The Forgotten Motivator – Communicating for Buy-in When it Matters Most

Communication without Buy-in

It’s the 1950′s. The Great Depression and World War II have ended. Decades of pent-up demand and the new found insights on human motivation offered by Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, come together to create a new era of unconscious consumption.

Fast-forward 60 years. Marketers, business leaders and corporate communicators have enlisted the Hierarchy as a mechanism for ringing up sales, motivating employees, managing change, and more. But it seems the more we communicate the less buy-in we achieve.

With the signal to noise ratio widening every day, buy-in is a gold standard few communicators achieve. It’s time to reevaluate what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Continue reading the article online or get the PDF version here The Forgotten Motivator – The Mindful MBA Resources (PDF).

How our Signals Got Crossed

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs–originally published in 1954, and later revised in the 70′s and again in the 90′s–was represented as a Pyramid of eight pre-potent levels:

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - List Form

The pyramid structure and Maslow’s assertion that each lower need had to be satisfied first before moving up to the next level of needs has led to a vicious communication cycle of diminishing returns.

The most misleading aspect of the pyramid metaphor is that it supports the underlying assumption that only a small percentage of the population has reached the top of the pyramid or even cares about self-actualization and growth.

This makes it easy to ignore self-actualization as a motivator and instead, to direct most, if not all, of our communications toward the bottom and middle layers of the pyramid. Ironically, it’s our over-emphasis on deficiency needs and our avoidance of growth needs that keeps communicators and their constituents stuck, making buy-in virtually impossible to achieve.

You might recognize the classic symptoms:

• Customers buy, but they move on the minute a competitor finds a better or more compelling way to appease their deficiency needs.
• Employees agree to the plan, but their day-to-day decisions and actions don’t support the initiative or the spirit of the agreement.
• Partners give you their time as long as there’s something in it for them, but you never really gain their loyalty.

Communicating on the Right Frequency

Instead of an incremental hierarchy, imagine that your driving needs function more as parallel motivation frequencies. Not to throw the baby out with the bath water, you’ll see that each of Maslow’s levels fits neatly into one of the three Motivation Frequencies

• The Survival Frequency – Physical, safety and security needs (previously the base of the pyramid)
• The Success Frequency — Love/belonging, social and esteem needs (previously the middle of the pyramid)
• The Self-Actualization/Service Frequency – Learning, aesthetic, fulfillment, peak experiences and transcendence needs (previously the top of the pyramid)

Communication/Motivation Frequencies

With this parallel structure we can see human motivation in a new light. And with that, new communication opportunities emerge that were previously off-the-radar.  Consider these insights:

• The growth frequency is not contingent on satisfying the other two frequencies. It can be activated at anytime in a person’s life.
• When communications or experiences trigger a particular frequency of needs, this can become a motivator of behavior, represented either as a hidden (unconscious) agenda in the case of deficiency needs or a driving (conscious) intent in the case of our growth needs.
• Multiple frequencies can be activated simultaneously and can create internal conflict for the unaware.

What isn’t obvious in the diagram, or in real life, is that 95% of the processes we use to formulate and satisfy our deepest needs are unconscious, which means they show up as covert influences that we’re not able to articulate or directly express in our day-to-day communications.

Until we learn how to access a higher level of awareness and the right tools and training to surface and support our deepest motivations, (making the unconscious, conscious) they can wreak havoc on our communications and interactions with others.

What percentage of your communications focus on deficiency needs vs growth needs?

Your company may be sinking more of your communication budget and effort into blanketing your so-called audience with deficiency messages in the hopes of obtaining a better position or bigger piece of the real estate between their ears.

Meanwhile, the growth frequency remains virtually untouched, mainly because most communicators aren’t trained or equipped to go there. As a result your “audience” remains unconscious and unfulfilled-the exact opposite of what’s required to generate buy-in.

The cumulative side-effects of this communication approach are that a growing percentage of your employees, customers and partners are unconsciously feeling:

• Inundated with communications and experiences that trigger their deficiency needs and perpetuate their hidden agendas.
• Unfulfilled by the gratification promise
• Deprived in meeting their growth needs
• Increasingly conflicted in an effort to satisfy their growth and deficiency needs.
• Caught in a vicious cycle where:
  • A deficiency need is triggered,
  • External gratification is sought,
  • Gratification wears off,
  • Deficiency needs are triggered,
  • Etc…

Transformative Marketing – The Gateway to Buy-in

Buy-in is a natural outgrowth of experiences and interactions that meet our growth and fulfillment needs. It requires a level of authenticity that can’t be faked or generated with a quick fix formula.

Transformative Marketing^TM is an emerging discipline that offers an enhanced motivation/communication framework to help organizations, business leaders and communicators increase effectiveness, reduce inefficiencies and waste, and attain high-quality buy-in from constituents and customers.

As an executive, manager or self-leader, if you’re not achieving the buy-in you need on important initiatives it could be because:

• Your own deficiency needs have unconsciously been activated and are acting as a hidden agenda in your communications and interactions with others.
• Your own growth needs have been denied or are unsupported within your organization.
• Your deficiency and growth needs may be creating internal conflict rendering your communications incongruent, ineffective and in some cases damaging to yourself and others.

Bottom line, you can’t share or support what you don’t possess. Only when you become aware of your own deficiency needs/agenda and create a communication loop for your continuous fulfillment and growth will you be able to provide the same for others.

Once you’ve brought your needs/agenda into conscious light you can then explore your marketing and business communications with a view to:

• Reevaluate your products, services and related communications as they appeal to each of the three frequencies. What percentage of your focus is on deficiency needs vs. growth needs?
• Understand the deficiency needs of your internal and external stakeholders and how they are affecting your products, your operations and your communications on key issues.
• Explore which deficiency needs are being triggered with those on the receiving end of your communications and why,
• Understand how to realign your communications, and where necessary your products and services to meet the growth needs of constituents and contributors.
• Provide support and tools to minimize internal conflicts that arise from competing hidden agendas.

Learning how to communicate for buy-in by focusing on fulfilling growth needs is critical to your success, if you’re: Responsible for crisis management, change management or critical communications with internal or external stakeholders.

• Restructuring or adjusting to current economic challenges
• Developing or moving to a sustainable business model
• An executive or manager seeking stakeholder buy-in on corporate social responsibility and environmental initiatives
• A developer of green or eco-friendly products and services
• A marketer trying to reposition existing brands or products for the conscious consumer
• A community leader, educator, public servant or professional with a vision to make a difference, or perhaps, even change the world.

Transformative Marketing is an emerging discipline. One that requires indepth evaluation, collective inquiry and pre-market planning.  If you would like to learn more about how Transformative Marketing can be used to create buy-in in your organization, please contact me at 778-297-4488.

Or consider a Discovery Café as a valuable first step for implementing a Transformative Marketing Strategy. Learn More