Issue Selling in the Organization

In this age of rapid change, organizations must relentlessly improve their structures, processes and systems if they hope to outperform their competitors. The best companies know which ingredients go into a successful change effort and how to mix and match them to achieve the most potent blend.

An August 2001 study published in the Academy of Management Journal examines issue selling, the process by which individuals within an organization bring ideas or concerns, solutions and opportunities together in ways that focus others' attention and invite action. The process represents the earliest stage of change — that of focusing attention on an issue.

To collect their data, the authors asked 42 midlevel managers at a nonprofit hospital to describe incidents in which they had tried to direct top managers' attention to a particular issue. (Issues were defined as any event, development or trend that could affect the hospital's performance; that is, updating a stale practice, increasing a budget, enhancing staff and patient safety, and so forth.) The managers were asked to describe both successful and unsuccessful issue-selling attempts.

The study grounds an earlier, conceptual model with empirical evidence of what issue selling looks like in an actual organization. Though the research has several limitations (the data come from a single organization and consist of retrospective accounts), it reveals what makes a change effort successful as well as affirms more conventional wisdom about change management.

For example, in the interviewees' responses, the authors identified three categories of “moves” that managers make in trying to sell an issue: packaging moves (including actively promoting an issue through the logic of a business plan and connecting the issue to other issues or goals), involvement moves (involving peers and superiors in issue selling through formal and informal processes) and process moves (using formal communication channels; educating oneself on the issue at hand before trying to sell it; and attending to questions of timing, such as when to persist in selling issues or when to involve others).

The interviews also revealed that issue sellers draw on three kinds of knowledge in pitching their ideas to top managers: relational knowledge (figuring out who will be affected by the issue, who cares about it, who might object to it and so on), normative knowledge (knowing which kinds of data important people use, how they typically present such data, whether similar issues have been sold before and so forth) and strategic knowledge (understanding the organization's goals, how the company plans to achieve them, which strategic issues top managers are grappling with and what the company's broader competitive context looks like).

The picture of issue selling that emerges from the research contains both expected and unexpected elements. For instance, it's not surprising that successful issue sellers present their issues as strategically important, legitimate and relevant to the organization overall or that they tend to break complex issues into manageable bits and present them incrementally to decision makers. However, packaging moves appear more complex than the authors expected. Specifically, issue sellers must do much more than provide compelling facts to support their claims. They have to know how to present those facts (in what order and in what form) — something that comes only with normative and strategic knowledge.

Equally interesting, the data suggest that successful issue sellers are conservative; that is, they tone down potentially radical ideas, “warm up” their listeners by introducing issues to them slowly and tailor their presentations to the organization's culture and overall strategy. Moreover, the managers' responses imply that change is continuous, rather than episodic. In other words, organizations consist of a cacophony of complementary and competing change attempts, with managers at all levels joining the fray and pushing their agendas. As in a pluralistic marketplace, midlevel managers “sell” issues, while top managers “buy” those they find most appealing and convincing. Thus the study also challenges the dominant portrait of change agents, which centers on senior executives' or outside consultants' heroic efforts to effect change.

Finally, though the study suggests a more central role of middle managers in successful change, the authors maintain that top managers have their own part to play — that of creating both fixed and flexible organizations. Specifically, top managers must fix those aspects of their organizations that support smooth coordination of change (such as delineating responsibilities and priorities) while also allowing great freedom on other aspects. The blend enables organizations to capitalize on middle managers' unique — and essential — power to put the gears of change in motion.

The study is “Moves That Matter: Issue Selling and Organizational Change” by Jane E. Dutton and Susan J. Ashford, both professors of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Michigan Business School; Regina M. O'Neill, assistant professor of management at Suffolk University in Boston; and Katherine A. Lawrence, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan Business School. The paper can be downloaded at www.aom.pace.edu/amj/August2001/dutton.pdf.