The Crucial Missing Element in Your Change and Transformation Strategies

Change management practices have been process-ized and consultantesed to death. It’s time to get real.?

While working on my Masters, I learned change theory from one of the field’s early masters,?Kurt Lewin . Then came?Kotter’s change management model ,?McKinsey’s 7-S model ,?ADKAR ,?Bridges ,?design thinking , and countless other approaches. And now, most every aspect of change is being driven through digital transformation — for better?and?worse, the leading edge of most change and transformation comes at us through a device.

But change — no matter how we standardize, process-ize, and technify it — is always deeply personal. It’s always one person at a time making new choices, doing things differently, letting go of something that feels safe or comforting for another thing that may or may not bring benefits to that individual.?

Change is always personal.

And?that’s?what’s missing, especially in what’s being sold by so many change management practices.?

Change and transformation are about?helping each person be the best they can be, in service of something bigger than themselves.?

The most crucial missing element in most change management efforts today is You. Infusing who you are as a person into each change effort.?Keeping change personal, while also still serving an aligned, we’re-all-in-this-together, higher purpose.

What’s Your Uniquely Personal, Passionate Point of View?

Every change project awarded, every assignment, every response to a transformation RFP comes down to one thing:?This is what I/we believe... What we stand for, the lens we’ll use, the thing that excites us every day to do change work, and the thing we’ll passionately push for to make sure we do change right!

Whether you’re a principal at a top-tier consulting firm, an HR exec with change responsibilities, a newly-minted manager trying to help your team go through change, or anyone else within the supply chain of change: Your unique point of view, your personal passions, your values-based wisdom, what you stand for (and against)… You… are the most crucial missing element in the vast majority of today’s change plans.?

The best change agents I’ve ever served or worked beside always practiced personalized changed strategies.?

For example: I first met?Rob Newson , when he was XO (Executive Officer) of Special Boat Unit 12 and Navy SEAL Team Seven. After 30 years, he retired from senior positions in the Department of Defense, and is now an anti-cancer catalyst and consultant. I witnessed his deeply personal leadership style in how he led SEAL Team Seven. “The one thing I’ve learned about making tough choices,” he shared, “is that the worst choice is picking the one that provides the most short-term relief. The far superior choices, which are much more difficult and consume more time and effort, are the decisions based on your values. What is best is rarely the easiest choice, and is always values-driven.”

Another great change agent who understands that change is always personal is?Gavin Kerr . He’s currently CEO at Mentor, helping clients and organizations find greater purpose in their work. He brings his caring passions to all that he does — first formed with his Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and his years in the Peace Corps.?

One Friday, I was riding with Gavin as he drove from his HR and reengineering job at PepsiCo outside of Boston, to his home in western Connecticut. We were a couple hours into the drive, and I could tell something was bugging him. Suddenly he said we had to turn back. Why, I asked. (This was pre-24x7-cellphone-days, so he couldn’t just call someone.) Because he’d gotten a report of offensive graffiti in one of the ladies’ rooms, and he remembered that he hadn’t heard back on whether or not it was cleaned. He had to be sure.

Both these leaders were in charge of massive change efforts. But it wasn’t the ADKAR model, or stakeholder mapping, or their communication plan, or new technologies that anchored their successes. It was their passionate connection to everyone and everything.?Change was personal?to them.

And your best shot at success is if you bring your uniquely personal point of view to your next change effort.

5 Ways to Bring Your Point of View to Change

These are the five guiding principles that I’ve developed over nearly four decades of leading change efforts, and that I’ve incorporated when leading Life Sciences change projects at IQVIA. Internalize them in ways that are unique to you and your change practice, and I promise you amazing successes!

1. One Rule That Rules All Others: Empathy

This is by far the most important, because it drives the other four. Truly understanding what all stakeholders are going through and are feeling. Before I begin any change project, I try to deeply understand the world from?their?perspective.

True empathy is walking a mile in the other person’s shoes. My most successful change efforts sometimes looked like the TV show,?Undercover Boss. I asked the senior team driving the new changes to spend some time working a frontline job. I learned this approach from PepsiCo when I worked with Gavin. Before I could work on Pepsi’s reengineered processes, I had to spend a day delivering soda to grocery stores. Nothing creates greater empathy than doing the person’s job that’s about to change.

However you achieve it — interviews, simulations, meetings, or actually doing someone’s work?— the most crucial missing element in most change efforts is your deep empathy for what those being changed are going through.?Change is always personal. How personal are you being with what your people are going through?

2. Leadership, What’s Your Personal Why?

All leaders, even the most bottom-line-driven ones, are also people who are emotionally invested in the success of your change efforts. To reach that person, I always begin every change project with two behind-closed-doors questions:

• What keeps you awake at night about this project??(I try to make them feel comfortable expressing their?fears. We all have them. But many leaders do not have anyone to express those fears to.)
• What makes you, you??(Every great leader has done the introspective work to better understand what drives them. Exploring this question with leaders often reveals important passions and purpose that can be built into the change effort.)

Combined, the answers to these two questions begin to flesh out the leader’s personal Why — his/her inner truths, passions, and drive, which can become an important part of the change plan.

3. Find the Pebble-in-the-Shoe Problems

One of the most important things I’ve learned about driving change efforts is: The biggest things that need to be addressed are often the smallest, and easiest to fix — if those driving the change truly practiced deep empathy.

For example: A bench scientist’s new admin tasks are so time-consuming, that she’s falling behind on crucial drug development; A call center rep’s headset isn’t working properly, so his customer satisfaction scores are tanking; A group of cross-functional teams don’t have the time to coordinate their efforts?and?keep up with expected performance targets. Like a pebble in one's shoe, these are not massively complex problems, but they are definitely debilitating if you're forced to endure them day-in, day-out.

I’ve found that easily-fixable Pebble-in-the-Shoe problems are most often misunderstood as resistance to change; are extremely frustrating to those in the throes of change; and are caused by a lack of practical workload/work design empathy.

4. Pre- and Post-Assess for Resilience

A crucial missing element in many change efforts is rigorous pre- and post-testing. And it needs to be about more than the change effort itself, or the standard too-high-level Pulse surveys. We need to be testing for individual/personal agility and resilience, team agility, as well as how the organization is changing compared to industry leaders.?

These three components — individual, team, and change initiative readiness — need to be integrated and considered together. That’s why I brought to IQVIA the Future Strong Assessment, specifically designed to test for integrated resiliency in a highly disruptive world.

5. Our Tech-Future is Personal: Be User-Centered

Change is personal, and our tech needs to be just as personal. For decades I’ve been surveying companies about their worktools: The average has always been about 85% to 95% corporate-centered vs. 5% to 15% workforce-centered. Meaning: The vast majority of the tech we use to get our jobs done is designed to make it easier for the company to succeed, but not necessarily easier for the individual.?

We need to be far better at leveraging technology to make things far easier for each individual teammate, not just the organization, or we’ll forever run into “resistance” to digital transformation.

But it’s not resistance. It is the majority of people who work recognizing that the tech they get for their personal use is far more user-centered than what the company provides to get their work done.

> > > It's simple. Change will always be personal. If we are to help people change, we need to remember that in everything we do.?Keeping it personal, while also still serving a higher purpose.

Bill Jensen?is Principle, Strategy/Life Sciences, at IQVIA.?Leading IQVIA's Applied Change Management Center of Excellence, Bill is author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including?Simplicity, Disrupt, The Courage Within Us, and?Future Strong. He's also a Top 10 global keynote speaker on the future of work and digital disruption. Reach him at?[email protected] .