Issue Selling

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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 highlights 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.

rELEVANT puBLICATIONS

 

The Role of Issues Selling in Effective Strategy Making

In Handbook of Middle Management Research on Strategy Process, 2017

Issues Selling: Proactive Efforts Toward Organizational Change

In Proactivity at Work: Making Things Happen in Organizations, 2016

 

Identity-Based Issue Selling

In Identity and the Modern Organization, 2007

 
 
 

Selling Issues to Top Management

Academy of Management Review, 1993