Stop chasing buy-in. Start building chemistry.

Stop chasing buy-in. Start building chemistry.

(Dr. Janice Perkins) - My research on executive coaching relationships suggests chemistry may be a better first step toward lasting buy-in.

By Dr. Janice Perkins

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

Consider a common corporate challenge: An executive team needs its organization to carry out a major restructuring. Leaders spend weeks building their case to get everyone “aligned” before the initiative launches. The effort is exhausting, and people still aren’t on board. The alignment they were chasing never fully arrives, and the launch is shaky at best. Senior leaders end up frustrated with middle managers for not complying and getting on board.

I see versions of this scenario in my clients’ organizations regularly. It reflects a common assumption: that alignment must come before action, and that leaders can create it by “giving” people the direction and the reasons until they’re convinced.

My doctoral research on executive coaching relationships, combined with my experience coaching executive teams, has led me to question that sequence. In the coaching pairs I studied, chemistry often developed before explicit agreement and helped people move forward together. That doesn’t eliminate the need for alignment, but it has changed how I think about its role. In my view, chemistry may be a more important precondition for forward movement than securing buy-in up front.

The problem with buy-in

Buy-in is an appealing corporate phrase because it gives change a tidy sequence: Leaders create an idea, convince others, and the idea moves through the organization. As a result, leaders often oversell initiatives and push uncomfortably hard to persuade everyone to get on board. The approach is logical, but it doesn’t account for the emotional acceptance, trust and psychological safety people need before they shift.

Dictionary.com defines persuade as “to prevail on (a person) to do something.” But people generally resist feeling pressured, which is one reason they push back against change or increased speed. No one likes to be prevailed upon. In my experience, that is the resistance leaders feel from other levels of the organization when change is initiated. It often isn’t resistance to the idea or the change itself, but to the way it is introduced and carried out across the organization.

People recognize the difference between being persuaded to follow and genuinely wanting to move together. Buy-in is an outcome; the more important question is whether you’ve created conditions that encourage participation. Take a step back and ask what companies really want from buy-in: people moving in the chosen direction. Traditionally, leaders tell employees what they expect. Some also explain why and invite questions to gain support.

How I studied chemistry

As a former athletic coach and now an executive coach, I wanted to know whether the chemistry we rely on in athletic and executive coaching could be understood well enough to teach leaders how to build stronger teams and cultures.

For my 2026 doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching, I conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coach-client pairs in the fall of 2025. I analyzed recorded coaching sessions, session transcripts and video elicitation interviews, in which participants reviewed recordings of their sessions and reflected on key moments. I examined when chemistry emerged and intensified, instances of perceived alignment or shared orientation, and references to implicit and explicit values. I studied what happens when people move beyond simply communicating and begin thinking, responding and creating together.

My findings challenge a common assumption: Chemistry is not simply luck, charisma or personality fit, nor something that appears only after people have known and trusted one another for years. In the pairs I studied, chemistry offered a faster pathway to connection and trust, and it emerged through identifiable relational conditions that I believe can be replicated and strengthened.

Within those coaching relationships, chemistry was associated with increased agency and ownership, reduced relational friction, a stronger sense of identity and greater confidence. Based on those findings and my work with executive teams, I believe strong team chemistry can significantly reduce the need to persuade people to move in a particular direction, and that buy-in can become a natural result of chemistry rather than a separate campaign.

Mutual orientation: what buy-in gets wrong

One concept from my study helps explain how interactions became productive without requiring prior agreement.

Mutual orientation is the shared direction of attention and engagement within an interaction. It is not the same as a shared goal. In coaching, the coach’s goal is to help the client succeed. The client has specific goals for their professional development. The organization paying for the coaching has goals for the client’s career growth. Those three goals are different, but they point in the same direction. That is mutual orientation. It’s not agreement about outcomes; it’s alignment in the moment about what matters for improvement and growth. And it helps reveal what buy-in gets wrong.

Here’s a metaphor I often use with executives who are trying to implement change and are frustrated by a lack of buy-in despite all their effort communicating. Picture a couple of young adults being pulled on an inner tube behind a speedboat on a busy holiday lake. The riders are safe inside the boat’s wake. The riders and the driver haven’t explicitly discussed any of this; they’re simply facing the same direction while participating in the movement in very different ways.

Buy-in assumes sameness. But the two riders could be having completely different experiences. One is thrilled, and the other is nervous. Their experiences aren’t symmetrical, and they don’t need to be. They share orientation, not identical understanding. They’re facing forward, moving together in the same direction.

Buy-in also assumes commitment comes before movement. The riders haven’t committed to a particular kind of ride, but they committed to the ride itself when they got on the tube and into the water. The driver committed the minute they got behind the wheel. The moment the boat accelerates, the riders are already moving. In the coaching pairs I studied, change regularly came before conscious agreement. The only conscious agreement was showing up and being willing to be moved. Participants shifted, opened up and changed before they had explicitly committed to doing so. You don’t persuade someone through a relational gate; you create the conditions for them to walk through it on their own.

What throws people off the inner tube is the boat cutting hard left or right without warning or explanation. The shared orientation breaks down not because anyone stopped caring, but because the direction changed without enough time to adjust together. In my work with clients, the most common causes are decisions made at the top without considering all stakeholders, without connecting the change to the “why” or without acknowledging the loss people need to process. People don’t mind going fast if they are safely in the wake. They mind being thrown off or put in danger.

Buy-in treats persuasion as the fuel for changing direction. But you can’t talk people back into the safety of the wake. What brings them back is the steering: holding the orientation or slowing the turn. Sometimes changes have to be made suddenly, and the driver can signal the riders. Otherwise, it’s the driver’s actions, not words, that communicate with the riders. People won’t mind the speed if they can adjust to the turn in time, so ask them what they need to prepare for it. That question is often overlooked, and skipping it dumps people either into the lake or outside the wake. Time and again with clients, I’ve seen those as the two places where resistance shows up.

In practice, mutual orientation means communicating with stakeholders (anyone behind the boat) and, instead of only telling them where the boat is headed, asking what they need to keep holding on and prepare for a turn. Leaders need to make sure both the direction and the speed of the turn are mutual. The goal isn’t to slow down. It’s to steer the turns in a way that doesn’t toss people off or into unsafe places. Not because everyone has agreed, but because they’re all still in the water, facing forward, held by the same momentum.

What my research found

My research found that a relational container, in which both parties feel safe to contribute to the shared orientation, was paramount. Within the safety of that container, interpersonal chemistry emerged and powered mutual orientation. I identified six conditions that enabled chemistry to emerge and thrive, which I call the Six Gates of Chemistry: Legitimacy, Dignity, Containment, Agency, Attunement and Orientation.

Alignment emerged without being engineered. In session after session, participants found mutual orientation without explicitly discussing goals or values. The goals were understood simply by showing up to the sessions. Mutual orientation appeared as coordinated conversational rhythm, shared attention, and a distinct quality of conversation and inquiry.

Alignment amplified chemistry rather than initiating it. Chemistry often emerged before any explicit alignment took place. Attunement, dignity, legitimacy, agency and rhythm also affected how strong the chemistry became. Once established, chemistry was “sticky” enough to remain a positive force for forward momentum. Tension and challenge, consistency and humor also accelerated it.

What I believe this means for leaders

My study examined one-on-one coaching relationships, not organizations or restructurings, so it doesn’t establish that corporate change succeeds without buy-in. But seeing these gates in the research made me look back at the successful and unsuccessful leadership I’ve observed over decades in corporate leadership, athletic coaching and executive coaching. I’ve come to believe the same conditions apply to leaders and their teams. The recommendations below are my interpretation of the findings, grounded in that experience.

Start with the relational container. Can employees ask questions, give feedback and take the time they need to adjust to the loss that comes with each change? Are they allowed to be human beings who need to adjust emotionally, or are they expected to simply execute instructions? Do leaders know what each level of the organization is experiencing “behind the boat”?

Stop waiting for full alignment before acting. Don’t hold people hostage until they see what you see or believe what you believe. In my study, movement often preceded agreement, and I’ve seen the same with teams. That doesn’t give you permission to leave people behind; make sure they’re still “behind the boat” and feel safe enough to keep holding on. Leaders who wait for full consensus may be delaying unnecessarily. In my experience, creating the conditions for shared direction often matters more than securing explicit buy-in up front.

Listen for unspoken values and direction. In conversations with direct reports, peers and stakeholders, people signal what matters to them, and what concerns them, before they say it out loud. Leaders who develop sensitivity to those signals can respond to what’s actually motivating people, not just what’s being said. Resistance is often the first sign that people feel outside the wake. Listen to it, pause and reset mutual orientation.

Treat alignment as an ongoing practice, not a box to check before change begins. The pairs I studied didn’t achieve alignment once, like flipping a light switch. They moved in and out of it, and the coach maintained the relational container through dignity, legitimacy and attunement. In my experience, effective leaders do the same, just as a good boat driver does for the riders.

Use shared values as anchors during change and as a way to understand stakeholders’ experience. Values that are genuinely shared can hold teams together during change, but only when they are real, recognized, discussed and respected. They don’t anchor anything when they’re written on a wall or website but not lived out in everyday work.

A different picture of how change works

The conventional model of change leadership treats buy-in as a box to check. Based on my research and my work with leaders, I see buy-in as an ongoing relational practice that tends to how stakeholders, and the employees carrying out the change, actually feel. That practice focuses on building the chemistry that strengthens mutual orientation and helps change take hold.

Change begins in the quality of attunement, a willingness to inquire and the openness created when people sense they share something that matters. Once chemistry emerges, and the conditions that support it remain, change can accelerate.

For leaders exhausted from trying to secure buy-in and create engagement, my message is simple:

Stop asking, “How do I get them on board?”

Start asking, “How can I get my team to click?”

About the research

This article draws on my doctoral dissertation, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching (Kansas State University, 2026), a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coaching dyads. Data sources included recorded coaching sessions, transcripts and video elicitation interviews. The full dissertation is available through K-State Research Exchange and ProQuest.

About the author

Dr. Janice Perkins

Dr. Janice Perkins is an executive coach and leadership researcher who helps teams build chemistry that drives change. A member of 100 Coaches with Master-level status from the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, she trains coaches through Coach Training EDU, competed on the inaugural season of Top Coach and contributed to the 2024 book The Intersection of Leadership and Coaching.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.