Week 3: Provide a Menu to Reduce Reactance

In a class I was taking a few years ago, one of the instructors made an off-hand comment that, instead of coming to the table with a solution that was 100% done, they’d learned to deliberately only come with something that was 80% complete. They explained that this left room for others to discuss and contribute to. I remember wondering if I could ever present something that I didn’t feel had been given 100% of my effort.

But, the universe was either laughing at me or helping me when, later that same week, I presented my technical health plan to my boss and a few of the other decision makers in my org.

It was great!

The plan laid out the technological skill areas that were critical to our business and the emerging technologies that were on the horizon.

It defined technical leadership roles aligned to each of those areas and identified their main responsibilities as (1) curating training to upskill/reskill employees in those critical areas and (2) staying abreast of relevant emerging technologies.

Finally, it provided a roadmap over the next three years that positioned us to meet our customer needs in perpetuity!

You know what happened?

Nothing. There’s no discussion, no push back, nothing.

You know why?

Because I gave them no way to weigh in…there were no gaps. And for a long time, I thought that having no gaps meant that I had done a good job. In some situations, this is true. However, as a leader you can’t do anything significant alone. Therefore, you need discussion and even push back. Most of all, you need buy-in.

This week’s lesson was to learn how providing a menu can reduce Reactance. It is exactly what it sounds like — providing a limited set of options from which people can choose. This tactic overcomes the natural response of pushing back on a suggestion and increases buy-in for whatever choice is made.

While this technique seems easy enough, I know I would need to be deliberate not to provide a false menu. I would define “false menu” as comprising the option you want them to choose coupled with nonsense or unreasonable options. I’d then define “super false menu” if those same choices are delivered with a snarky tone ha ha.

I worry that my future, frustrated self may be more inclined to do this than I would be proud of. So, I have to challenge myself to ensure that my process involves legitimately identifying alternatives that I would be ok with for a given choice.

Ooh, this immediately feels uncomfortable…I’m not gonna lie.

Self-awareness as a leader is extremely important. Since I know myself, I know that in order to be able to present others with a menu, I’ll need to be less thorough in my preparation.

Say what?

Yeah, that doesn’t feel great to me either but I am confident it is what is needed. This feels similar to my lesson on why the 80% solution is better than the 100% solution.

I’ll certainly need to work on making a mindset shift. I pride myself on pursuing excellence. I realized that I pursued the 100% solution in preparing to present my ideas because that’s how I defined excellence. If, instead, I define excellence as “gaining the buy-in needed to bring my idea to fruition,” then bringing an 80% solution to the meeting is what is needed to achieve excellence.

Well, now I’m excited!

In the past, I’ve defined excellence around my change initiatives as “successfully bringing about the change” but now I will define it as “successfully bringing about the change with as much buy-in as possible.”

I consider this week’s lesson to be immensely valuable.

I’ve now tucked provide a menu into my proverbial tool belt and a process is emerging in my mind that looks something like this:

1. Define the change - clearly articulate the state of things once the change is fully adopted (I can’t wait to tell you about the natural gifts I bring to the table to help me with this one)
2. Develop a draft strategy to bring about the change
3. Communicate and get buy-in
   1. Identify the various groups within the organization that may experience reactance for some reason (and try to identify what those reasons are)
   2. Without compromising the desired outcome, identify several potential options for how the organization might achieve that outcome ⇒ the menu

While this is awesome, I recognize two potential pitfalls. First, we have to be careful not to provide the choice to anyone whose input we don’t really value. It should be obvious why this is a no-no. Second, this tactic is not going to work for all groups of people who experience reactance in response to our change initiatives. That’s why leadership is so complex. Being a good leader means having a toolbox of LOTS of tools AND the expertise to know when and how to use each.

Next week, we’ll learn another tool to reduce reactance! Thanks for reading!