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.

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.

2.    Describe the current and desired cultures.

What aspects of the current culture do you want to keep?  What do you want to tweak or shift?  What needs to change entirely? Many efforts to change a culture fail because change is described too vaguely and is interpreted in many different ways.  Being specific and descriptive is imperative.

3.    Focus on a few key behaviors.

Because culture is an outcome of thoughts, feelings, and actions, the best way to change a culture is to focus in on a few key behaviors that, if changed, would significantly impact the overall culture. Again, be specific about who needs to do what differently. (see my post Want Change? Get Specific)

4.    Communicate.

To drive a culture change, you must communicate a compelling case for change, along with your vision, and clear expectations. And, you have to repeat yourself. A lot. If you are introducing a change, you’ve probably been working on this long before you unveil it to the people who are going to need to execute the day-to-day details. If it’s your initiative, your project, by the time you say “let’s go” you are thinking that everyone should be right there with you. They aren’t. They time to catch up.  (see my post on The Marathon Effect at Work)

5.    Lead by example.

Research consistently shows that culture is largely top-down.  It is imperative for the leader to not only talk about – but also demonstrate desired behaviors.

6.    Empower and equip employees.

Once you have engaged people, you need to ensure that they are empowered to take action. Empowerment as it is used here means giving people what they need in order to take action, including access to information, authority, and equipment, as well as the knowledge, skills, and ability to demonstrate the desired behaviors.

7.    Recognize progress.

Think about your organization’s reward structures—both the informal and the formal. Which behaviors are getting reinforced and rewarded? The new ones you want to see or the old behaviors you want to do away with? If the answer is “the old behaviors,” you most likely need to take involve the right people in revising expectations and reward structures. Remember the old adage: Only behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

8.    Maintain momentum.

Research shows that many culture change efforts fail because attention is only paid to the launch or kickoff.  All too often change loses momentum and becomes “flavor of day” to people on the front line. Be sure to identify a team who is responsible for maintaining momentum, refocusing energy, and revitalizing the effort when the initial attention starts to wane.

Culture change isn’t impossible and it doesn’t have to take forever — but to be successful it requires ongoing focus, energy and engagement.

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?

Attempting to change anything without intimately knowing the answers to the above is a recipe for disaster. Take, for example, leaders who try to “boost morale” with ridiculous actions that only serve to demonstrate their lack of a clue.  David Spark recently wrote a post about 10 tales of condescending morale boosting efforts.  The examples he shares are incredibly funny in the way that Dilbert is funny -  familiar and painful.

Contrast these awful examples with leaders who know how to connect with the emotions and reality of their people.  One of my favorite examples comes from Peter Bregman.  Bregman wrote about the CEO of a software company who skipped his usual morale-boosting  visionary holiday speech and instead authentically empathized with what his people were thinking and feeling after a very tough year. After the speech, more people came up to thank, appreciate, and congratulate him than after any speech he had given before.  (You can read Bregman’s article and the CEO’s speech here.)

Michael Abrashoff, past captain of the U.S. Navy’s USS Benfold put it best, saying,

Acting in accordance with this belief helped Abrashoff lead 311 sailors through one of the greatest turnaround stories of the modern military. Similarly, as a leader at any level, it is critical that you understand your organization from the point of view of the people on your front line.

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

- Lou Gerstner

For more great nuggets on leadership and leading change, watch video clips of the show:
– Watch Blair HERE .
- Watch Gerstner HERE .
– Watch Whitman HERE .
- Watch Levin HERE .
– Watch Mullen HERE .

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.

As, I reflected on my own little experiment, I realized that I was embodying some of the principles of change management.  I had delayed making the change for more than 2 years because I knew it would be a lot of effort. Researchers from the Boston Consulting Group, Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson wrote about the role of effort in change in their 2005 Harvard Business Review article, The Hard Side of Change Management. In fact, effort is one of the four elements of their DICE model (Duration * Integrity * Commitment * Effort).  As they describe it, the more extra effort the change requires from an already busy workforce, the less likely it is to succeed.

In my case, having a higher level of C  – commitment and a lower level of D – duration helped to overcome the pain of the additional E – effort of making the transition.  I knew that if I could spend concentrated time over the holidays, I could get through the learning curve faster than normal.  My commitment was higher than ever because more and more of my clients had already converted to Word 2007 or 2010 and I couldn’t use their computers when visiting a client location.  I got committed to the change, because I felt the pain of not changing.

In the end, I found the DICE model an excellent lens for helping me make my own change and one that I will share with clients who are trying to make change happen both personally and in their organizations.

For me, these three situations were powerful moments.  None of the leaders blamed the audience for their lack of understanding.  Each had the guts to share openly that they a) were surprised and b) recognized that they had to do a better job at communicating.

What helped each of these leaders was learning about a concept known as the Marathon Effect.

If you have ever run (or watched) a large marathon you know that at the start of the event the best runners are right on the starting line. Where are the first-timers? Way at the back! Think about one of the big races with thousands of runners—like the Marine Corp marathon in Washington, D.C. It can take about an hour for someone at the very back to even get up to the start line. By that time, the ones who were at the front are halfway through the race!

William Bridges, a renowned expert on organizational transition, recognized that a similar phenomenon occurs during organizational change.  If you are rolling out a new compensation system, reorganizing your company, or introducing a new product, you’ve probably been working on this long before you unveil it to the people who are going to need to execute the day-to-day details. If it’s your initiative, your project, by the time you say “let’s go” you are thinking that everyone should be right there with you on the starting line. They aren’t. They are way at the back and they need time to catch up.

Bridges coined the term “Marathon Effect” to describe the fact that change leaders and those involved in planning change are often out ahead of everyone else. In my work with organizations, I frequently find myself reminding clients of this fact. Since they are accountable for getting people committed, they can easily be frustrated when everyone doesn’t get it as fast as they want them to.

Former GE CEO Jack Welch reminds leaders that we have to be patient. He warns that, “The vision becomes boring to the person who came up with it.” It’s tempting to keep changing your message—making it flashier, making it new. Don’t. To get people on the same page, you can’t keep giving them new pages.  Focus instead on slowing down enough to get people caught up to where you are in terms of awareness, understanding, and support.  Then, you can all move forward together.

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.

Next, we showed slides that compared and contrasted all of the advertising and marketing this company had been doing. Without us having to say a word, the audience members realized that their old brand was in complete chaos. We ran more than 70 of these sessions, and every single time, this was a pivotal moment. You could watch people sit up and almost immediately become willing participants in the change process instead of prisoners in a training class.

As a change leader and communicator, ask yourself how you can help people feel a sense of urgency and get “it” at a gut level.

Riboldi’s description of Akido struck me as being a powerful way to visualize an approach that I talk about when advising leaders on how to deal with resistance to change.  The most common response to resistance is to attempt to overcome it – in other words to use power and strength to subdue the resister(s).  As professor Gary Yukl’s research shows though, using power tactics usually result in compliance without commitment, and – even worse – increased resistance.

Instead of overpowering or overcoming resistance, I urge leaders to first accept the emotions underlying the resistance and then actively engage with resisters to find collaborative solutions.

Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland, brilliantly demonstrated this approach when Greenpeace launched a letter-writing campaign against Timberland.  Greenpeace and their supporters claimed that Timberland was causing deforestation in Brazil by purchasing leather from inappropriate suppliers.  In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Swartz shares how he and his team responded to the claims and the 65,000 angry emails.  Rather than spending energy refuting the claims and/or attacking Greenpeace, Timberland communicated with emailers respectfully and transparently and expressed a sincere interest in engaging with Greenpeace to find a solution.  In the end, Greenpeace ended up praising Timberland for their leadership on this important issue.

According to Swartz, one lesson he learned from this experience was:

While you might not have to deal with angry activists in your work, if you are leading change at any level, you will encounter resistance which may come in the form of an attack.  My hope is that you will apply Swartz’s advice and not stand there with your arms folded and mind closed. You will seek out the legitimate question or concern that may be beneath the resistance.  You will engage with the resisters, cynics, and skeptics to collaborate on a solution. And you will succeed.

Links:

Read Swartz’s “How I Did It” article from HBR here.

Read Juan Riboldi’s article on Akido Coaching here.

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.

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:

Hurd goes on to say that:

My take on this is that effective leaders proactively look for facts, data, and opinions on what could go wrong.  They then take positive action – either personally or by empowering others – to overcome obstacles.  Their actions and words convey confidence and optimism, thereby positively impacting others’ emotions and commitment.

Check out the following resources for some good suggestions on being realistically optimistic:

• The Balance Needed to Lead Change HBR article by Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay, Kerry A. Bunker and Michael Wakefield
• The Problem with Being Positive, blog post by Eric Klein
• Just Enough Anxiety, book by Bob Rosen