Why should employees and investors support you?
What is the purpose of this article?
This article enables a discussion about to maintain, or gain, the support of your employees and investors.
The audience for this article includes: controlling shareholders, the board of directors, and C-Suite.
This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.
You can download a PDF of this article from: https://koorandassociates.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/why-should-employees-and-investors-support-you.pdf
What are the critical learnings in this article?
- The core reason for support is that people understand “what’s in it for them”.
- Support is emotional.
- Support has become much harder to get in today’s world.
#1 What is the core reason employees and investors will support you?
- They understand “what’s in it for me” and they want that. Negative reasons for support (e.g. do this or you will be fired) create limited support.
- Support is emotional and requires an emotional connection.
- Lack of support or active resistance is also emotional.
#2 What are the pre-requisites for getting support?
- Employees and investors must understand and trust what you’re saying.
- Trust must be earned. It starts with understanding your audience by listening to them. You need to understand, and demonstrate that you understand, their problem, needs, values & morals, and emotions.
- People need to perceive that you understand the world from their perspective.
- They need to trust the facts that you are sharing.
- Understanding requires that you use words and concepts which the audience understands.
- Often people expect that their values, morals, and ethics are the same as yours. And that they and you have a common purpose.
#3 What destroys support or prevents support?
- Your audience does not understand the words and concepts you are using.
- They don’t believe your facts.
- They think you are misleading, deceiving, or lying to them.
- They think you neither understand nor care about them.
- They perceive that you are not listening to them.
- You are not providing value to them or helping them understand “what’s in in for them”.
#4 What are your challenges in getting support?
- Society does not trust its leaders and institutions. 1
- People don’t agree on what the facts are. The world is swamped with misinformation and lies. Groups of people passionately believe that they know the facts and that others are wrong.
- People have a broad range of values, morals, and ethics.
- We live in a world where massive changes happen more often. The natural reaction to change is resistance.
- It can be very hard to explain to people why they should support having their livelihoods destroyed e.g. jobs disappearing due to offshoring.
What are your next steps?
- Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
- Prepare your plan, which addresses the points in #1 to #4 above.
Footnotes
1 “Society does not trust its leaders and institutions” Koor and Associates website
What further reading should you do?
“Managing the people aspects of supervisory change” An article I wrote for the Toronto Centre which trains financial services regulators around the worl.
Koor and Associates 