Sherpa Alliance

Yes, I believe organizational agility demands a bottom-up approach, not least of all to achieve the buy-in you mention, in addition to a top-down approach as well.  It’s an “and” proposition.  Bottom-up and top-down.  It’s also about planning forwards-from-the-present and backwards-from-the-future and a number of other “and” propositions as well.  Our job as breakthrough leaders is to be mastering the challenge of the “and”.

Buy-in is crucial.  With it, we get real commitment and cooperation.  Without it, at best we get half-hearted interest and reluctant compliance and, at worst, we get outright resistance and even possibly sabotage.  The secret to buy-in, in particular with shop-floor personnel (which is what I think you are referring to by the “forklift barrier”), is dialog, within which they are asked for their opinions, concerns and ideas.  Most importantly, they must feel heard, not just once, but and ongoing basis.  They must feel they have a voice which really gets listened to.  That doesn’t mean we will agree with everything, but it does mean that we are stirring in their input and we value their perspectives.

When they see your commitment to the challenge of sustaining a process of execution, as an integrated system and a discipline, they will take note.  When they see it beginning to deliver results to the benefit of all, then their buy-in will go to the next level and things will start to become more self-propelling.  When you address all the moving parts of Execution Excellence, including the culture and leadership/communication elements, you have the potential to break down the barrier over time, to get from “them and us” to “all of us” and become a combined, high performance team.

I started my career working on drilling rigs for Shell, offshore in the Dutch sector of the North Sea, as a Petroleum engineer.  As one of two company men onsite (I was No2 to the “Tool-Pusher” who was No1) running a contractor rig of multi-national personnel, known as “rough-necks” and “roustabouts”, we were responsible for 24/7 operations in a hazardous environment.  Drilling a well to maybe 3 Kilometers depth with maybe 1 Kilometer lateral deviation and hitting our target was a quite a journey!  This is where I first learned about the criticality of penetrating the “forklift barrier”, by earning respect for leadership/communication, creating rapport through dialog (as part of which I had to necessarily become multi-lingual in colorful language!) and nurturing a culture of true teamwork for the high-stakes situation we all worked in.