So, you’ve made the leap. You began as an individual contributor in your organization, and now you’re a new manager, with direct reports and greater exposure to middle and even senior management. This is a major step toward making your mark on the organization’s culture and operations.
However, you might wonder what kind of influence you really have. The truth is, quite a bit. In most organizational hierarchies, frontline managers outnumber every other kind of manager. Estimates find that 50% to 60% of all managers are frontlines, and collectively manage 80% of all employees. Frontline managers also tend to have the best read of what’s happening because they’re closest to the action. They’re the most qualified to report on which on-the-ground processes need fixing.
It’s difficult to tap this influence because you might see aspects of speaking up as scary or risky, so you decide to keep quiet. And if you do make your voice heard, you might struggle to get busy, distracted senior leaders to engage with your ideas.
Fortunately, the science of social threat and power can help any new manager use their voice to add value to the organization, support their team, and be heard by those holding higher positions.
Bridging the status gap
Speaking up and being heard are separate challenges. Both are important for getting buy-in as a junior leader.
Speaking up is the act of sharing ideas, questioning decisions, and challenging behaviors. If you’ve ever been in a meeting with someone who holds a more senior position, you know speaking up is hard because there’s a perceived power differential at play. More specifically, there’s a status differential at play, and some senior leaders may view suggestions from junior leaders as a threat.
Any time we speak up to someone we perceive as having a higher status than us, we become anxiously aware of the power imbalance and our own place in the hierarchy. You may hesitate to voice your opinion or share an idea before hearing the other person’s opinion. Often this leads us to keep our thoughts inside.
Then there’s the matter of being heard when you do speak up. Ideas don’t always land well because of how they’re delivered—say, someone who throws out an idea as the “best one” without asking for others’ opinions or providing choices. In these cases, team members—other leaders, especially—are likely to feel a threat to their own status, not to mention their autonomy, which is their sense of being in control. They might wonder (or actually say), “Who does this person think they are?”
To get buy-in for your ideas as a junior leader, it’s important to stay mindful of the science behind speaking up and how to package your message for the optimal effect, specifically in the face of a power differential. Improving both skills will increase your confidence to share good ideas and present them so that senior leaders will listen.
Habits to practice
With these guardrails in mind, science offers helpful habits to get buy-in for your ideas as a junior leader.
Reappraisal: Since mostly everyone feels a threat response when they speak up, you’ll want to manage that response. The first habit for making speaking up easier is called reappraisal. This is an active process of intentionally reframing a negative situation in a more positive light so that you feel greater energy and motivation to act. Instead of focusing on how threatening it feels, try focusing on the benefits you’ll bring to the organization, or the sense of duty that comes with having a good idea. Rather than it being optional, can you see speaking up as compulsory, given your role in the company?
Once you’ve reframed the act of speaking up and made it easier to do so, you want to make sure your message lands well. It helps to begin from a position of facts and data, rather than opinion. While opinions are debatable (and more easily dismissed), facts are easier for others to observe and harder to refute.
Status differential: On a psychological level, you can also help the ideas land well by addressing the status differential. Try boosting the person’s feeling of status by asking for their opinion on your idea, rather than presenting it as a take-it-or-leave-it assertion. You can also boost their feeling of autonomy by providing a couple of options for how they might imagine implementing the idea.
For example, while conducting hiring interviews, you notice that the current script doesn’t supply the right information to make a hiring decision, you might raise a question like this: “I’m noticing the interview script could be improved to screen for stronger candidates. I have a couple of ideas for how we could improve it. Can I share them, and you can tell me which one you like better?”
Being a junior leader doesn’t disqualify you from sharing good ideas—that’s why you were put into a leadership role in the first place, to make meaningful contributions to the organization.
But because of the way our brains are wired to think about status in groups, it helps to share these ideas with the right mindset and approach. You’ll maximize your impact and keep your bosses focused on the ideas, not their own standing in the group, which ultimately helps to move the organization forward.
