Investor's Business Daily, July 28, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
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Investor's Business Daily

July 28, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: SECTION LEADERS & SUCCESS; IBD'S 10 SECRETS TO SUCCESS; NATIONAL EDITION; Pg. A03

HEADLINE: BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE Build Yourself A Coalition

BYLINE: By Cord Cooper

BODY:
9 You've come up with an idea rife with potential for your firm. The downside? Parts of it are controversial. The initiative could step on some toes.
Clearing hurdles and getting a green light involve building momentum, says Samuel Bacharach in "Get Them On Your Side." Bacharach is director of Cornell University's Institute for Workplace Studies.
Build a coalition by solidifying your base, Bacharach says.
When presenting your plan, know your audience. Know what resonates and what produces resistance, says Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, author of "Changing Minds."
Here are other tips for moving your initiative forward:
** Highlight your strongest allies. Turn them into your first line of defense. "Cultivate (a) relationship with them and keep them strongly supportive," Bacharach said.
** List those on the fence. They might support your goals but propose different ways to reach them. How you court them could mean the difference between bringing them into your camp and turning them into adversaries.
** Highlight the resistors. Your choices? Find ways to bring them around, or devise strategies to "keep them from derailing your efforts," Bacharach said.
** Prioritize. First, shore up your allies, he advised. Make sure they fully understand the initiative and support all aspects of it.
Next? Move fence sitters to your side with help from your most convincing supporters.
Then use momentum to convert or marginalize the opposition. Be aware that time is a critical factor. "If you wait too long, potential resistors will become bona fide (critics) entrenched in their position," Bacharach said. If you approach them too early, "you'll come to them from a weak position. The trick is to deal with resistors when they know you have a groundswell of support."
** Avoid a mess -- coalesce. "Without a coalition, you're a lone wolf in the organization -- where the risk is much greater than any likely reward," said Bacharach. "With a coalition, you improve the chances of (success), of surviving unintended consequences" and raising your profile as a leader.
** Infuse power. To succeed, coalitions have to be unified, with each person reinforcing the other's ideas. Unity propels power. "Often coalitions are made up of people with no real authority in the organization," Bacharach said. Solidarity gives them clout.
"A successful coalition must find the balance between the self-interested goals of individual members and the collective goal of the group itself," he said.
** Play it smart. Work with human nature, not against it. Challenge a person, and he'll get defensive. Show interest in his views, and he'll be more apt to listen to yours, says communications coach James Van Fleet.
** Spot concerns. If you can "take the pulse of a group, spot unspoken concerns" and share a vision that excites and unifies, you can accomplish almost anything, said leadership coach Daniel Goleman, author of "Working With Emotional Intelligence."