Issue Selling

In today’s dynamic, complex, and ambiguous business environments, businesses can no longer reserve all decision making for those at the top of the firm. No matter how talented they may be, they lack sufficient capacity to map and respond to such environments adequately - - their decision-making will be too slow and cumbersome. Survival in such environments involves getting input from levels below the top as part of a strategy development process, Jane Dutton and I have studied this phenomenon since the late 1980s under the heading of issue selling – examining whether and how middle-level managers try to sell issues to those above them in organizations, hoping to gain upper-level attention for their issue, to have it incorporated as part of the firm's strategy and to see action on it. We now know a lot about the conditions under which people will sell issues versus feeling blocked from doing so, how they will sell issues, and the effectiveness of various approaches. This work culminated in an article (with Jim Detert) highlighting the issue-selling moves of successful and unsuccessful sellers. I hope you'll find this work helpful – it highlight the ways that individuals at all levels of our best companies can be active in influencing the firm’s actions and how those companies benefit as a result.