Leading Change
Are You An Overly Optimistic Leader?
I often write about the importance of optimism when leading in turbulent times and when leading change. Researchers such as John Hopkins’ Kay Redfield Jamison, Stanford’s Robert Sutton, and Harvard’s John Kotter have all found that positive feelings such as hope and optimism are critical for rallying the troops and moving forward.
At the same time, optimism can be overdone – especially when optimism turns into overconfidence or turning a blind eye to problems and challenges.
Eric Klein recently blogged about this phenomenon, calling it “the problem with being positive.” He wrote about leaders who shut down conversation and shy away from conflict by overdoing an emphasis on the positive.
The balance of realism and optimism is critically important for change leaders. Leaders who squash any expressions of concern or who react negatively to problems run the risk of missing major issues that will ultimately impact performance. For this reason, some researchers have started to use the term “realistic optimism”. Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. writes that realistic optimism consists of two parts:
Slow Down to Speed Up
Last week I posted about how important it is for change leaders to build a sense of urgency and act with speed, while at the same time avoiding the dangers of overdrive. The delicate balance between urgency and overdrive has given rise to a phrase that I often use when teaching leaders how to lead and communicate change, “You’ve got to slow down in order to speed up.” (Watch a video clip of me talking about this here.)
Interestingly, there are several new books and articles on this topic that are hitting the market right now. In May 2010 Forum corporation released their new book, Strategic Speed. The book addresses these critical concerns for leaders:
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What role does speed, or lack thereof, play in the high failure rate of strategic initiatives?
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What are the barriers, or traps, to execution?
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Do faster companies financially out-perform slower companies?
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How can I engage people in accelerating our strategy?
Balancing Urgency and Overdrive
It is finally spring here in the Rocky Mountains. Back in the east, spring unfolds slowly. The forsythia blooms in February. You start to see crocus and daffodils in March. By April the fruit trees are flowering and by Mother’s Day, the dogwoods and azaleas are in full bloom.
Spring is very different at an altitude of 8700 feet in Colorado. Two weeks ago our aspens and lilacs barely had buds. Today everything is gloriously green and the lilacs are literally unfolding their flowers right before our eyes.
The difference in the two springs has me thinking about speed and urgency. The trees and flowers here know that they only have a few weeks to execute so they make the most of every minute.
Want Change? Get Specific!
While the number of books and articles about change can be overwhelming, there are some universal truths that tend to appear in most. The one I have been thinking about a lot lately is how important it is to be specific when we are attempting to change ourselves or influence others to change.
In his books, Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith uses the term “criteria” to get at the concept of being specific. For example, when coaching an executive who wanted to spend more time with his kids – Goldsmith pushed the executive to be specific. Exactly how much time with which kid? When? Committing to spending 4 one-on-one hours with each child allowed this executive to track his progress and truly change.
The authors of Influencer present a similar idea in their book – claiming that for change to succeed, we need to get specific about who needs to change which exact behaviors. They use the term “vital behaviors” to describe the concept and share scores of examples where change succeeded because the leader got specific.
Avoid Overdrive: Two New Articles about the Danger of Going Too Fast
In Myers-Briggs terms I am an EJ. In the DISC, I am an I/D. What this boils down to is that I get things done. I work fast. My personality style is often an asset because people can count on me to deliver. On the other hand, I know that my personality can also get in the way of my own effectiveness. I admit that I can be bossy. I sometimes plow ahead too quickly, neglect to get others opinions and ideas, and look past potential problems in the interest of quick wins and accomplishments.
I use the term “Overdrive” to describe this tendency. Overdrive is basically the overuse of the “get it done” style. Many business leaders I work with move into overdrive without even realizing it and recognizing its consequences.
It so happens that two premier business publications (HBR and the MIT Sloan Management Review) addressed the issue of overdrive this month, using different terms.
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.
