This is the latest installment in my ongoing series about helping you reduce career friction, so you can work at your highest level of excellence and achieve your goals. Each month I’ll point out a different type of friction, and share some communication strategies and mindset tips for handling it. FYI, I don’t use AI for any of this!
As you climb up the ladder of your career, you’ll need to improve the way you do just about everything. What worked for you as a junior employee will no longer be effective above a certain level. That includes how you lead meetings, give work presentations, and negotiate your salary, and it also includes the way you advocate for your own ideas, especially when the stakes are high.
This is an area where many people falter. While you may have the greatest idea in the world, you won’t be able to persuade the right stakeholders, including Senior leadership, vital peers, and clients, if you don’t have a strong strategy.
For women, who are socially conditioned to smooth social friction and go along with the group, the natural inclination is to try and build consensus around your ideas. Yet while this approach may have worked in the past, it won’t have the same effect at this point in your career, and can be a source of tremendous friction.
Here are some signs that building consensus isn’t working anymore:
People seem unenthusiastic about your ideas, even as they claim to agree with them, and you’re not certain that they will back you when the time comes.
You’ve spent tons of extra hours working to get people onboard, and now you’re exhausted and close to burnout, leaving you unable to perform at your highest level of excellence.
Despite assurances from the people you’ve reached out to, when the time comes for them to convey support for your ideas to Executive leadership, they suddenly find excuses why they can’t do it.
Know this: at the Senior level, your ideas have a shelf life, because they are likely in fierce competition with other people’s. So you have to move quickly and decisively. Consensus-building is slow and messy! You need a stronger, more strategic method of gaining support.
So stop building consensus, and start forming a skillful coalition. What’s the difference? A coalition is a much smaller, more strategic group that comes together around a single goal. If you can convince the right people in the right way to back your idea, and forget everyone else, you can come out on top.
Here’s what consensus-building can do for you:
It can win you the respect of Executive leadership, as they recognise your ability to bring key stakeholders together when it counts. This can give you much greater influence over high-stakes decision making, and keep your big projects moving forward.
It can help you identify new opportunities for growth, as you begin to notice patterns of interest and friction in the Senior leaders that you interact with around your ideas and projects. You’ll know instantly who to approach, and how to approach them in a way that gets through immediately.
It can give you back valuable time that you’ve been wasting on ineffective consensus building, and help you prioritize your time and energy in an optimal way so you can be much more effective in all your work.
Skillful, strategic consensus-building is something that you should take seriously. It’s so effective that once you start doing it you’ll never go back! I work on these skills and strategies with clients every day. Contact me for more info, or drop your questions in the comments.