Leading Change
To Lead Change, Communicate With People Not To Them
I recently had a prospective client ask me how I would create a communication plan that would convince people to support a change. My response was that any communication plan should focus on communicating with people, not to them.
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:
Communicating Change Case Study: Part 2
Earlier this week I posted about a successful workshop I and several colleagues ran for 800 managers as part of a major transition. My previous post was about senior leader involvement. Today, I will address the topic of training.
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:
Communicating Change Case Study: Part 1
I disappeared from this blog for most of the month of January. No, I wasn’t on vacation. I was working with several colleagues on a large change communication project. Our client is in the middle of transforming their compensation structure. Our job was to lead 800 managers (20 at a time) through a 4-hour workshop. The workshop covered the purpose for the transition and the specifics of how the new compensation program would work. The overall objective of the workshop was to equip managers with information that they would need to communicate the change to their employees. Of course, before that could happen, the managers themselves needed to understand, accept and support the change personally.
Because the response to our workshops was overwhelmingly positive, I decided to take time to reflect on what worked. Over the next few posts, I’ll explore what we learned from this rollout and the lessons that it illustrates for all change communicators.
Topic #1: Senior Leader Support
For this organization, the rollout of the new compensation system has been a multi-year process. The internal HR/Comp/OD team worked closely with each division’s top leader and his/her direct reports on every aspect of the transition. This was not simply a process of getting surface-level “buy-in.” The division leaders personally made critical decisions at each point of the transition.
The involvement of the senior leaders ended up being incredibly powerful when it came time to introduce the new system to managers and employees. We ran most of the workshops with managers in intact teams. Each team heard from their division’s most senior leader at the start (and sometimes also the end) of the class. The next-level leaders who had been involved in the decision-making participated in the sessions along with managers who were hearing the details for the first time.
In every session that we ran, it quickly became evident that the involvement of senior leaders at every stage (decision making, planning, and communication) was the most powerful factor in getting front-line and mid-level manager support for the change. You could visibly see resistance levels being reduced at three points in the workshop:
Video: Leading Change? Make it Fun!
Last month I posted a video about making behavior change fun. Today I learned that Volkswagen has another in the series.
Are you leveraging fun and curiosity to interest people in your change effort?
A Change Case Study: Part 3
In previous posts in this series, I explored a phenomenon I call the Change Gap. The Change Gap illustrates the divide that is always present when one leader or group implements a change that affects others.
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.
A Change Case Study: Part 2
In yesterday’s post I wrote about a technique that one hospital used to help shift their culture. The technique was called the 10/5 rule and it encouraged employees to make eye contact with one another when approaching within 10 feet and say hello at 5 feet. I wrote about what made this an effective approach and what we could learn from this successful example.
A Change Case Study: Part 1
A few weeks ago a friend of mine told that his hospital had implemented a great idea that really seemed to be working. Curious, I asked for the details. It turns out that this particular hospital had become siloed. Departments weren’t working together and employees in different departments rarely spoke to one another. In this particular case, patients and their family members were even picking up on the issue. Across the board, people reported feeling that the vibe in the hospital was cold and unfriendly.
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.
Leading Change When You Are Not in Charge
You have a great idea for increasing sales, improving service, or saving your company money. But you aren’t the boss and others aren’t interested in your idea. What can you do?
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:
- Run some small experiments off the radar screen.
- Collect compelling data.
- Recruit some early champions.
- Show them, don’t just tell them.
- 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.
A Tool for Leading Change: Comfort Zone
Leadership expert Steve Arneson shares a simple and effective way to help change leaders understand the discomfort that often accompanies change in his Examiner.com blog post:
Leading change: Start by acknowledging the comfort zone
The Power of Social Norms
When attempting to lead change that involves changes in people’s behavior, we often forget the power of social norms, habits, and systems that reinforce the old way of doing things.
My colleague, Burgess Levin, recently illustrated this phenomenon when he spoke at the HumanR/PSC Federal Contracting Conference. He talked about a study in which researchers invited subjects to walk across a freshly plowed field. When the researchers plowed the field between subjects, they found that people crossed the field in a variety of ways. But something interesting happened when the researchers stopped plowing. The first subject created a trail as he crossed the field. The next subject chose to walk in the footsteps of the first person. After that, most subjects chose to follow the path that had been worn into the dirt.
