Eight steps to achieve sticky change in your organization

Originally published on January 16, 2015 as a Guest Column in The Globe and Mail:  

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-digital/innovation/change-is-the-new-status-quo-embrace-it/article22447422/

Change sucks, let’s be honest (even for a guy like me who gets bored in his sleep). Doing things differently is difficult. Re-learning, re-thinking and, most importantly, getting people to go along with your new regime is a task fraught with peril and potentially dogged resistance.

But there’s no denying that change is a constant in life and often inevitable. We live in an era of social change, market change and technological change that add up to 24-7 turmoil. This means change is no longer a specific event that we can anticipate or plan for. It’s a continuing process that we must live out daily.

With the New Year upon us, I want to focus on how to embrace change and make constant evolution a more achievable resolution for us all.

Having read through a series of articles on change published over the last 20 years, I’ve been struck by one thing that hasn’t altered much at all: the success rate of change initiatives. It appears that historically only 30 per cent of corporate change initiatives succeed. A .300 batting average might get you into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it’s not an acceptable success rate to any owner, manager or CEO trying to keep their business ahead of the curve.

In my opinion, change initiatives are almost always defeated by a problem of definition. By “definition,” I refer to the act of determining what success looks like at the end of the process. Case in point: not long ago I sat in a client’s brainstorming meeting and the exercise started with a broad, sweeping proclamation: “Something has to change here.

Sales are not where we want them to be. We need ideas.”

Sadly, objectives like these are too broad and ambiguous, to succeed.

Through a series of simple questions, I helped the group drill down to focus on a more tangible definition of success. First, how far off-target are dollar sales? Second, based on the amount of dollar sales required, how many new accounts are really needed to close the gap? Third, how many people should be tasked with acquiring the new sales? And, finally, what geographic area should these sales be drawn from?

Within 15 minutes we had moved from a broad-based need – sales – to a specific definition of success: “We need six people to bring in a total of 12 new accounts from a 10-kilometre radius of their office within one year.” This is a well defined and achievable goal.

Most importantly, this focus identified that the real problem wasn’t sales. Lagging revenue was just a symptom of the real problem: inappropriate marketing. Given its model of big-ticket sales, the business’ focus needed to change from costly, ineffective awareness marketing to targeted, one-to-one initiatives supported by sales training.

Definition and focus are the all-important, overarching fundamentals of every change process. Once success is clearly defined, I have developed these eight steps to achieve sticky change:

1. Define stakeholder and organizational needs. Identify, support and engage the people on your team who are going to be affected by change. Address their motivation, their practical and emotional needs, and their readiness for change. This information will help you craft a compelling vision for the project outcomes, secure senior-level support, and map out a thorough project plan.

2. Identify measures of program success and appropriate rewards. Major milestones and specific metrics need to be established, with goals being used to bring focus and clarity to the outcomes you wish to accomplish. This creates alignment across the organization, provides for greater levels of accountability, and establishes a framework for celebrating success or making course corrections.

3. Design the change program. Successful change programs align with and can be integrated into the company’s culture. Building a link between a change initiative and the organization’s current values, vision, mission and processes will leverage existing attitudes and strategies. This will substantially increase the impact and longevity of any change.

4. Reduce obstacles and barriers up-front. Identify all potential obstacles and address them early on. Map out the stages of the journey your organization and team members will experience, and develop a plan for managing and navigating through each stage. In this way, clarity will replace ambiguity, and acceptance will overcome apprehension.

5. Deliver the program elements. Support change with robust project and communications plans. Change, by definition, is about doing things differently, so it requires more planning, not less. Checklists and techniques for ensuring successful program delivery should be developed and reviewed with regularity, allowing for fine-tuning on the fly.

6. Coach your change champions, early adopters and managers. Identify the champions who will lead your change project. Change champions make initiatives more credible and more scalable. They will help you build momentum faster. Support them with one-to-one coaching so that they’ll feel more empowered and better equipped to direct their teams through the hurdles of implementation.

7. Communicate goals and results to the entire organization. Support change initiatives with strong, frequent communications that share short-term gains as well as long-term success. Ongoing communication builds momentum by letting team members know that their efforts, ideas and participation are not taken for granted.

8. Review progress at pre-scheduled team meetings. Measure performance and share results. Regular feedback is a necessary accountability tool. Formal checkpoints should be determined at the start of the project and scheduled in advance, with Change Champions tasked to lead scheduled review meetings with their teams, and report back to senior management.

Technology is changing our world every day, and it’s not going to slow down to let any of us off the ride. To equip your business for the New Year, adopt one more resolution:

understand that change is the new status quo. Embrace it as a fundamental driver of your success.

Written by

Ken Tencer

Leading By Following (Sort Of)

I’ve always been fascinated by the Iditarod dog sled races. For a man or woman and a few dogs to trek hundreds of miles over the frozen arctic tundra of North America is truly remarkable. I admire anyone who has the guts to do it. There are truly some formidable obstacles to overcome. There’s the cold temperatures, the snowy and icy terrain, the gloomy skies, the limited rations, the threat of becoming lost, the danger of possible injury, and the list goes on and on. Only men and women of great personal courage and fortitude would even attempt such a venture.

The dog sled team is just that – a team. As with all teams, it has a leader, and that leader is the dog sled driver. But how does a leader actually lead a team that consists solely of member that are not even the same species as the driver?

We find this same problem in the corporate world. There are thousands of managers and supervisors out there that don’t have much in common with the technical employees that work for them. They are not the same species. What can the successes of dog sled racing teach us about how to manage employees that have far different functions than us?

1. The leader needs to address the needs of the led.
Dogs know that they need things. They know that they need to stay warm, they need food and water, they need companionship, and they need care. They are not interested in how these things come to them, only that they do. If left to their own wit, they may find ways to provide for their needs in ways that do not meet the approval of the sled driver. So, the sled driver becomes the one responsible for ensuring that the dogs have all their needs met.

A manager needs to ensure that if he or she tasks his or her employees to do something that he or she provides the proper resources to accomplish the task. Most workers don’t care about the process of acquiring the resource. That’s not their job. They only care about putting the resource to good use. When faced with a project or task deadline, an employee with a resource request that is unfulfilled by the manager may resort to ways of acquiring it that are against company policy, unethical, or even worse, illegal. If you’re in charge, gathering resources is your responsibility. You can delegate the authority to do it, but not the responsibility for it.

2. Everyone must know their responsibilities. If they don’t, the leader must train them.
Dogs simply don’t start the race when they don’t know what to do. It takes months and years to train good sled dogs. Sometimes they learn directly from one-on-one with the driver.

Other times, they learn by doing what the rest of the pack is doing. With a lot of positive encouragement and engagement from the team and the driver, dogs become valuable members of the team.

A new hire may know why he or she was hired, but may not be completely knowledgeable about duties, the industry, the company way, or any number of things. It takes some face time with the leader and a lot of peer following to really get the hang of things. In a positive and mutually encouraging work environment, employees develop rapidly into valuable, happy and energetic members of the team.

3. Know your team members and position them for success.
Some dogs perform well together. Some dogs don’t. There can be personal conflicts that cause dogs to not keep their focus. Other dogs would rather play with each other than do their work. Still, other pairs of dogs want nothing more than to win the race when paired. Stronger dogs work better in the front. It’s up to the sled driver to know where his dogs will work best when they are all harnessed up and ready to race.

Managers need to be aware of who their employees are. They must place their team members in the best position to succeed by resolving conflicts, avoiding placing lower-producing workers together, and allowing the leaders within the team itself to emerge and handle minor issues. The great thing about human employees is that they will probably tell you where they think they can work best, if you just ask them.

4. When the team is performing its function, get out of the way.
There’s a reason dogs are in front of the sled and not behind it. They are doing all the work to get the sled where it needs to be. They have been trained to run, and to work together.

They don’t need any help from the driver with this. The driver can do little to make them run faster or work better together when they are in the midst of the race. It’s best at this time for the driver to stand back and watch for obstacles.

The employees on a manager’s team were put there because they are highly skilled at what they do. Once a project has started, they only need to know what the tasks are. Once the task is identified, the team will know how to accomplish it. The manager only needs to ensure that he or she prevents or resolves any non-technical problems while the team is completing the tasks. This is where the leader begins to lead by following.

5. The leader must provide direction.
Dogs love to run. And many dogs love to please their masters. They light up when a satisfied owner pats them on the belly, offers them a treat or spends time playing with them as a result. They also have a sense of accomplishment. Any dog owner can tell you how their pets react when they have done something that they feel is a tremendous accomplishment. So when the dogs are running the race, they only need to know where to go. At one command, they will steer left, and at another, right. They will halt, they will bark, they will follow any command of the driver, because they trust that where the driver wants to go is where the dogs want to be.

Hopefully, employees are doing the job that they are doing because they love it. When they do, they only need the manager to tell them what the task to be accomplished is. When they do a good job, their pride in their work shows, and they feel appreciated when they are rewarded for it. A manager that shows appreciation for his employees and rewards their good work will have no problem ensuring that employees follow his or her directions throughout projects. What’s more is that they will expect to be given good direction, and they will trust that the manager is pointing them the right way. A good leader recognizes that he or she can only make a good course correction by standing behind the worker (as in, being knowledgeable about where they are in a task, not literally standing behind them) and seeing which direction they were first headed.

6. The leader can only take credit for leading.
Sure, the driver of the sled is given the trophy. No doubt, the driver rewards their dogs handsomely for their effort. He talks about how well his dogs held up through the cold, and how they pushed themselves. He also remembers to thank others that helped him prepare for the race. At the end of the day, all he can really take credit for is guiding the superb efforts of the team.

While managers help to organize the tasks of their employees, they can’t really take credit for the technical accomplishment of the team members. Managers need to remember to heap praise on the employees for their accomplishments, especially when noted by others outside the team. After every project, awards and rewards need to be presented, whether formal or informal, to thank the team for the effort. This is also NOT a zero-sum game.

Everyone on the team who contributed gets some kind of reward. The manager will no doubt be rewarded, but needs to share and spread the acknowledgements.

One thing I always noticed about the race is that the driver is never in front of the dogs. He simply follows them on his sled, even across the finish line. He is the last member of the team to cross it. This is because he knows that his responsibility is to make sure that every member of the team crosses the finish line together first. You really can follow your team members to lead them. They know what they are doing.

Written by

Edward Emerling