The Primes: How any Group can Solve any Problem

Chapter 3

Enrolling Others

Can you call people, from disenfranchisement and mere compliance, to their highest level of commitment?

You are clear about your goals. You have boldly declared that you will achieve a specific outcome by a certain date, with integrity. You know that you need others to commit to work with you in order to accomplish this declaration, since there are not many worthy outcomes that you—or any single individual—could produce on his or her own. This chapter will show you how powerful leaders and managers enroll groups of people in the risky business of problem solving, change, and transformation. One PRIME will show you how to get the folks to lean into your vision. The next will show you how to compel the group to do whatever it takes. The third reveals how to generate unprecedented power within the group.

I stress again that I am deliberately using the word “group” as opposed to “team.” This is because while all teams are groups, not all groups are teams. Teams are groups in which the feeling is one-for-all-and-all-for-one. Teams are willing to wear the same t-shirts, and have a common objective and sense of what winning looks like. Teams have someone to whom they all report and who can tell them what to do. Teams are a luxury. But many groups you will be leading and of which you're a member are more like coalitions. The problems you'll solve and the change you'll drive will increasingly require that strangers, competitors, cautious allies, and suspicious ...