Fortunately, there are ways to overcome inertia. One trick is to get people to take small steps rather than committing to a major change or approach all at once.  hen several people take a few small steps forward, momentum starts to build and it becomes easier and more natural to keep moving forward.

One of my favorite illustrations of this concepts comes from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Collins uses the metaphor of a flywheel as a metaphor for organizational change. Here is an edited excerpt of Collin’s description:

In Collin’s words, no one action is a miracle movement that leads to organizational change. Rather, like with the flywheel, momentum builds as a result of numerous, additive actions.

The flywheel  image came to mind last week when I had the opportunity to witness the power of successive small steps at work. I was honored to be asked to speak at a retreat being held at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.  One of the activities early in the day was a sitting volleyball competition. In honor of the Wounded Warriors who would be competing that week at the OTC, our group was told that we’d have the opportunity to play a version of volleyball that those who had lost legs would play in the games. We’d be sitting on the floor and moving like crabs to get to the ball. Well, I was dressed in my presenting clothes and thought, “I wont play, I’ll just watch.”  Several others in my group muttered the same thing.

Our instructor started the session by asking everyone – even the spectators – to sit on the court. So we all did. Next he gave some pointers and asked everyone – even the spectators – to count off into teams. So we all did.  He then asked each team to form a circle and just practice tossing the ball around – so we all did.

You see where this is going, right? Soon ALL of us – even those who swore we’d only be spectators – were playing and having a great time.

It struck me that often I can get too caught up in trying to motivate people through persuasion and conversation. While both are important techniques to have in our toolkits, another I will be sure to add is simply getting people moving by asking them to take small steps.

I’m certainly not the only person making this comparison.  Last week management consulting guru Alan Weiss wrote, “We are watching popular uprisings gain traction or fail largely based on whether those in power and the military are willing to turn their guns on their own people or refrain from doing so. In organizations, the ability to change for the best is often a question of whether senior people will listen and offer avenues for communication to do so, or whether they are insulated and aloof, and those with new and bold ideas get “whacked” by the status quo.”

Peter J Minich, MD, Ph.D, is author of Rethinking Power in Healthcare: What to do when Authority Fails and Patients Suffer.  In his online article Positive Power in Organizations, Minich writes: “Our organizations are filled with committed people with varied beliefs, strengths, and ideas; in other words, talent. These people also have the energy and thus power to support or sabotage leadership. Now is the time for leaders to rethink their own notions of power, and build new behaviors that help, rather than hinder their leadership.”

Giving up power is incredibly difficult for those who are used to holding it.  Yet fighting to maintain power and control will likely backfire as we move to a digital age where people have unlimited access to information and the ability to connect with others.  Are you ready to reframe your idea of power?  If you are a leader who is not embracing collaboration rather then control, you may find the world is about to leave you behind. For more on the revolution check out:

• Why It’s Different this Time, Fareed Zakaria’s Time magazine article about how youth and technology are driving a wave of change.
• Leadership in a Wiki World by Rod Collins.
• Gary Hamel’s Management Information Exchange (MIX)

As Peter Bregman writes in his book, Point B: A Short Guide to Leading Big Change, providing information is important in any change.  But, he writes,  “tell & sell” isn’t enough.  Real change happens when every person impacted is actively engaged in the process of change – to the point where they become owners  – not targets of the change.

Just last week, Melissa Dutmers of RiverFork Consulting posted 9 questions to ask when leading a change:

1. What do you think about this change?
2. How do you feel about this change?
3. What do you see your role as in this change?
4. What is your opinion about this change?
5. What is your experience with this type of change?
6. What are you working on and how will you be impacted by this change?
7. What are your ideas about this change?
8. Would you change anything about this change?
9. Why do you think this change is needed (or not)?

Her readers added their own suggestions, including:

• What are you already doing in your day to day work that supports the change?
• What areas do you feel will be a challenge for you to adjust?
• How can I support you?
• What’s most important to you about the change?
• How will this proposed change be different from past changes in this organization?

Great advice from people who know that the job of a change leader is to educate, engage, and empower others.

For this particular transformation effort, our client recognized that mid- and frontline managers would play a pivotal roll in communicating the details of the change to employees. Therefore, the client hired my colleagues and I to facilitate over forty 4-hour workshops for managers.  The response to the workshops was overwhelmingly positive – which surprised a lot of people because the change the organization is introducing is highly sensitive and counter to the way things have been done in this organization for more than 30 years.

After running 19 workshops myself, I reflected on what made the sessions work well.  Here are my thoughts:

Conduct Conversations – Not Training

While the manager sessions were called “training” and were accompanied by workbooks and slides, the experience was much more of a facilitated dialogue than a one-way download of information.  

Course evaluation feedback indicated that managers were pleasantly surprised at the level of open, honest conversation that took place in the sessions. I believe this point is essential for future programs of this nature.

Lesson Learned: When is comes to gaining support for a change, conversation matters more than content.

Make Space for Emotions

While it was important for managers to learn the content of the course, in every case it became apparent that the managers themselves needed an opportunity to vent, express their concerns, and name the emotions that they and their people were experiencing.  

We started the sessions by introducing the change cycle and the emotions that typically accompany a change (shock & denial, anger, uncertainty & anxiety, understanding, and ultimately acceptance).  We drew the performance dip that typically happens when people move into anger, uncertainty and anxiety and discussed the fact that the dip is not avoidable.  Rather than pretending there are not emotional reactions to change, we encouraged managers to accept and acknowledge emotions.  

I knew this model would be helpful to managers in communicating with their employees.  What surprised me was how helpful it ended up being for them.  In every single session, managers would speak up and say, “Okay, I realize I am in the dip, but here is my concern . . .”  By having the model posted, we gave managers permission and space to name and work through their own emotions.   

Lessons Learned:
1.    Allow and encourage emotions to enter the conversation early on.
2.    Along with content and key messages, provide models or frameworks to help managers understand the emotions they and others are experiencing as a result of the change.  

Don’t Overcome Resistance – Explore It

The final point I want to address here deals with resistance. Overcoming resistance is the most searched term in the field of change management. All too often change leaders looks to “nip resistance in the bud.”  What I have learned over the years is that the best way to deal with resistance is to get it out in the open and to talk about the reasons for resistance.  

In these workshops, my colleagues and I stopped delivering content about 30 minutes into the session and asked what questions people had.  Usually we got one or two mild questions.  We then asked people to share what rumors and concerns they were hearing.  Managers started to open up and discuss the harder aspects of the change.  Finally we asked managers to “channel their inner skeptics” and ask everything they knew their most skeptical employees would ask.  In some cases the managers would say, “Really . . .are you sure?”  Often one would test the waters and when we listened, acknowledged and openly discussed the concern the floodgates would open and the questions would flow.  

This point is counter-intuitive but essential. When communicating a change, our natural tendency to shut down and overcome resistance forces concerns underground.  Once suppressed, resistance grows stronger and becomes harder to resolve.  It is important for change leaders and communicators to welcome, acknowledge and explore resistance in order for it to dissipate.

Lessons Learned:
1.    Make it okay for managers to ask skeptical, cynical questions.  
2.    Dialogue (don’t debate) about the change.

The only way to close the change gap is through communication.  Specifically, my advice for leaders is:

1.    Expect and anticipate a cynical interpretation.

This piece of advice is somewhat counter-intuitive. When we are about to roll out a new approach or initiative, most of us look for all of the reasons why people will love the idea. In reality, there will always be a significant portion of the population who is cynical and skeptical.  Sometimes this is because of their personality traits.  More often, cynicism is a result of having been “burned before” by changes that ended up hurting rather than helping.

When we ignore the inevitable cynicism and communicate only the positive aspects of a change, we inadvertently come across as “spin doctors”.  We also tend to skip over the complex issues we’ve probably struggled with.  The result is that our ideas seem like another fad of the week.

To address the skepticism, first and foremost, change leaders need to:

2.    Take the time and care to communicate the reasons for a change.

While this second piece of advice sounds obvious, it is usually not done well. Change leaders tend to jump to implementation and skip the explanation.  

One good technique is to allocate equal time and space to describing and reinforcing the “why’s” along with the “what’s” of a change.  In other words, a 2-hour training about a change should devote 1 hour to the reasons for the change and 1 hour to the details of implementation.  A reinforcement poster that reminds people about a new rule should also include explicit text about the ultimate reason for the rule, or the desired outcome.

The final piece of advice I’d like to address here for closing the change gap is to:

3.    Ask people about their reactions to the change.

All too often, change leaders get caught up in being cheerleaders for an idea or initiative.  We look for signs that people are excited and onboard and we tend to run right over concerns and questions. The only way to close the change gap fully is to understand how people perceive and feel about the change.  This requires that we stop and ask explicit questions such as:

•    What concerns do you have?
•    What doesn’t feel right about this?
•    Is there anything about this that will hard to do?  

While extremely counter-intuitive, these questions help us gauge how other people are reacting to the change and provide us an invaluable opportunity to share and reinforce the reasons for the change. 

Summary

I started this series with two contrasting interpretations about the same idea – a 10/5 rule. I hope that this series of posts has illustrated the fact that there will always be a Change Gap and that the only way to close the gap is deliberate and careful attention to two-way communication.

Earlier this week, I was reading book about energy in the workplace when I came across this paragraph:

“A local hospital recently undermined its staff’s mutual connections by implementing what is called the ‘5-feet 10-feet rule.’ . . . One unintended consequence of this rule is likely to be that people will regard the smiles they receive as mandatory and therefore false.”

Wait a minute!  Does this mean the very idea I was just lauding is actually backfiring?  Does that mean it’s a great example or a terrible idea?

In reality, I think this is a beautiful illustration of a phenomenon I call the change gap.  The change gap is the term I use to describe the vast divide in understanding that occurs between the people who come up with an idea and the people who are ultimately affected by that same idea.

In the case of the 10/5 rule, chances are that some people (those working on changing the hospital’s cultures) saw the concept as being a helpful vital behavior – one that would encourage employees to connect, relate to one another, and eventually build relationships.  Other people in the organization may have first learned about this rule as being “yet another mandate” from the top of the organizations. It’s no surprise that some people may interpret the mandate through a cynical lens and feel that it requires them to “be fake just to keep management happy.”  

This presents an important lesson about change: there is always a change gap. The only way to close the gap is to communicate.

In Part 3 of this series, I’ll explore techniques for closing the change gap.

Leaders at the hospital responded by engaging employees in all departments and all levels of people in a “friendliness campaign.” They put into place a “10/5 rule” which encouraged every employee to look up and make eye contact when they got within 10 feet of another person and to say “hello” or “what’s up” or “hey” when they got within 5 feet of another person.  The other essential element of this rule was that employees were encouraged to hold one another accountable for following it.  In other words, if someone were to brush by you in the hall without the eye contact or greeting, you might (smile) and say, “Hey .  . . 10/5 rule!”

My friend told me that the 10/5 rule has become deeply embedded in his hospital’s culture. He acknowledged that it can sometimes be annoying to be “called on it” when he forgets to say hello, but that overall the rule has helped people to create a friendlier environment.

To me, the 10/5 rule illustrates a number of important points about change and influence.  

First of all, the hospital utilized a key principal from the authors of the book, Influencer.  The Influencer authors (there are five of them so I won’t list them here) found that in successful change efforts, leaders identify vital behaviors. Vital behaviors are the few key actions that lead to other changes. In this example, the vital behavior was looking up and acknowledging one another. While this one action didn’t change the culture, it did create a cascade of other changes.   

Second, the 10/5 rule is an example of a principal we now call “stickiness.”  Author Malcolm Gladwell used the term sticky in his book The Tipping Point.  Researchers (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath then picked up on the term in the title of their book, Made to Stick.  The Heath brothers argue that an idea needs to be “sticky” enough for people to first understand it and then communicate it to others in order to spread. The 10/5 rule is sticky because it is simple and concrete.  

So, the 10/5 rule appears to be a great example of a successful change effort.

But wait; there is a twist to this story!  Come back tomorrow for Part 2.

Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level, recently wrote about the lessons we can learn from Subway franchise owner Stuart Frankel – the creator of the Five Dollar Foot Long.  While the concept has been a huge success for Subway, getting the company to accept and implement the idea wasn’t easy for Frankel.

According to Eblin, lessons we can learn from Frankel include:

1. Run some small experiments off the radar screen.
2. Collect compelling data.
3. Recruit some early champions.
4. Show them, don’t just tell them.
5. Stick with it.

Read Scott Eblin’s post: Five Change Leadership Lessons from the Five Dollar Foot Long.

For more on the topic, also check out Robert Rosen’s new book, The Catalyst.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In addition to the fun factor, I think this video illustrates another powerful point.  People are curious.  In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath demonstrate how powerful it can be to start a talk or a class by using a question or a mystery:

Today’s takeaway:  Are you leveraging fun and curiosity to interest people in your change effort?

As Myron Radio and I discuss in our book, Change at the Core, most organizational change ultimately comes down to changes in people’s behavior. Yet this aspect often proves to be the most mystifying part of any change. We know that command and control results in short-term compliance, if it works at all. Memos certainly don’t work. Neither does begging, pleading, or other forms of incentives.

Fortunately, there is great research available from Joseph Grenny and his Influencer co-authors. They found that successful influencers utilize at least four sources of influence when getting people to change their behavior. Two powerful sources are peer pressure (aka social motivation) and practice. Others include personal motivation, social ability (mutual accountability) and structural motivation (rewards).

For a fun introduction to the concepts from Influencer, check out the video below.