Every Decision Needs Promoting

The most common failure mode for a good decision is not opposition. It is silence. 

Why does a good decision made in a leadership team sometimes never happen? Why would it quietly disappear when no argument was ever made against it? 

Often this points to a buy-in problem, but not in the usual sense. The people in the room agreed, so the real difficulty is not the decision itself but what happens once everyone leaves the room. A decision of any consequence has to travel, down through the teams who will execute it, laterally across the functions whose work it touches and upward to the leaders whose support or resources it depends on. That travel does not happen by itself. Someone has to promote the idea, talk it up across many conversations, reframe it as it meets different audiences and defend it where it gets challenged. Without that work, even a sound decision loses momentum, and the effort behind it never finds its legs. 

Promoting, the work that carries a decision 

The TMS Team Management Profile (TMP) names this work directly. It identifies eight Types of Work that every high-performing team needs to get done, and one of them is Promoting, the work of taking an idea out of the room and into the system, talking it up, building interest and championing it across the network until it takes hold. 

Promoting calls for energy and persuasion, a comfort in networks and a willingness to champion a concept publicly and repeatedly. Some people are naturally drawn to this kind of work, and in the TMP they lean into the role preference of Explorer-Promoter, often the ones who will not let a good idea quietly disappear. But the work matters more than the label. Whether or not anyone on the team holds that preference, every consequential decision needs the Promoting work done by someone willing to carry it. 

Leadership, extraversion and idea champions 

TMP norm data offers an important nuance here. Leaders tend to show a stronger preference for Extraversion than the broader workforce (TMS Standardisation Norms 2025), a pattern consistent with longstanding research on personality and leadership, as well as more recent work on how voice and championing operate in modern organisations [1]. But Promoting draws on more than outward energy. At its heart it is the work of extroverting the why, taking the bigger picture behind a decision and carrying it outward with enough conviction to build genuine enthusiasm. Extraversion supplies the voltage, and Promoting is what aims that energy at the idea itself. 

This is why a leadership team can be confidently extraverted, full of strong stakeholder skills, and still watch good decisions quietly stall. Outward energy on its own is not Promoting. If no one is actively carrying the why of a particular decision into the corridors, the one-on-ones and the upward conversations where commitment is won, that decision loses momentum no matter how capable the room. 

The shift that changes everything is awareness. A team that recognises Promoting is not its natural strength can make sure the work still happens rather than discovering too late that it never did, because once the gap is seen it can be planned for. 

Ideas have to be embraced

The principle the TMP makes operational is a simple one. Ideas have to be embraced, discussed and promoted with energy, because that is the mechanism by which a decision travels. A memo or a slide deck can record a decision, but artefacts alone rarely carry one. Momentum moves through people and through conversation. 

This is reinforced in McKinsey’s transformation research, which reaches the same conclusion from a different angle. What separates the transformations that take hold from those that stall is rarely the quality of the strategy. It is the depth and persistence of internal championing across the organisation’s informal networks, renewed in the teams who execute, the functions whose support is needed and the leaders whose backing has to be won again and again [2]. Put in TMP terms, this is sustained Promoting work, someone, somewhere in the system, keeping the idea alive in conversation every day. 

The leader does not have to do all the Promoting 

A common trap, once leaders grasp how much Promoting matters, is to assume they have to do it themselves, when in fact they may not. A leader may not necessarily have Promoting among their own preferred Types of Work, and forcing it can produce unconvincing championing while pulling their energy away from where it is best spent. 

Once the need is recognised, the choices open up. A leader can stretch into the Promoting work themselves for a time. They can hand it to someone with a natural energy for it, the person most drawn to the Explorer-Promoter role preference, who will relish carrying the idea outward. Or they can make it a shared effort, with the team shaping a common message and each person promoting it through their own part of the organisation. Coordinating that effort is its own distinct discipline, what TMS calls Linking, making sure the right work reaches the right people and that the message is pitched to how each audience prefers to receive it, because the way you promote to one group rarely lands the same way with another. 

Stretching into less preferred work is healthy in measured doses. TMS research points to spending around two-thirds of your time in your areas of preference and no more than about a third stretching beyond them. That balance is less about performance than about energy, working too far outside your preferences for too long is draining, so Promoting work that does not come naturally is best done in deliberate bursts rather than carried indefinitely by someone it exhausts. 

When a team has little natural pull toward Promoting, the answer is not to hope someone steps up. It is to build the work into the plan, deliberately, so it does not get forgotten. The questions worth asking early are simple ones. What does promoting this decision actually need to look like, and who is best placed to carry it? In a team without natural Promoting energy the carrying will be more deliberate and more paced, and that is fine. The value of the TMP here is that it makes the gap visible and the task specific, so a team can decide, with open eyes, how its decisions will travel. 

The capability worth building 

Decisions do not fail at buy-in because the room was unconvinced. They fail because the room was the only place the decision was ever discussed. The capability worth building is a simple recognition, that an idea is only as durable as the energy invested in carrying it into the network around it. 

Promoting is the work that provides that energy, and it is work any team can plan for. The TMP makes it practical. Its model of the eight Types of Work breaks a team’s work into its parts, so a leader can see plainly whether the Promoting will happen on its own or needs to be built into the plan. 

Find out more about TMP

The Team Management Profile is the foundational TMS instrument and the most useful starting point for the work described here. It maps the work preferences across a leadership team, shows where Promoting sits among them, strongly represented or barely present, and gives leaders a shared language for the work of carrying decisions through the organisation. Talk to TMS about running a TMP workshop with your leadership team, or about working with a certified TMS practitioner. It is the natural place to start building the capability this article describes. 

References

[1] Grant, A. (2023). Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Viking, October 2023. Drawing on Grant’s broader body of work on personality, voice and championing in modern organisations.

[2] McKinsey & Company. Transformation research stream on the role of informal networks and internal championing in change success (ongoing; recent insights 2023-2024). https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights

TMS Standardisation Norms (2023, with 2025 update). Team Management Systems.

Margerison, C. and McCann, D. (1990, revised editions). The Team Management Profile and the Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel. Team Management Systems.