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Have a project that’s bogged down due to the number of people, departments, and opinions involved? Building a coalition can help you get decisions made and projects shipped.
Unless you’re working at the smallest of startups, it’s inevitable that sooner or later, a project you care about will be stalled out by conflicting opinions and departmental dynamics. It can feel hopeless, like the only possible outcome is that the project gets cancelled or you quit and move on to a different company. Luckily, there’s a third way. It’s time to build a coalition: a loose-knit group of like-minded peers, internal influencers, and leaders who can make decisions happen by the power of collective action.
It starts with listening
One of the most frustrating feelings at work is when a project you care about stalls out; deliverables aren’t being met, stakeholders aren’t in alignment, and morale is low. Even worse, it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it. “If only I had more institutional power,” you might think to yourself, “then I could fix this.” The reality, though, is that positional power isn’t everything – even if you’re the CEO, you can’t ever force people to do what you want. So what can you do if all you have is the power of persuasion to get people aligned and moving forward? You have to begin by listening.
When I began working at Miro, I was brought on as a tech lead for a brand-new product that had started nearly a year before. While a few prototypes had been written, nothing had yet been shipped to production. I was thrust into a cauldron of competing opinions, frustrations, and viewpoints, and I had no idea how to move forward. Not knowing what else to do, I began by simply sitting down with stakeholders, listening to their perspectives, and understanding the goals they were trying to achieve. One side saw issues with our current architecture and wanted a clean start. Another side believed that if we built new features on the existing platform, then we could evolve the platform itself. The product and design departments weren’t too interested in the technical tug-of-war and primarily wanted to get the product shipped. I agreed, but to do that, I had to figure out how to get various engineering stakeholders aligned so we could get out of our competing architecture diagrams and start shipping. I began by having 1:1 conversations with various stakeholders to understand what felt important to them.
I listened and took a lot of notes, and slowly started to notice that what felt like competing points of view were not necessarily mutually exclusive. There was a way for me to build a coalition among these stakeholders to ship something everyone was more or less on board with. It took a couple of (exhausting) months, but we eventually got everyone to agree on a path forward and began shipping our first lines of code to production. In the end, we took a product that was nearly a year behind and shipped our general availability (GA) release on time.
If you’re facing a similar situation at your company, how can you build a coalition to get your own project unstuck?
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Whom to include in your coalition
If you want to start with listening, you need to identify relevant stakeholders within the world of your project who aren’t yet aligned but who need to be. The goal of a coalition isn’t to persuade everyone, but to unite key influential figures who can inspire others to follow. I try to keep my eye out for the following kinds of people.
The first follower. The first coworker you need to look for is someone who is already aligned with your viewpoint. It doesn’t matter whether they hold a lot of sway or not; the most important thing is that they’re already convinced. This gives you someone with whom you can talk and brainstorm. If you can get someone like this on your team, they’ll do a lot of cheerleading for you.
Influencers. The next people you want to recruit to your coalition are those who have influential power. Whose face do you see a lot in Slack? Who is that charismatic person that everyone seems to like for the most part? Is there someone like that who is at least relatively sympathetic toward your goals? Some people and departments that oppose your goals might not ever listen to you, but they might think to themselves, “If so-and-so is behind it, maybe I need to rethink my opposition to it.”
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Leaders. Even though positional power is not all it’s cracked up to be, you should still think through the leaders in your company that you can get on board. At minimum, your direct manager should support your initiative, and ideally, other leaders would back you as well. It’s way easier to get the kind of momentum you need if you’re able to say, “The CTO thinks this is a good plan.”
When you sit down for a conversation with these various people, recognize that it’s going to take time. You might be tempted to try the mass communication route – prepare a slide deck and get everyone on a call for a pitch – but I find that sitting down for 1:1 listening sessions is worth the extra time and effort. Why? Because you’re signaling that you care about this person as a person. You care about their professional experience, and not just your own. Come to those meetings prepared with a list of questions you’ve specifically prepared for that person: avoid the temptation to make a template. Use this 1:1 to find out what they know that you don’t, and why their viewpoint differs from others. Take notes, and let the conversation follow its own course.
You’ll have a good idea at the end of such a conversation whether they’re onboard or not. If their body language, tone, and words are relentlessly hostile, if they just seem committed to opposing you, then let it go. Kick the dust off your shoes and move on. If they open up, though, and they start brainstorming and getting excited with you, then you’ve found a key addition to your coalition.
All this talk about power and influence might have you thinking that coalition-building is just about using other people to get what you want at work. That kind of abuse of power can happen, and you’re right to be cautious about it. But building coalitions should not play out that way. Instead, view it through the lens of Andy Crouch, who describes power as having the agency to achieve meaningful outcomes. If your plan is successful, it should not only benefit you and those who champion your cause, but also those coworkers who opposed your plan and never joined the coalition. It should benefit the business and its customers.
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Final thoughts
If you’re working on a project that is stuck in the gears of competing stakeholders and departmental disagreement, building a coalition is an empowering way to get it back on track. Start by taking the time to listen to people’s perspectives rather than just assuming they’re wrong because you disagree. Take notes, try to understand what valid points they may have, and then see if you can brainstorm win-win solutions together. If you can, congratulations! You’ve persuaded someone to join your coalition, and you’re one step closer to your goal.
Once you have a critical mass of like-minded peers, influencers, and leaders in your corner, then the actual moment of making a decision together can almost feel anticlimactic because enough people already agree. It’s going to take a lot of legwork to do all this persuasion, but in the end, you’ll experience the gratification of salvaging a project and gaining goodwill with your coworkers.
