It is that time of year when Hotshot crews around the country are building their teams. Some crews have mostly returning personnel that have already bought in, some are selling their brand with the hope of getting new crew members to buy-in. You can always tell the crew that has bought in, they believe in what they are doing and it shows in quality of work. The same is true of the crew that has not, they do what they have to and that’s about it.
How do you get people to buy into the brand or team? Is it salesmanship, trust, pride, ownership? I think it is a little of all of those. I believe it starts with trust or at least building trust, granted you have to do a little selling to get people to your crew in the first place. Once you have the trust, and more importantly the belief that your intentions for the crew/people are good, then comes some ownership. You have to give them responsibility for people to have ownership.
That last sentence is huge. I have been apart of organizations that only gave task specific responsibility, i.e. pick up all the trash in the campground. I did not have a problem wanting to do a good job picking up the trash until it became clear that my supervisor took the credit and gave the blame. So the only feedback I got was negative feedback when I did not do a good job.
Ok, yes this is a very simple example, but it highlighted for me when I would take ownership. Never getting positive reinforcement and only negative reinforcement slowly eroded the quality of my trash picking up duties. I no longer had ownership in the picking up the trash, and therefore lost my “Buy-In” to the team.
A similar situation where the supervisor gave the credit and took the criticism did the opposite. I took responsibility and ownership in the task. I found better ways to do the work. I bought into the organization. The difference between those to examples is who takes the blame and who gets the praise in the organization.
What are you doing to get buy-in within your team? Pay attention to Buy-In this summer, the crews that have ownership have bought in. I bet you can see the leadership mistakes in the supervisors of a team doing just good enough work.
Is it that simple? Kind of. People are smart, they eventually figure out your intentions. As a leader, giveaway the praise and take all the criticism.