engaged.
I ran into this while trying to transform that organization. All I could do was ask for them to participate. I had no way to enforce the new way of working. And this frustrated me at first.
But then I learned about the concept of influencing people without authority. You might think this is a pretty straightforward concept. But when it comes to interacting with other people, nothing is ever straightforward.
So how do you influence someone without any authority over them?
I found a simple four step process works best:
Engage and ask: Questions are the most powerful tool of persuasion and influence. But not just any questions. Understanding what drives the other person will let you know what messaging to use to motivate them. Use questions like: Why do you work? What does success look like for you?
Connect and align: Once you know what motivates them you can recognize where you both have shared goals or interests. Highlighting these commonalities will activate a friendship trigger which reduces their internal barriers to helping you.
Legitimize your leadership: Once you have established a level of trust you have to show them why you’re worth following/listening to. Highlight some of your experience to show them you know what you’re doing. Don't go overboard and brag about how great you are, just give a few highlights of similar projects you were successful with
Give them a why: Go back to the first step and look at why they work or what success looks like to them. Now highlight how the work you need them to do will help them achieve those goals.
Now step 4 is where you can bring in the business case. When you are trying to gain buy-in for your projects with people who are resistant to the change, there is nothing more powerful than an incentive. By highlighting how the change is going to benefit a person, you’ll see them start to believe in the project.
And the business case document should highlight the value a project will create for the organization. You just have to tailor that value to each individual who isn’t on board for the change.
When I faced these problems, I looked at how the new process was going to change that particular person's future work. In most cases they would have fewer things on their plate once the new process was adopted. When I highlighted this reduction in work, they became way more excited to implement the change. And that’s when I started seeing more progress.
So if you’re feeling stuck with any of your projects, go find that business case document and see what value the project is supposed to bring. And then use that when you talk with your stakeholders.