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HR is primarily about results, not people.
The success or failure of many HR initiatives rides on genuine support from senior management. Not only do they allocate the overall HR budget, but their actions (or lack thereof) also have a profound effect on the attitudes and commitment of others throughout the organisation. Therefore, if you want your idea or project to be successful, you need to get senior managers on board. By combining what we know about “what makes senior managers tick” with what we know about the psychology of persuasion, we have come up with four steps to follow when pitching your ideas to senior managers:
- Get off on the right foot: In your short introduction, you need to simultaneously gain their full attention while engendering a frame of mind that will be receptive to your ideas. To do this, surprise them while aligning your goals with their goals. Imagine starting your pitch with the claim that HR is primarily about results, not people. Pointing out that your role as an HR professional is to find ways to boost results by getting more from people hooks their interest immediately because it causes them to rethink you and your message. And, because most senior managers are concerned with company-wide results, it creates a psychological bond by showing them you want the same things they do.
- Describe the correct challenge: From your perspective, the challenge may be to recruit better staff, keep the good staff you have or improve the performance of existing staff. These are all real and common challenges faced by HR professionals, but they are not the challenges senior managers face in their day-to-day realities. In order to present your ideas as a solution worth supporting, you need to address a problem familiar to them, from their perspective, and explain how your ideas will help them solve it. At the senior manager level, these challenges will fall into one of two categories: moving the company towards a desired outcome or preventing a decline in the company’s position relative to its competitors.
- Lead into logical options: Nearly 80% of senior managers prefer to make decisions based on hard data and logical reasoning. Therefore, you need to demonstrate how your proposed solution is logically the best path, in comparison not only to other options, but also to doing nothing. Doing your homework will allow you to use quantifiable research data and illustrative case studies to support your case and highlight the logical implications of all the options presented. For example, did you know that research shows a) that the quality of leadership within an organisation consistently accounts for between 20 and 45 percent of differences in a company earnings, b) that everyone can indeed learn to be better leaders, yet c) less than 15 percent of learning from traditional management training style courses makes any lasting difference in a manager’s on-the-job behaviour?
- Gain commitment to proceed: You need to know the goal of your pitch, and rarely is it realistic to get the thumbs up in one sitting. Often, the goal is simply to get a commitment from others that will allow you to proceed to the next step. You will probably need to refine your ideas based on feedback you receive in the initial discussion of options and then re-present your ideas (with amended details) for approval.
Gaining support from the senior management team is seldom easy, but it is critical to the success of most HR initiatives. Good luck!
