When it comes to implementing change, the experience for many businesses is that it is an unmitigated disaster and when the dust settles, rarely does any business realise the returns they had expected and hoped for before undertaking the change. This is hard to get your head around but the evidence is clear; it is not the actual change that matters but the experience that people have when the change is taking place that determines if the change will be successful or not. In short, the experience of change is more important than the change itself. In this sense, it is folly to hope that an abundance of features will drive positive change when it is, in fact, an absence of resistance that best predicts success.
There’s a great cartoon where in the first frame a leader asks, ‘Who wants change?’ Here, the entire workforce has their hands enthusiastically raised. In the next frame, the same leader asks, ‘Who wants to change?’ As you can expect, in this frame everyone lowers their hands and looks sheepish. In the third frame, the leader asks, ‘Who wants to lead the change?’ In this frame, there isn’t a soul to be seen, everyone having made a mad-dash for the exits. The same is true in our businesses; most people actively side-step the management of change.
But today, change is ‘business as usual’ and whether it’s the introduction of a new process, the adoption of a new piece of software, a change in organisational structure or a system-wide change, most leaders feel uneasy by the challenge in front of them. It can’t help, of course, that in a recent global study of leaders, only 15% of them were found to be any good at leading change! That said, I am the first to admit that there isn’t a silver bullet or a one size fits-all for implementing change. What there is, however, are a number of validated techniques that do increase the likelihood that you can successfully manage change and the first step is to understand what drives successful change.
A positive experience comes down to how much engagement people have during the change process, better described as the ‘transition’. This level of engagement is much more important than the quality of the idea or the merit of the change. Get this engagement with your staff right and people will feel empowered and enabled to positively embark on the change journey.
To create a positive experience and drive high levels of staff engagement in the change process, we ask leaders to imagine the workforce experiencing the following:
These may sound trite but if your staff feel this way during a change process, you are almost guaranteeing success because you are ensuring that people’s experience of the change process is positive – and that’s what matters. Feeling that you have a purpose, that you belong, that you are learning and growing, that you matter, these are critical drivers of engagement and the more occasions in which people feel these things, the more likely they are to be engaged and get on-board and commit to change.
If these bullet-points above, represent how we want people to feel during change, we can design change programs that allow the workforce to experience these – this sets us up for success.
In 1978, Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, found that individuals were significantly more likely to comply with a request when a reason was given for the request. With this in mind, when we are asked to help implement change, we typically, press pause on the process and recommend to leaders, that before they embark on any change, they answer the following questions – a failure to do so means the businesses would be initiating change well-before it is ready to do so.
15 questions – a starting point for change
Just because you can answer all these questions doesn’t mean it is clear sailing ahead. Change, successful change, requires leaders to have tremendous resilience and agility at a time when most people do not want to deal with more change – generating engagement and commitment to change in such an environment is bloody hard!
When all’s said and done, it’s not that a proposed change lacks merit or a lack effort by the business that leads to poor returns on most change initiatives, but rather that people have not bought-into the change process. When leaders tell me about a change they want to implement, I typically say, ‘That sounds like a good idea’ and typically, it is. Then I add that being a good idea doesn’t matter much in terms of whether the change is going to be successful or not. This is a challenge for most businesses – their ideas for change might be good but their implementation of change is usually poor. This is because leaders devote far too much attention and time spruiking the features and merits of the change and little time thinking about how people will experience the change process.
There are many theories about how to ‘do’ change, with John Kotter’s 8-Steps perhaps the most well-known. At People At Their Best, we start with our 15-questions and then lean-into the experience we want people to have during the change process, and build a change program that ensures people feel engaged, feel empowered, feel enabled and experience the change in a positive way. The process is conceptually simple: What does the business need to do to ensure people have this positive experience?
This all happens before we embark on the change itself, before the use of Kotter’s 8-Step methodology or any other process. There are no shortcuts through this groundwork for change, in fact, we have found that the ‘steps’ for executing or implementing change are fairly straightforward when the foundational work has been done.
Below, we have combined HBDI Whole Brain Thinking and John Kotter’s 8-Steps to form our own model for managing change. In applying this hybrid model, we have found that ‘people’ factors (red text) are overwhelmingly the most critical when it comes to managing change – as Tom Peters says: 65% of organisational success depends on its people; how engaged, committed and aligned they are and how enabled and capable they are to deliver on the business’s mission.
Leveraging the power of engagement requires an appreciation for the difference between change and transition. In our work we clearly put the emphasis on transition and the experience people have rather than change itself.
According to the Bridges’ Transition Model, transition is internal and occurs more slowly than change. Alternatively, change is external, it happens to you and; tends to occur rather quickly. There are three stages of transition in the Bridges’ model: Stage 1= Ending, losing, and letting go; Stage 2 = The neutral zone between the old that has passed away and the new which is not yet place and, Stage 3 = The new beginning.
It is during this transition that resistance to change typically rears its head. In our experience, this arises because leaders have not asked and answered the 15-questions and have failed to appreciate the importance of the change experience, usually having been seduced by the merits of the change itself. When this happens, people’s resistance will tend to manifest, revealing a fundamental lack of trust and /or confidence in the leaders of the business.
The problem is that change brings uncertainty and our brains perceive uncertainty as a threat. When this occurs, as it does when people experience change, a physiological response takes place where cortisol and adrenalin are released into the bloodstream, shutting down the thinking and learning parts of the brain and sending us into flight, fight or freeze mode. Clearly this curtails our engagement and openness to change and thwarts our ability to see the merits or positives of change. In short, people close down (they narrow and limit their thinking), at a time when we need to them to expand their thinking and receptivity.
Empathy promotes trust because people who feel understood are more likely to trust you and people who trust you are far more likely to buy-into change and commit to it – and here’s the kicker – even if they don’t agree with it. What’s more, if people trust you, they are far less likely to descend into resistance (and conflict) when going through change.
So, how do we demonstrate empathy. Well, as a leader, your best bet is to seek to understand others – this is how you circumvent the threat response, diffuse tension and buy yourself trust. In the act of understanding others, people’s focus moves off self-protection and onto shared goals, new ideas, problem solving and creativity. In this way, empathy is an organisational superpower and a shortcut to workforce engagement.
In fact, we change people’s minds far more through listening than we ever do through talking. This points to another superpower – curiosity – and the foundation for both empathy and curiosity is asking questions and striving to understand. It is through understanding another’s perspective that change resistance can be dissolved.
So, to set yourself up for change success, it is important to suppress the urge to convince others of your point of view and instead get curious and ask questions: ‘What impact will this have on you?’, ‘How do you see the risks?’, ‘What is most important to you?’ In a nutshell, seek to understand another’s perspectives and get them to reveal what is driving them – this must become the leader’s default approach.
Adopting this ‘servant’ leadership style works best as it brings to the fore the superpowers of empathy and curiosity and because it prioritises what we have been discussing; that how people feel, their experience of change is what matters most; that empathy and support and placing the needs of team members first, enhances the experience of change and determines its success. The other-side of this is equally true, that traditional, top-down change leadership does not bring about the levels of trust and engagement necessary for successful change and in such cases, resistance is inevitable.
At the end of the day, change will not happen without trust; trust in the change itself, in the change process and in the leaders who are driving the change. Beyond what we have already discussed, how do you, as a leader, cultivate this trust:
Remember: Trust and engagement are built on understanding each other and feeling valued.
Everything we have discussed leads us to the image below. What is important to note is the planning and detail that goes into a change plan – in this case, the integration of two disparate business units and cultures into the one site and one business – find more detail here.
It is noteworthy to point out the number of opportunities for staff engagement and positive experiences. What was critical for success in this case was that people didn’t feel that this change was happening ‘to them’ but that they were part of it and would reap benefits from it. At the end of the day, if staff do not feel this way, it is unlikely the change will be a success. In this particular example, I am most happy that staff felt they were part of a common journey and shared future – this certainly led to higher levels of engagement and commitment to the change process.
Most organisations take their foot off the pedal when they decide to pursue a change and decide what the change should be, whether it’s simply a new piece of software or a full system transformation. But it is after the analysis and decision making that the real work of ensuring success starts! Even when the business case for the change is strong, there is little chance of success if businesses stop there – the research bears this out – most change programs fail.
To give yourself a fighting chance, understand the foundation of what drives successful change; answer our 15-Questions and then work like crazy to demonstrate empathy and build trust. In this way, you will cultivate engagement and even excitement – after all, this is the positive workforce experience that helps guarantee success when implementing change.
Dom Meli has held senior human resources and industrial relations positions within the public and corporate sectors for organisations such as BHP and the Ambulance Service of NSW, during which time he successfully managed the resolution of significant disputes, the negotiation of employee agreements and drove performance improvement and change programs. Over the past 20 years, Dom has established himself as a trusted adviser and innovative consultant helping leaders and organisations to develop, define and deploy strategies which have resulted in sustainable improvements. Many of the initiatives that Dom has introduced were inspired by studies in the USA, where he examined employee involvement in change programs, non-traditional approaches to workplace organisation and management communication programs. During this time Dom spent time at Harvard, MIT, Caterpillar, Du Pont and IBM. Dom holds a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University along with certifications in EI, personality assessment, coaching, CBT, ACT, and whole brain thinking. Dom has also studied stress management techniques and is a member of the International Positive Psychology Association and alumni of Mt Eliza Business College.
