Dealing with change resistance: You will have to shoot a hostage

For a leader, trying to shift a culture, improve performance or lift the standard of a team is fraught with danger. Ideally, everyone would recognise the necessity for change, the benefits to be gained, and the logic of the plan. In a perfect world, they would then get behind you with their unequivocal support. In reality, though, this is not how the world works. 

Change is all about people. Getting them from where they are now to a better place, helping them to change their habits, their views, their behaviours, and ultimately their actions to implement a new way of doing things. But as Niccolò Machiavelli said, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

Leading change is not for the faint of heart, and there’s been an incredible amount of research on change and many tools and frameworks created to help us lead change in our organisations. Yet still, as many of you would have already experienced, most major change initiatives fail. 

Many leaders lean on change management frameworks for results. These frameworks provide us with a roadmap for how to establish new ways of doing things and to move people from the current state to the desired new state. They focus on people's behaviours and what you might need to do to help them change. They seek to answer the question, “How do you align people towards a common goal and motivate them to act in pursuit of that goal?”. Frameworks like John Kotter's Eight Steps of Change, or Prosci ADKAR are commonly used to help leaders guide their people through the different phases of change.

But the reality is, without strong leadership, these tools are only of marginal benefit, and the temptation for a leader is to believe that because they've hired the experts and followed the process, change will automatically happen.

Everyone talks about change, and pretty much every senior executive claims to have made culture change in their organisation.

For me, sure, I think I managed to change the culture in parts of the organisations I ran, but I would in no way suggest that I changed the culture across the board. After five years running CS Energy, going like stink on culture change as hard as I could, I can honestly say there were pockets of the organisation that had a culture that would be the equal of any office you would find on the planet, but equally, there were pockets where I was actually embarrassed at how poor the culture was, and this was in the same organisation.

This is because so much of the success of change depends on individual leaders through the line. It's the individual leader that determines what standards they set for their team, what behaviours they allow, what things they turn a blind eye to, what things they emphasise as being important. Even the extent to which they will tolerate the resistors in their team.

The bottom line is, it's the leader that determines the success of the change initiative. It is not the change expert and it is certainly not the change framework you use.

So, what should leaders do? I want to be really clear here, which is why I've chosen such a graphic expression. When you come across people in your organisation who are resisting change by white anting or blatantly ignoring what you’ve directed as the leader, you have to shoot a hostage. There is no other way. In every major change initiative I've undertaken, it has been essential sooner or later, and trust me, you want to err on the side of sooner. Most leaders wait too long, forlornly hoping that the resistor will decide to get onboard, which by the way, I have never seen happen.

Not only that, many leaders rationalise that everything is working well despite their weakness in inaction, and they turn a blind eye. I also want to be really clear that this has nothing to do with being tough, oppressive, or intimidating. It's simply about having the strength to put the good of the team and the organisation ahead of your own fears, and certainly ahead of the selfish agendas of those who would stand in the way of sensible, positive change.

It should be easy to work out who it is that needs to go, and there may be more than one. It's likely to be a relatively senior person. It's likely to be someone that has a measure of respect with their team, which may not necessarily realise that this leader has been holding them back for years. It's like a weird case of Stockholm Syndrome as they’ll generally be knowledgeable and have significant expert power.

In short, it's someone that everyone else thinks is indispensable, and to be honest, they probably think they're indispensable, otherwise they wouldn't have the gall to pit themselves against a necessary and value accretive change initiative! They need to be terminated quickly and emphatically, and people need to know why.

If you truly believe that the organisation and the people in it, are going to be better off through the change, then why on Earth would you risk all of that because a handful of self-interested people want things to stay exactly the way they are? In order to lead change, you need to be strong and make decisions for the good of the people, even when it's at the expense of an individual who refuses to play ball.

But the benefits of shooting a hostage are incalculable. It's like a cancerous growth. Clearly, if you don't want it to spread through the whole body, so to speak, you need to cut out the tumour. But more importantly, by removing a resistant individual, you create a positive force for everyone who is left behind.

You've just demonstrated a couple of really important things to the whole workforce. 

1. Not changing is not an option
2. No one is indispensable - not you, not me, no one
3. Passive aggressive resistance and white-anting simply won't be tolerated

You've also earmarked yourself as a strong leader who believes in doing the right thing and isn't going to let the organisation be held back by a few bad eggs who'll do whatever they can to try to preserve the status quo.

This might all sound a little harsh, but believe me, it is a necessary part of leading change, and when your culture change initiative stalls, and you don't know where to go, look to this one. 

Most major culture change fails because the leadership isn't sufficiently committed to seeing it through, and doing whatever it takes to drive the change. They kid themselves that it's all going swimmingly, but they aren't prepared to do the difficult things that would make the change a reality. 

Don't get me wrong, everyone needs an opportunity to change and they need your support, and they deserve a chance. But you can't afford to make it optional for anyone.

Listen to the full No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast episode on ‘Dealing With Change Resistance: You will have to shoot a hostage’ at www.yourceomentor.com/episode56 or on your favourite podcast player!