Corporate Explorer Fieldbook

CHAPTER 17Leading High‐Stakes Conversations: Getting the Senior Team Onboard

Alexander Pett and Kristin von Donop

SENIOR TEAM COMMITMENT

Getting and sustaining senior‐level commitment to innovation is at the top of every Corporate Explorer's list of key success factors. The typical corporate approach to this is to have a good‐news story to tell – positive customer feedback, technical achievements on the product development roadmap, new partners signed up. However, the good‐news story approach is a trap. It lowers tension in the senior team, making it harder to talk about substantive issues, resolve tough problems, and get authentic agreement.

Corporate Explorers need to be able to create productive tension in senior teams so that when they have tough issues – like resource conflicts with core business units, channel conflicts, budgetary constraints – they can discuss and resolve them openly.¹ Creating productive tension means understanding enough about conversation dynamics to know when tension is lacking and having a repertoire of interventions to make it happen. This chapter offers guidance on how to do this.

Figure 17.1 Understanding productive tension.

VALUE OF TENSION

Anyone with experience presenting to a senior management team remembers leaving the meeting dissatisfied. They were listening and seemed to support what were you saying, but somehow you are just not ...