Get buy-in
Making the decision was only the beginning for McLaughlin. He next had to get investors, board members and employees to buy in to his thinking.
“There’s a bit of a myth or fiction that if a CEO decides we’re going in a certain direction, we’re going to go there,” he says. “Well, there’s a big difference in leading people in that direction and dragging people.
“You certainly don’t want to drag people because you won’t get the best out of them, and, frankly, who’s got the energy to want to drag hundreds of people in one direction or another?”
He decided to get feedback and do a slow campaign to help people see the logic themselves.
“You have to do your human best to have really thought through the plan and know where the risks are,” he says “You don’t have to foreclose the risks, but you want to acknowledge them. It takes a lot of work upfront to be truly prepared. You don’t really want to go to a meeting to start talking about your doomed plan to have people ask too many questions you didn’t think of, and I think there’s a tendency for that to happen.”
First, he had to make sure he could communicate his idea simply.
“I try not to float too many ideas at work that my 10-year-old daughter wouldn’t understand,” he says. “She’s really bright, and if she doesn’t get it, then I don’t have it right yet or I’m not putting it across the right way.”
After his litmus test, then he started talking to some confidants about his idea.
“I’m not talking about going around internally and talking about it,” McLaughlin says. “I’m talking about looking for people you believe and trust outside that you can check your thinking on things.”
He turned to his brother, who is now VeriSign’s CEO, and his sister, also a successful businessperson, as well as board members and the other founders. It’s critical to talk to outside people first because internal people will bombard you with questions.
“Usually when I talk to other officers, they turn quickly to how to implement that, and I’m still trying to have a conversation called, ‘Should we be doing this at all?’” he says. “CEOs are a little bit limited in their ability to really brainstorm internally. People like to talk about how you’re going to do it. If you want to send a shockwave of terror through the organization, just come in on some given Friday afternoon and start to share your wildest thoughts about what the business might look like in five or 10 years. You’ve just created a wild staff that doesn’t sleep all weekend. It doesn’t matter how you preface it — ‘Oh, I just want to see what this sounds like, or do you think I’m crazy?’ — they have to get back to work on their resume.”
Once he had worked through the arguments and kinks in his idea externally, he started planting seeds internally by posing a question and leaving it unanswered.
“I would ask people, ‘Do you know that it’s only less than 5 percent of retail is going online?’” he says. “So I’d put that out there. The first step was to educate people about the facts that I was aware of that I thought were meaningful that I think they were either unaware of or didn’t ascribe significance to.”
This got the wheels turning in their heads.
“Then I would just ask, ‘What are we going to do about that? What do you think our future l
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ks like? Where do you think this path is going to take us?’” he says. “Try to get them to do their own thinking about it. They may not get excited the first time I asked a question or the first couple of times I asked a question, but, eventually, I was able to engage people in a conversation about where are we going.”
Because he had prepared and thought deeply about these answers, he had an idea of where the conversations would lead, but he was also open to hearing new ideas in case he had missed anything.
“There’s just a lot of groundwork there,” he says. “It was a very big change for us, so we wouldn’t put that kind of energy into picking a new caterer, but for what we were undertaking, that’s what I thought it took.”
