Tuesday, October 15 - MPIGNY Education Recap: "Winning Strategies to Create Buy-In"

On Oct. 15, meeting professionals and suppliers gathered at Merchants Hospitality’s newly opened Ivy Lane to participate in MPIGNY’s second Education event of the 2019-2020 year. Participants experienced an excellent session with subject matter experts in the field of organizational development and learned "Winning Strategies to Create Buy-In."

Check out photos here!

Some key points included:

Defining buy-in
Buy-in is an emotional state of mind. When you achieve real buy-in, your stakeholders are owning the work versus renting space within the work. When a tenant is renting and something breaks, it’s another guy’s problem. When you're an owner and something breaks, you're responsible for fixing it.

Important skills

• Emotional intelligence - "Know yourself and the people in your tent" – relationships are everything.
• Empathy - Approach getting buy-in, resistance or lost buy-in with empathy and curiosity: How can you get it; why did you lose it?
• Selling - As Dan Pink famously wrote, we’re all in sales. Think like a sales person: What's their pain point? How am I solving their problem?
• Communication - Mindfully select opportunities for individual versus group communication. Frame messages differently for different thinking styles. Does the listener need to hear things simply or are they interested in all the complexity. Pay attention to what works and then course-correct.
• Facilitation - Let go of control/authority and use facilitation instead.
• Managing in all directions - Manage up by keeping top people informed to give them comfort that everything's in control. Employ "servant leadership" principles to manage employees and team members.

To learn more, check out this awesome link for key takeaways: PDF