Lead In 30 Podcast

How Do You Get Your Team's Emotional Buy-In?

• Russ Hill

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True team buy-in requires both operational involvement (hands and feet) and emotional involvement (hearts and minds), with many managers struggling to achieve both simultaneously. The distinction matters because emotional investment drives innovation, resilience, and sustained performance beyond mere task completion. In this episode of the Lead In 30 podcast, Lone Rock Leadership co-founder Russ Hill dives into the difference between operational and emotional involvement.

• Operational involvement means team members show up and do the work but may just be going through the motions
• Emotional involvement means they genuinely care about outcomes and are intellectually invested
• A river rafting experience demonstrates how clear leadership creates both types of involvement automatically in high-stakes situations
• The more ambitious your organizational vision, the more critical emotional involvement becomes
• "Founder mode" or command-and-control leadership actively kills emotional investment from team members
• Emergency situations are rare exceptions where directive leadership doesn't diminish emotional involvement
• Most successful leaders consciously cultivate both operational efficiency and emotional connection

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Speaker 1:

What kind of buy-in do you have from your team members? Many of us are able to get their hands and their feet, but we're struggling with their hearts and their minds. How do you hook that part of them? We'll talk about it in this episode. This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes. Yeah, there are two kinds of what we call involvement, buy-in or yeah, those are probably the best terms to describe what we're talking about. And many of us, many managers of teams, are able to get the hands and the feet and you know what I mean by that right Obviously like people to show up and to do the work. We're able to lock that in, but where so many managers struggle is in getting buy-in from the hearts and the minds of the people that we lead. And, by the way, the opposite is true. Like some leaders are actually it's not as common but some managers are actually they get the exact opposite. That's what I want to talk about in this episode. Welcome in to the Lead in 30 podcast. I'm Russ Hill. In less than 30 minutes, we give you something to think about, a framework, a best practice, an example, a story from a client we've been with in the last few days or the last few weeks, or a framework, anyway, something for you to think about implementing in the way that you lead others, and the whole purpose of every episode is to upgrade upgrade your ability to lead others, because that has profound impact on your ability to deliver results, on you, the scalability of your career, your uh your livelihood, your income. I mean, let's just be honest, your ability to lead is tied to all of that, and so that's what we share in this episode.

Speaker 1:

For those of you that are new, I make my living coaching, consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies. You can find out more about our executive team consulting work or our off the shelf courses for managers at scale at lonerockio. Lonerockio Our company is LoneRock Leadership and I'm one of the founders and I get to host our little podcast here in this corner of the internet, glad so many of you are listening on a regular basis. It's fun to interact with you on LinkedIn or various places and to hear about where you work and where you live, and all over the world and in every industry imaginable, so I'm thrilled to be having the conversation with you. Okay, I'm going to give you an example of what I'm talking about and I put this under the category of involvement.

Speaker 1:

And in our foundational flagship course called Lead in 30, we teach clarity, alignment and movement. Those are the three core competencies of every leader who scales period, mic, drop, end of story, no debate. Clarity, alignment and movement. If you're able to do that, to create each one of those and obviously we're boiling a ton down into just three competencies, three areas of expertise and that's our job at our firm is to take the complex and make it simple. By the way, it's your job too, as a leader, to take the complex and make it simple. That's how you mobilize masses. If you got one person, you can be as complex as you want to on your team Not really, but you could. When you're trying to mobilize a dozen, a thousand, a hundred thousand, you've got to be simple. You've got to boil it down into very simple terms and under the category of alignment.

Speaker 1:

So, clarity, alignment, movement, under the category of alignment, the ultimate goal of creating alignment on a team is to get everyone's involvement or buy-in, or participation or engagement whatever term you want to use, the one we like the most, after considering them all for lots of years, is involvement. That's what I want is I want everybody on my team involved in trying to deliver on our TKRs, on our team key results, the things that matter most, whether that's a safety metric, a revenue metric, a market share revenue, market share growth number, it's a patient satisfaction or customer service number, new product development, whatever it is, I'm trying to get your involvement as a member of my team to actually help us deliver on that. And if I can mobilize like 80% of you, 90% of you I'm never going to get a hundred percent, that's, that's just not going to happen but if I can get 80, 90% of you, wow, we're going to. We're going to, we're going to do some exciting things at this company, whatever company you lead. Okay, so the example river rafting. Have I told this you all? I have to apologize, but we are putting out so much content that around our core, the stuff that we work with with leaders, that I forget. Now I got to come up with a better system. Have somebody on our team track this stuff for me. So I know. But when you're writing a book and, by the way, we're so close on our new book and I could not be more excited about it. It's going to be a game changer for those that read it and for our firm, and I'm not overstating that. It's that good. So it's coming out here. It's coming out being published in the next few months, couple months. So, writing a book and then we're filming.

Speaker 1:

I think by the end of this, by four weeks from now, we will have shot let me count them up 20, 40, about 90, somewhere between 90 and 100 videos. I'm talking with the production crew, with the studio crew, on-site lights, all the stuff and then professionally put into post-production. These are videos that were refreshing for some of our courses. They're brand new videos for other things. Yada, yada, yada. So, in fact, if you go to our website right now, lonerockio, you'll see some of the new videos that have been produced there with different members of our team and things like that, so you can get overviews. If you want to dig into, oh, what's this course on change that they've launched, called Adapt in 30? Well, there's a video describing it which I'm super proud of. Anyway, it's all there. So the point of all this is we're putting out all this content, I'm having all these calls with different people. Then we've got the clients that we're working with, and so I forget who I told what story to. So if you've already heard this in a previous podcast episode, my apologies, but I'm going to tell it from a different angle here.

Speaker 1:

We went river rafting in Colorado this summer so took a group from our church these we call them young men, teenage boys a big old group. There are 50 of us who went river rafting on the fastest river in Colorado. It was amazing. I've never done it before. Many of you have gone river rafting, some of you multiple times. For me, it was just one of those things that I had never done and so I was excited about it.

Speaker 1:

The part of the experience I want to share with you is getting into the raft, and we've got a guide right. So we were running the. What's called the oh crap, I'm going to forget the name of the river right now that I have to boot it up Starts with an A Amicus. Starts with an A Amicus. Is that it Amicus man? I can't remember the name. It's like A-M-I-C-A-S. Yeah, I think Amicus River Comes down from Vail, super fast moving.

Speaker 1:

You know, depending on the time of year, the water's 40 degrees, so, like crazy cold, they outfitted us in wetsuits, boots, helmets and, of course, these life jackets. And then we've got our crew that spends their summer running the rapids. So I end up on the first raft. So we've got all these rafts with all these different people from our group, and I'm on the first one. There's six of us, so my youngest son is on there with me, a couple of his buddies, another couple of dads and whatever, and then the guide, and so our guide was the leader of the whole thing. So he said they put their best out front.

Speaker 1:

So he explains to us as we're getting ready to go and, by the way, this is not if you picture a river like what I pictured was oh, there's these slow spots of a river and you get on the raft and that and you kind of have to paddle to keep moving, and then you get out at a slow spot, eat lunch and then get back in. Not that that was not this experience. This sucker had no slow spots. So, like the place they put us on, where you climb into the rafts, they're like holding it on for dear life. And then they're like when we push this thing off the rocks, like it's moving there. You don't have time to adjust. We are hauling and there will be no place on the river where you're going to need to raft or paddle to keep us moving, like the river is just that fast, moving the whole time, which is awesome.

Speaker 1:

So as we're getting ready to get in the guide and we start going down, we get our bearings and we're moving down the water and we're, you know, having this freezing cold glacier water splash into our faces and we're awake and having a great time. And our guide is like okay, we got our first serious rapid coming up and he said let me explain how this is going to go. And he's like yelling this from the back of the raft. He's like we're the first boat and if a human falls into the water, they float down the river faster than the raft does. They're more buoyant. So if somebody falls in on the rafts behind us, they're going to move faster than their raft and they're going to. They're going to move faster than their raft and they're going to, they're going to. Their body is going to come down the stream and they've got all these boulders and all these things and every in the river we got to get them out. So the whole time we're going you be, you keep your eyes on the water because somebody might be floating and I, we're like okay, and he's like now.

Speaker 1:

Now, when we come up to this first rapid, when I say forward two, you dip your paddle in, you cut like I taught you, and you do two forward movements and you do them at the exact speed of the person in front of you so that we are absolutely in sync. Do not hit their paddle, do not bump their paddle, do not row faster than they do, do not go slower than they do, don't put your paddle in before they do. Follow each other to exactness. He said now, when I say backward two, backward three, you do three backward motions. Then when I say down or duck, you get your head between your knees because there's something overhead that we're going to hit, it's going to take off your head if you don't move. When I say back up, you get back up and pull that head out from between your knees and you get sitting straight up and in position Now, when water is splashing in your face or we're sideways or you feel like you might fall out and I say forward two, you do forward two. And then he yelled out to us. Do you understand? We said yes and we're ready to go At that moment with that explanation, with what he did and, for our example, the leader of our team, our guide.

Speaker 1:

He was the designated decision maker. Leader of our team. There was no lack of clarity in our raft of who was in charge, who was making the decisions, who was the leader. It was him who was making the decisions. Who was the leader? It was him.

Speaker 1:

So after he gave that speech and in the environment we were in, I was completely involved in whatever he asked us to do. Now, he did not just have my hands and my feet, he also had my head and my heart. He also had my head and my heart, my mind and my brain. The way I'm thinking, I care about it, I'm passionate about it. So the terms we're going to use for this are operational involvement and emotional involvement.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so this is something we don't teach in lead in 30, because we don't have time to get this deep into it, but I've had conversations with several teams about this recently. In fact, I was with an executive team of a pharma company last week in New Jersey and we spent probably an hour talking about this Do we have emotional involvement in this company or do we only have operational involvement? And then there are all kinds of questions that you can ask associated with that, like which one is more valuable? Operational involvement meaning you show up, you do the work, you execute on it, you're doing it, but you're kind of just going through the motions with operational you tracking with me. We're emotional. You know what that looks like. Right, you've seen that.

Speaker 1:

You've felt that when I left the firm I used to be an employee of, I was operationally involved. I was no longer emotionally involved. That had faded over a period of probably a year, and I'm not proud to say that. But I also would put some accountability on the executives of our firm, who I have a lot of respect for, a lot of good people. I got no hard feelings about any of it All doing our best, but they did not seek my emotional involvement and the private equity firm that bought us could care less about anybody's emotional involvement. Deliver the number, no questions. Just put your hand down. Execute on what we've told you to do your part. The bank is calling.

Speaker 1:

It was all a numbers game. It was all like if they could have hired AI robots they would have, because they just needed people to execute on what was decided, and my level of involvement in discussions and debates went to pretty much zero. Pretty darn clear that opinions didn't matter. I'm not and I'm not again. I'm not. I'm not indicting anybody on that. I'm not saying that anybody did it wrong. They get to choose right. And that private equity company we weren't the first firm that they bought at that time, so you think they had some ideas of what they were trying to do and think they had some expertise at it, I would assume.

Speaker 1:

So Just didn't work for me because I don't want to be in a job, I don't want to work for an organization. I don't want to work for a, an organization that isn't interested seeking the emotional involvement of the members of the team. Now, that might not be you, some of you then you don't care about that, and some of you would say, especially if you run a factory floor or you're you know you've got kind of service entry level jobs that you're worried about, then operational involvement is pretty much what you care about more than anything Like get to your position on the floor, execute, do your part, don't have a lot of time for discussion. Okay, but emotional involvement the bigger the vision, the grander the vision of what we're trying to accomplish, the more that operational or the more that emotional involvement becomes critical. So anyway, in this episode I'm not going to go too deep into it, I just wanted to float those ideas to you, those terms, wanted you to think about it. Which one is more important to you, operational or emotional involvement? Which one do you have on your team right now? And then we won't spend a lot of time on it in this episode.

Speaker 1:

But then how do you get either and you have some ideas on emotional, certainly the why becomes critically important Certainly a leader who creates clarity. You see how these pieces all fit together. That's super important. Like there's a destination we're trying to get to, there's a vision for what we're trying to accomplish. We're certainly talking about the customer, the member, the patient, a lot. We're coming up with solutions for problems that matter in people's lives. So you've got a leader that's tying all that together, focusing on that, and you start to get emotional involvement.

Speaker 1:

Now, what kills emotional involvement more than anything? Being what we call a second leader, founder mode, which is the whole first chapter of our upcoming book, and it's freaking amazing, if I do say so myself, founder mode. We take you to a meeting that happened in Mountain View, california, in the latter part of 2024, where founder mode exploded across Silicon Valley. And so when you are in founder mode or command and control or second leader mode, then you're not that interested in engaging your team in discussion. You want them just to go execute, and that kills emotional involvement.

Speaker 1:

Now, the only instances where that kind of efficient conversation is appropriate is life or death emergency, like we've got five seconds, we've got an hour to figure this out, and so in that case I'm emotionally involved without you allowing me to be part of the conversation because of what's at stake, you with me. So think of a soldier in battle. Is there a lot of time for discussion? No, are they emotionally involved Big time? Why? Because lives are on the line or they're fighting for a cause that they firmly believe in and they're in the throes of it, and so. But those are rare, those happen. You can count those on one hand in a career Okay, for those of us in professional career. So in the absence of that kind of involvement, then it's all about, or those kinds of circumstances, then it's all about making sure people feel heard and all of that. So, anyway, that's that's what I wanted to cover in this episode.

Speaker 1:

Emotional involvement, operational involvement which one's more important? Which one do you have? What do you need and what are you doing about it? The most successful leaders? These are the sorts of things they think about, and so I wanted to get it on your mind in this episode of the Lead in 30 podcast. Share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You're listening to Lead in 30.