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Hemant Shah: Gaining Emotional Buy In

Name: Hemant Shah: Gaining Emotional Buy In
Uploaded: 2014-04-02T17:22:54+00:00
Duration: 2 min 36 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this talk, Hemant Shah reflects on his early experience leading a change‑management initiative and identifies two key missteps that limited employee…

2 Apr 2014 · 3 min

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2:36

In this talk, Hemant Shah reflects on his early experience leading a change‑management initiative and identifies two key missteps that limited employee adoption. First, he admits he over‑intellectualized the new strategy, presenting logical arguments without connecting to people’s emotions, which left the workforce feeling alienated from a business they love. Second, his initial messaging was overly optimistic, emphasizing only the upside opportunities. Recognizing that people view the status quo as the safe option, Shah and his leadership team began to balance the narrative by explicitly communicating the risks of staying the same. They introduced a calibrated “downside” emphasis—roughly a 22 % weighting of potential negative outcomes—while still maintaining an optimistic tone. This balanced approach helped employees see that not changing also carries significant risk, thereby creating emotional buy‑in. Shah concludes that future change efforts should allocate more time to emotional engagement and risk framing rather than relying solely on top‑down logical arguments.

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Getting people— the first mistake I made was overly intellectualizing the strategy. Of course it makes sense, it's so evident, here's the logical argument, and didn't engage people enough emotionally in why there was a need for change and engage people as human beings emotionally around why should they as people buy into a new strategy and why that strategy doesn't alienate them from the business that they love and they made the choice to come work here. And that was something that I feel like if I do this again, I will spend far more time on that aspect, getting emotional buy-in from the team as opposed to just trying to cram it down top-down because it makes intellectual sense. Another thing that was— maybe it's an unfortunate statement on human nature, but in the early days of the change management process, which I guess is the proper way to refer to these things— it didn't seem like much like a process at the time— but initially the change management process, I spent a lot— I'm a very a very optimistic person. I'm a glass half full person and I sold the need for change in very aspirational, these are huge opportunity. I found that also when we realized as a leadership team that we needed to balance the need for change with it's going to be great if we pull this off and the opportunities are much more, but also that the status quo is not risk-free. So human beings, we always think the status quo ex ante is the risk-free option and change is risky. It's very hard for us— I think a lot of social scientists suggested— to cognitively realize that the status quo carries a lot of risk. So we started talking about the downside and the risks that things that could go terribly wrong if we just keep sticking to our knitting. And we didn't overdo that because, again, I'm a very optimistic person. But we started dialing in maybe a 22% weight on the downside as opposed to upside. And that really tipped people's minds that there is a need where the status quo isn't tenable. We have to change and the risk of change is balanced against the risk of not changing as opposed to just the great stuff that's going to happen if we successfully pull it off, balanced against the fear that if we fail we're going to screw up what we already built.