The amount of change managers have overseen in the past two years might delude them into thinking they’re change maestros. When the pandemic arrived, urgent action was required – a fact employees understood and could buy into. But under normal circumstances, the challenge of orchestrating change is much greater.
If you’re contemplating change – a new strategy, transforming culture, or even a long-anticipated return to the office – the odds are likely against you. A McKinsey & Co. survey found that less than one-third of respondents who had been part of a workplace transformation in the past five years say the changes were successful at both improving organizational performance and sustaining those improvements over time.
One reason companies flounder is that they assume they have found the right model for their transformational effort, rather than considering it as an approach that may need to be altered along the way, according to consultants at NOBL Academy. They add that we fail to take into account that change is a dynamic, non-linear process with no arrival point and that we assume the change is taking place in a closed system, unaffected by outside forces.
We also view change as coming from the top. Indeed, the consultants note there is almost always a slide in the Power Point presentation promoting the initiative that shows the torrent of change communications cascading down, like a powerful waterfall. “Sure, change leadership can happen in the traditional top-down direction, but for change to stick, change leadership should be reoriented to address how change is led from the bottom-up, and perhaps the middle-out,” they write.
Change consultant Greg Satell says our thinking – and the top-down models we use for driving change – is rooted in a time when organizations were largely hierarchical, but that has dramatically shifted with time. These days we operate in networks. “Wherever we see significant change today, it tends to happen side-to-side in networks rather than top-down in hierarchies,” he says.
He offers the example of a new CEO at a large data company who wanted to switch to cloud computing, but knew there were deep concerns throughout the organization about such a move. So he found enthusiasts for the idea at lower levels, and brought them together into a group which successfully helped others buy into and make the transformation.
Consultants John Jones, DeAnne Aguirre and Matthew Calderone in a landmark 2004 article stressed the importance of systematically addressing the human side of change. Any significant transformation creates “people issues.” Individuals will be asked to step up into new leadership roles, jobs will be changed, and new skills must be developed. Inevitably, employees will be uncertain, and many of them resistant.
In their book The Human Element, Northwestern University professors David Schonthal and Loran Nordgren say for an idea to take flight it, like an airplane, needs thrust, and so we spend a lot of time developing the fuel for our initiative. But also like an airplane, it will encounter friction, quietly undermining our idea.
They identify four frictions. Inertia is the powerful desire to stick with what we already know, despite the limitations. Effort is the need for energy that may not exist to make change happen. Reactance is the impulse to resist being changed. Finally, emotion – the unintended negative emotions created by the very change we seek to make. And it’s not always observable emotion. It took 30 years for cake mixes to catch on, the authors note, because people felt the innovation made baking soulless; when the formulation was changed so that cooks could add an egg to the mix, that negative reaction was addressed.
You need to consider the friction you will face – the resistance that awaits new ideas, often from the very people you want to help. In doing so, keep in mind bad news sells. Negative information – and negative emotion – packs a bigger psychological punch than the positive equivalent. They also point to research that strong evidence can be worse than weak evidence, as it triggers reactance – greater opposition to the idea. Similarly, another study found that strong arguments against the death penalty strengthened support for capital punishment among those already in favour.
Reactance is strongest when it threatens a core belief, when people feel pressured to change, and when people who must implement the change have not had a voice in developing the plan. You need to rethink the hard sell in such situations.
Kevin Eikenberry says there are three levels of communication: communicate, in which we send a message; converse, in which we focus less on telling and more on sharing; and connecting, when we recognize that the moment of communication is about more than the message being sent. It’s also relational: The exchange of information is a chance to create more understanding. “All of us communicate at all three levels. The question is, are you spending enough or the right time at each level?” he asks.
Mr. Satell warns against a burning desire to convince skeptics. Research suggests the tipping point for accepting change is about 25 per cent of the affected people. Once that point is reached, most of the remainder will follow. We don’t manage change, he argues; we empower it by enabling those who believe in it to show it can work.
Cannonballs
- Here’s a handy question from executive coach Susan Peppercorn that leaders should be asking their staff to quell resignations: How would you like to grow within this organization?
- Also on development: Jobs should not only help us grow professionally, but also ethically, argue Maryam Kouchaki, professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Isaac Smith, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Brigham Young University.
- Our actions all have consequences. The question, says entrepreneur Seth Godin, is who will bear them?
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
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Harvey Schachter