Why your leadership team isn’t on board and what to do about it | The CEO Magazine

Have you ever followed something up in a team meeting, only to be met with silence, blank stares or furrowed brows? Or perhaps you’ve been met with nods that feel like dismissal more than understanding. It’s frustrating. Even more so when it’s something that really matters.

In my 30 years of leading and two decades of coaching senior leaders and executives, there are usually three reasons why this occurs.

The first is clarity – your leaders don’t fully understand the context, the importance or what they actually need to do. The second is confidence – they’re unsure how to do it, either because they lack the skills or don’t feel capable enough to take it on.

The third, and often the most significant, is the care factor – your leaders simply aren’t invested. They haven’t bought into the topic, the change, the organization or – potentially – you.

It starts at the top

Gallup research shows that 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is directly linked to the manager, which means more often than not we have contributed to the lack of buy-in we are experiencing. And it’s rarely intentional.

When it comes to clarity and confidence specifically, there’s a well-documented concept that explains exactly why we are not as clear as we think we are, or as effective at building confidence as we should be. This phenomenon is known as the ‘Curse of Knowledge’, popularized by Chip and Dan Heath in their bestselling book Made to Stick.

It is a cognitive bias where, once we understand something deeply, we lose the ability to see it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have the same context, experience or capability that we do. It’s where we assume clarity we haven’t actually created, and competence we haven’t yet built or shown.

The third reason, the care factor, is different. Unlike clarity and confidence, it’s not a knowledge gap or a skill gap. It’s a disconnect from the work, from the organization, and sometimes from you.

It is usually a consequence of leaders having lost faith, having been through enough change or broken promises to have quietly stopped believing it will be different this time. Perhaps leaders are unable to connect what they’re being asked to do to something meaningful or bigger than the task itself. It might simply be that the relationship between you and them not being as strong as it could be.

Out of all three reasons, it’s often the biggest contributor to a lack of buy-in and engagement.

The most powerful thing you can do

While providing clarity and confidence are important and will help with some of the factors above, the biggest difference to how your leaders show up and how committed they feel will come from leading relationally. Relational leadership, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a people-centered approach where you prioritize building trust, being collaborative and understanding the thoughts, feelings and perspectives of your leaders.

It’s best practiced by being ‘Compassionately Curious’, bringing a kind, non-judgemental lens to understanding what’s really driving the disconnect and asking yourself, “I know their intentions are good; what might really be going on here?”

By being ‘Coactively Catalytic’, bringing your leaders into the thinking, the decisions and the problem-solving, creating a genuine ‘we’re in this together’ mentality that builds participation and shared ownership. And by being ‘Consciously Conscious’, deliberately paying attention to where your focus is, being fully aware of yourself, your leaders and the moment you’re in, not operating on autopilot but genuinely present, aware of what’s being said, how it’s being said and what’s not being said at all.

These are three of five states I refer to as the Voltage of Building Trust, Loyalty and Engagement, and they can be brought to life when you encounter indifference or pushback in the following ways:

1. Acknowledge and validate. Before you do anything else, make space for what’s going on for your leaders. Not to agree with everything they say, but to show them you see it and you’re not dismissing it. That alone can shift the energy in a conversation and relationship.

2. Own your part. This one sometimes takes courage. But when you’re willing to acknowledge your contribution to how things have landed – whether that’s a lack of clarity, an assumption you made or the way you responded – it disarms defensiveness and opens the door to a meaningful conversation.

3. Ask genuine questions and seek input. Not questions that lead your leaders to your answer, but questions that actually invite them in. What do they think? What would help? What’s getting in the way? Your leaders will actually re-engage when they feel like their perspective matters.

4. Listen to understand, not to fix. This might be the trickiest one. The instinct when a leader is disengaged is to solve it quickly. But rushing to fix it often makes it worse. Sit with what your leaders are telling you. Let it land before you respond.

The way you show up with your leaders, curious, present and collaborative, has never mattered more. Buy-in isn’t something you can demand. But it is something you can create.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.