Why Your Boss Ignores Your Ideas
And how to change that reality through persuasion
The last issue of the Mode/Switch told you that the first person you need to persuade when you need to change things at work is yourself. Persuade yourself that your ideas are important. Move from self-doubt to self-advocacy.
When I posted a reel about this, one viewer asked, “But how?” Heckuva question. Before I share a response, let me tell you a story.
Envision someone named Cecilia who works for a tech company and who notices that her company doesn’t have an email opt-in process. This might not sound like a big deal to you. But it’s a process to obtain customer consent to receive company emails—a process that allows subscription to people don’t get spammed with, ahem, newsletters that they don’t want. It’s a big deal in the world of email marketing.
She goes to her boss, notes the problem, and explains why it’s ethically important. He just stares at her, shakes his head, and says, “Stop pushing about this.” (See, he really likes sending emails out to customers whenever he wants, whether they’ve consented or not.)
How can she persuade him to do this morally correct thing, when he’s determined to do the opposite? Here’s the bad news. This is a true story. You probably don’t need me to tell you, as Cecilia explained during a recent interview, that women in tech often get ignored. The dudes in charge won’t listen, unless another dude says it.
But here’s the good news: Cecilia doesn’t give up. She works on this problem for months, doing the quiet work of indirect persuasion—or what she calls “sliding things into their peripheral.”
Later, her company hires a fractional chief marketing officer (CMO)—basically, a glorified, part-time consultant. Cecilia actually finds him hard to get along with. But he’s at least got this going for him: he notices that the company’s getting a lot of unsubscribes and spam reports. The CMO asks Cecilia why this is happening. Well, there’s no opt-in process, she explains. We’re about to go to marketing jail. People are pissed that they’re getting all these emails that they didn’t ask for. Cecilia sees an opening: she asks him to go to the CEO and to urge a change in process.
The CMO does. Lo and behold, Cecilia now has a new assignment: she’s designing the opt-in process she had herself been urging for half a year.
I hate that story, and I love that story. I hate it, because it’s an all too perfect example of how good ideas get ignored. I love it, because it shows how persuasion happens.
You noticed that Cecilia used the term peripheral, as in “sliding things into their peripheral.” Her use of that term points to a way of convincing people of things by positioning ideas in the corner of their eye. They don’t give it the time of day, really. But when it comes to mind again later, it feels like their own idea.
That’s the mode switch for this week: move from direct to indirect persuasion. Direct persuasion involves laying facts and reasons out clearly and in detail. Indirect persuasion means convincing people by sideways means so that they think an idea is their own.
I’m drawing here on Elaboration Likelihood Methodology (ELM) that says people are willing to think something through thoroughly, but only if they have the following:
Unfortunately, Cecilia’s sexist boss doesn’t have motivation. He doesn’t care to listen. Her warning doesn’t seem relevant to him. We don’t know if he has the ability, though it’s satisfying to dismiss him as a dummy incapable of thinking things through carefully. But snark aside, he might simply not have the opportunity to think about Cecilia’s idea. Running a tech startup is a frantic line of work. You don’t have a lot of discretionary time. You have to dismiss things or accept things quickly. (Or that’s how it often seems to some male leaders anyway.) Sometimes that means you miss things.
Here’s where ELM becomes handy. If your boss has motivation, ability, and opportunity and is willing to go with you on the “central route” of carefully considered, well-elaborated argument—hurrah! But when they’re not willing to think things through, when they’re not willing to listen to your well-developed arguments, they turn to a “peripheral route.” That is, they come at things sideways. They take shortcuts. They use heuristics.
Here are some peripheral routes.
Does your boss know other people who’ve tried what you’re proposing? If so, she or he might be willing to give it a thumbs-up without thinking it through.
Are there a lot of bullet points in support of your proposal? Even if the arguments aren’t very solid, your boss might be willing to skip evaluating them simply because there seem to be more pros than cons.
Do other people in the room nod their heads when they hear your proposal? If others smile at your proposal, your boss is more likely to as well.
None of this makes the peripheral route look very admirable. But humans tend to be lazy. No, let’s put it this way: they tend to be overwhelmed. So my recommendation is not to be too frustrated when your managers are unwilling to think something through with you. They’ve got more information than attention.
Instead put your energy into finding a shrewd pathway to indirect advocacy.
Warning, says Cecilia, this might cost you some ego. You might not get credit for the smart ideas you put forward so indirectly. But when an important project is on the line, try the following.
Find your allies, and enroll them in the campaign.
Insinuate your idea into seemingly unrelated conversations.
Share your idea with people who could never have thought of it on their own—especially if they have influence on the decision-makers in your organization.
Tell stories, circulate slogans, push statistics that make your idea feel increasingly taken-for-granted. Create the new commonsense in your company.
Peripheral persuasion is a long game, but it’s a mode switch worth making.
-craig
