If you have tried to get  a group of people to get moving on something, then you know that inertia often wins over action. The problem is compounded when one or more people resist what you’d like them to do.

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:

Leaders taking the helm of a team, department, division, or company often recognize that the organization’s existing culture may hinder successful strategy execution. Culture is often defined as the beliefs, values, norms and attitudes that form a group’s patterns of thought and action. Put another way, culture can be thought of as “unwritten rules about the way things are done around here.” Ultimately, changing a culture requires changing the ways that people feel, think, and act – which is a significant undertaking.

In my own work and research, I have identified eight best practices for culture change:

1.    Engage people in the process.

People commit to what they help create. The most successful changes happen when leaders actively engage people at all levels in all phases of the process and when there is a constant feedback loop between people on the front line and the leadership team.  Rather than hinting at the culture you want to see – be explicit about what changes are needed and collaborate with your people to implement the next seven practices.

As I work with leaders on change projects and strategy execution I always make it a point to talk with the people on the front lines of the organization.  Whether I am conducting one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or larger input meetings one theme emerges in company after company: “Our leadership makes decisions without understanding what we really do and how those decisions impact us.”

Hundreds of others have said it, but apparently the point bears repeating:  If you want your people to accept and support change, you must first show that you understand the organization from their perspective.

When we try to motivate others or mobilize energy for a change, the most important element is being able to connect with people.  An authentic connection has a lot of ingredients, including understanding:

• What matters to this person;
• What is this person’s reality;
• What is this person trying to accomplish at work;
• What is getting in the way?

On Jan. 2, Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN was dedicated to the topic of “How to Lead.”  Zakaria’s guests included Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Former Governor Christie Whitman, and Yale University President Richard Levin among others.  While the program was about leadership, not change per se, I was struck by how much of the interviewees focused on how to lead change.  In fact, Lou Gerstner (form CEO of both IBM and RJR Nabisco) said, “Leadership in my opinion, is all about change.”

Repeatedly, the leaders being interviewed stressed the importance of communicating a sense of urgency, setting a clear direction/vision, aligning processes with the direction, and empowering people.

Here are a few more sample quotes:

- Tony Blair

Because I work in the arena of leading and communicating change, people often assume that I love change.  Here’s the truth: I don’t!  Like most people, I try to avoid change – especially when the change disrupts my routine, requires a lot of effort, or has the potential to cause me pain or loss.  And, like most people, I really only change when I want to, not when someone else tells me to.

The reality of change hit home for me over the holidays.  In the quieter time between Dec. 24th and Jan. 3rd I finally made a change I had put off for a long time.  I switched from Window XP to Windows 7 and from Office 2003 to Office 2010.  Not a big deal, right?  Wrong!  I hated it!  I couldn’t figure out how to do the most basic functions anymore.  I struggled for days to access old Outlook emails and I still can’t figure out how to get Word to show the screens I want it to.  I almost gave up and went back to my old software and operating system.

I’ve been busy this fall working on several initiatives for a variety of clients.  While the nature of the projects varies, three recent projects have involved sessions where we brought together the leaders who were working on a change with the people who were impacted by the change.  This in itself is not that unusual.  What is unusual is that in three successive weeks, three different leaders in three different industries all had the same epiphany.  After spending a day in working session with the people on the front line, all three leaders realized that while they thought they had been doing a good job communicating, their people did not share their own level of awareness and understanding.  Here’s what the three leaders said:

A few years ago, we worked with a technology company on the rollout of its new brand. We’d been asked to develop a training class that explained the new brand position. The changes that we were about to introduce would impact the work of every person in the company. There were new guidelines about how to talk to customers, new rules about how to use the logo and brand icons, and a new color palette for use in everything from external marketing to internal documents.

Any of you who have worked with high-tech companies know that the best way to kill an idea is that say that, “corporate says we have to do it this way.” How in the world could we get 7,000 “techies” to not only comply with the brand guidelines, but to want to? We knew that we needed every person to understand at a gut level why brand consistency, and therefore guidelines, were needed. So we started our program with a visual tour of some great brands—Apple, Starbucks, Ann Taylor, and Disney. We got people interacting and talking about why each brand was so recognizable. Time and time again, the audience saw that deliberate, consistent use of fonts, colors, and shapes helped to create a strong brand.

Several years ago a good friend of mine sent me an article about using the art of Akido in coaching.  The author of the article,  Juan Riboldi, is an Akido teacher and founder of DecisionWise.  According to Riboldi:

In their recent book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath explored the reasons for why behavior change can be so difficult. One of their hypotheses was that behavior change requires self-control and that self-control is itself, an exhaustible resource.

Check out this video to learn more:

For leaders, the critical point to absorb is that piling on too many changes at once can backfire. As the Heath’s say, “Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.” To lead change successfully, we need to pay attention to how many changes we are asking people to make simultaneously and be on the lookout for burnout and overload. Help your people focus on what is most important now. Once one behavior becomes ingrained and automatic, you can move on to the next.

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: