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Getting manager buy-in for a good idea is harder than it should be. Our research points to a communication style that reliably breaks through this wall — and that is disproportionately exhibited by white-collar employees with working-class origins.
We studied how employees present ideas to their managers by conducting a field survey of employees and their managers in a shared-services division of a multinational engineering company in India (218 employees, 32 managers); running three follow-up behavioral experiments involving more than 1,000 working adults and university students; and interviewing dozens of professionals. In each study, we found that employees from working-class backgrounds who had moved into white-collar work, whom we call upward transitioners, were more likely to acknowledge that they might be missing something, invite the manager’s perspective, and appear open to revising their position.
In interviews, 77% of upward transitioner employees described communicating this way, compared with just 15% of colleagues who had always occupied higher-class positions.
We then tested whether this difference in tone and attitude affects how managers respond to an idea.
In one experiment, some participants were asked to take on the role of either a low- or high-power manager. Each listened to a participant cast as an employee deliver an idea either as a firm recommendation, in a highly confident manner, or as a more open-ended recommendation, in a humble tone that allowed for input. Each manager was asked to rate how willing they were to act on a recommendation delivered in one of the two styles. Among managers cast as having little power, the two pitches landed nearly the same way. Among managers cast as powerful individuals — people with the most resources to act and the most to lose by publicly reversing course — the open-ended pitch landed far better.
Why? Communicating in an open manner lowers a manager’s defensiveness, shifting the conversation from who’s right to what could work. Inviting a manager to help shape the idea prompts them to develop a sense of ownership over it. Both dynamics are important when pitching ideas to powerful managers, who can be resistant to ideas that are not their own.