Learning to Change
Leading your team into the future
Change or die. You’ve heard it, but how do you do it? More pointedly, how do you get others to do it, especially when it involves a group of high-powered and strong-willed executives, each of whom seems have reasons for not getting on board with the changes you are proposing? The image of a stubborn mule comes to mind; the harder you pull, the more the mule resists. You think you’re the boss but the mule thinks otherwise.
Obviously, if you or others on your team don’t understand why change is necessary, you won’t go far. The old “WIFM” (What’s In it For Me) reminder to explain the need for change to people and why it could be beneficial to them remains as useful as ever. But there’s more to it than that or we would see every company racing to the top of the leaderboard of innovation when instead we see a lot of small variations around the mean. Could every organization benefit from doing things better? You bet. Would greater organizational success produce worthwhile benefits for those at the top? Sure. Clearly, if change was a strictly rational proposition, there would be a lot more of it happening than there is.
The challenges to change are both rational and irrational and fall into two buckets: know why and know how. The why provides the motivation and the how provides the means. Each presents its own difficulties although they are interconnected.
Gaining agreement about why a specific change is important requires a minor miracle to happen. Team members must set aside their personal interests and adopt a common focus which is unlikely to benefit all members of the team equally. They must cease doing what they are currently doing in order to take on something new, even though what they are doing may matter more to them than the change being proposed. They must overcome their fear that the change will disrupt the familiar only to make things worse instead of better. And, if they are suffering from change fatigue, recent experiences of change failure, or resistance from their people who don’t want to charge up the change hill again, they may prefer to run in the other direction rather than get on the bus with you.
As good corporate citizens who want to remain in your good graces, the only appropriate response when invited to join you in bringing about another change is yes. Those who are more courageous will push back, citing one or more of the factors I just mentioned. As their leader, you are thinking, “We need to talk this through. Once they have a chance to express their concerns and we address them together, they will come around and we can get going. They just need to understand the importance of this change and they will get on board, as they always do. If there are a few roadblocks, we’ll figure out what it will take to remove them and then we can get started.”
They are wondering, “Is this change really necessary? Of course I want to help but how can I do this and everything else I have going on? Is now really the best time? I’m already short on the resources I need to accomplish my goals for the year. Is there anything I can say that would get the boss to listen to my concerns and call this off or delay the start? If not, what am I going to have to give up to make time for this and what are the consequences going to be? How will I explain this to my people?”
In other words, as the leader you are in an “all systems go” mindset while your followers are less than enthusiastic, at least initially. The same applies to any initiative suggested by other members of the team, by the way. Executive teams are especially fond (not) of new programs or extra requirements brought forward by HR, IT, or Finance. As a member of an executive team, I observed that we suffered from short-term memory loss as a group. Each week, new proposals for change would come forward and by then, we had forgotten what we agreed to do the week before. The same resources were being tasked to take on more and more, without rationalizing their capacity. Working with the top team of a client, I asked for a list of corporate initiatives; when we got to about fifty, the exercise was dropped and nothing was done because they were all deemed to be important by the boss. Just get them done.
Thus, you may believe you have created buy-in when in fact you have only engineered compliance. Half-hearted efforts at change typically don’t go well. The real know why isn’t there, except in the sense that there is general agreement that the changes would be beneficial if they were possible and successful. Yet the doubt that successful change can happen given the current circumstances persists, eating into the resolve to jump over hurdles and move mountains that changes often require.
The most important thing you can do to build authentic know why is to ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. Do we really have the resources we need to make this change happen? Who do we think will lead this and do they have the available capacity? What are the roadblocks we are going to encounter and how will we deal with them? What might we have to stop or delay to make space for this? How will we communicate the importance of this to our people given what else we have said? You also need to be open to the possibility that now isn’t the right time to undertake the change. You may need to back up, look at the big picture, and set a strategic change agenda: what absolutely must happen in order to achieve the performance and market position you need and what, realistically, will it take to get there?
Know how is equally challenging. Especially in the case of changes that have never been done, or those that have always been difficult, there is reason to be deliberate in assembling the team, resources, action plan and timeline that will give you the best shot at success. While you think you do this, too often you delegate and trust that others will manage the details. More often than you might imagine, this important work is skipped or performed poorly. When later, results are not forthcoming, the explanations you hear will almost never include bad planning from the start.
Given the rapid pace of change in our world, leadership teams are being asked to do many things they don’t know how to do. If you expect that the knowledge needed will appear as the work gets underway, don’t be surprised if you encounter delays or failures. Learning is an extremely important part of work at the top these days and learning how to learn is the topic for an upcoming post.