Gaining support from leadership

- You might have a vision of changing how your organization does business, or what their key products are. There are a few key milestones to get from disruptive idea to transformed company. First, you come up with something exciting, and develop an MVP. Once you've done your skunkworks efforts, and you have an MVP that proves your idea has merit, you're going to need to first get conceptual approval from leadership. You need a green light to move ahead. That gets you some resources and some time until the next big milestone, which is rolling your idea out more broadly, not just as a beta, but as a new way of doing business. Often there is a formal green-light process in large companies. Maybe you're presenting to your board or to the executive team, or even to the innovation committee. Side note, I have not found that innovation committees work very well, as innovation can't be designed or implemented by committees, but still, some companies have them. You don't want to really be presenting at this formal meeting. It should be a formality. Everyone on the approving board should already be familiar with your big vision, your small test, and your approach to getting from here to there. This is actually a good tip for any kind of formal approval meeting. You always want to have smaller meetings to present your case before the big meeting. You need to give power players time to understand your goals, and how those goals will affect them, and you want them to air their concerns in private, so you can respond or fix the issues before decisions are made. You need these meetings with supporters, but your meetings with dissenters are probably more critical. Many good ideas have been killed because of politics and turf battles. So make sure you understand how your idea impacts people across your organization and work to build support. If you can't get support from any one person, make sure that you have more powerful supporters. Otherwise, your idea will be shut down. At each step in the process of socializing your proposal, see how you can share the credit, and bring the ideas of others into your proposal. Are there initiatives elsewhere in the organization that align with your goals? Share them. Are there benefits that accrue to other teams? Make sure they understand how you can help them. And if you can incorporate recommendations from others, make sure to highlight the collaboration. You can still position yourself as the instigator and the gatherer of insights and ideas, and as the project manager exploring this powerful idea, without hogging the spotlight or claiming all the credit. In fact, being generous could help you to win in the long term. At Microsoft, collaboration is a skill that is tracked by HR. They want to be sure that you are asking for input from other departments, and that people in other departments are asking for input from you. I think this is really smart. After all, a key benefit to being part of a big organization is access to many points of view. Why not use those to strengthen your approach?