How to Lead Through Cultural Resistance

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YOU WANT TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE… BUT DOES EVERYONE ELSE?

It's often the case that the biggest impediments to improving your leadership performance are the organizational barriers that frustrate your efforts to be a strong leader. For example: a boss who doesn't want to change the way things are being done; irrational policies in critical areas like HR and finance; cultural barriers that provide resistance to any change; a lack of commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.

How do you lead through this, when it feels as though the people around you don't necessarily want you to make things better? How do you improve your team's performance despite the barriers that exist in your organization's DNA?

Your goal is to build an island of excellence in your team. This is going to free you from the constraints that seem to be holding everyone else back. Even with a bad boss and a poor culture, there's no reason at all why you can't improve the way your team performs. Control the controllables.

In this newsletter, I explore the issues of accountability, staff attrition, and peer resistance. I also look briefly at the constraints of your job -- every role, every team, and every organization has them. The question is, can you live with them, or not?

WHAT CAN I DO WHEN MY BOSS ISN’T ALIGNED?

When we run Leadership Beyond the Theory , particularly the live cohorts where we have 300-odd leaders from all over the world from different organizations and industries, we hear a common theme coming through: "This stuff is awesome, and it absolutely works… but I can't get my boss to buy in."

Sometimes this happens early – Module 1 – because front and the center of everything we do is value. We talk about getting the work program in the right shape, having it match the strategic intent of the organization and the value drivers.

People often tell us that they go to their boss to talk about improving the focus on value, and the boss says, "That looks hard. Just go and do as you were told. Just do what your resources are allocated to in the budget."

That's a pretty sad thing to happen. Think about it – you’ve got someone who’s putting their time and energy into learning how to lead better and to create more value. Then, the first time they approach their boss for support, they get a bucket of cold water thrown over them.

The art and skill of being able to navigate the existing corporation while you're making change from below is tricky. ?

For No Bullsh!t Leaders, you will no doubt take accountability for yourself, and you’ll take that accountability seriously. Charity starts at home. So, instead of becoming a victim and saying, "Oh, poor me. My boss won't let me do what I think I should be doing." The onus is actually on you to be able to communicate with your boss in a way that helps her to understand what the benefits of change are going to be.

Everyone's the same, whether you're talking about someone above you, below you, or beside you – they fundamentally don't want to change. Unless you can provide a really compelling reason, and demonstrate clear benefits to making the change then, why would they?

That's not on them. That's on you. You've got to be able to communicate this stuff. You need to focus on the right things so that your team isn't spinning its wheels – so they feel as though they're making progress, and that they're actually delivering results.

The one thing that overrides everything else is results. When your team starts to produce incredible results, people are going to pay attention. And they'll start asking you, "How did you do that? What are you doing differently? How come you were able to do that when none of my other teams have?"

EXCEEDING PERFORMANCE IN A LAX CULTURE

Sometimes, you’ll find yourself in a culture that doesn’t focus on performance. Don’t worry about what the rest of the company is doing. Your job is to create an island of excellence in your team.

Let me explain how this is done because it's not intuitively obvious. When you come into any organization (because it was there long before you, in most cases), you have a look around and determine the current standard of performance. From there, you need to decide where the level of performance ideally should be.

You don't have to get permission from your boss to do that. You don't have to get consistency with your peers, although people will try to tell you that you do. “Why do we have to do this when that team over there doesn't? Why are we setting higher standards in our team than they are in their team?

The answer to that question is a much more important question: “What sort of team do we want to be?”

You can choose to be a mediocre team that adds little value, or you can be a high performing team that achieves brilliant results. Do you want to be on a winning team? Well, that's us. That's who we are.

I've been in executive roles in organizations where I've gone into the team and had exactly that conversation. Moving a group of, say, a thousand people to adopt a different attitude and approach to how they do their work is tricky. In one role, I had almost a third of the team defect to other teams in the same organization within the first 6 months, because they could see I was serious about making change, and they wanted no part of it.

That's what you want. You want anyone who doesn't want to commit to excellence to find a role somewhere else. You don't want them there. You want them to move. You want them to be in a place where they're happier, they're more comfortable doing things the way they do them. And you have the people who actually want to be on a high performing team.

High performing teams start with high performing individuals. You can't create that without some attrition. And you need to be looking for the right skills, capabilities, and values to bring into the team. It can be quite a lengthy process. But that's absolutely possible within your team, even though it may not be the cultural norm across the whole organization.

Yeah. Okay. So let's assume that we've tried to do that within our team. No traction is being made. Is this what we call a constraint of the job?

WHEN CHANGE ISN’T HAPPENING

Sometimes, you’ll come to the difficult realization that any meaningful change is virtually impossible in the context you’re operating in. I call this a constraint of the job. Constraints come when you’re physically limited from doing things that you know you need to be doing.

For example, there are organizations that have a policy of full employment, where they choose to keep everyone who works for them, no matter what. They won't sack people for under-performance or bad behavior. This occurs most often in government organizations. Sometimes, they see hiring more people as a preferable condition to unemployment.

The metrics they report on are mind-boggling:

• How many new people did you hire?
• What was your attrition rate?
• How many new people did you bring on board?
• Are your headcount numbers growing?

I sh!t you not. Creating more and more jobs for people who ultimately don't have anything of value to do. If you work in an organization like that, you don't really have any option. You've got to follow that policy position. And that would be considered a major constraint to leading well.

Even though that is patently stupid, it does happen... and he board and CEO are all along for the ride. If I was ever offered a job in an organization like that at the CEO level, or as Chairman of the board, I would absolutely say no. It is a company that I could work in, because I'm all about performance, making things better, stretching people, seeing them shine and grow and build their self-esteem, and create some outstanding results. And I simply wouldn’t be able to do it in that context.

So that’s an extreme example of a constraint of the job. But here are other less obvious constraints – insufficient funding… not enough skilled people… or your boss might be a brutal micromanager who just can't get out of your knitting. And that's a constraint of the job because you can't get the freedom to operate the way you want to and make the most critical decisions.

With any constraint, you've got to basically work out whether you can live with it or not.

NEUTRALIZING NEGATIVE IMPACTS

Sometimes you won't be able to get the unequivocal support of your boss or of the board, but you want them to at least allow you to do what you think you need to do to make the team run better.

Quite often, someone above you is going to push some work down to you and say, "Please get this done", when you already have all of your resources fully deployed. It happens every single day because there are always new things coming onto the agenda.

Part of neutralizing that problem, that dynamic, is to make sure that you're really clear on the things you are doing and that you can articulate to your boss,

"Hey. Look, here's the things we're doing. Here's why we're doing them. And here's why we agreed that they were the best way to use the resources that we have. Now, if we want to do something else, hey, that's awesome, but let's think about what it does to our existing program and where it fits in, what we de-prioritize, which things are going to be at risk, and make sure we're comfortable with that."

You move that conversation from you, to we. If my boss comes to me and says, "Marty, I want you to do this," and I just say, "Sorry, can't do it, boss", then I just look obstructive and lazy.

But if I say, "I’d love to do it. Let's work out how this fits in and make sure that we're conscious and deliberate about what we're de-prioritizing", then that works much better.

Quite often, that's a good way to say no. You never have to say the word “no”, but you basically lead your boss through the problem of having insufficient resources to do the things that you're being asked to do. That can neutralize it really well.

There's all sorts of ways that bosses dip down to interfere in your work. Some of them micromanage, and you have to find a way to push them out of your space. There's a whole range of things. But ultimately, if it persists, it's a constraint of your job that you need to decide whether you can live with or not.

Being able to constantly refer back to the bigger picture is critical. It's the source of your ability to produce extraordinary results. It's the source of your ability to protect your team from overwork and burnout. It starts by making sure that everything you work on is delivering the most value it possibly can. Only do that – simplicity and focus.

If you get that right, then everything from there becomes much, much easier.

MANAGING YOUR ENVIOUS PEERS

The higher up you go, the trickier the politics gets. People who are at the most senior levels of organizations are all quite resilient. They've been around the block. And most of them have learned, to some degree, to manage and leverage politics.

To my detriment, I tried to work in almost complete ignorance of the politics around me. I just figured if I did a great job, led a great team, and achieved outstanding results, that that would be enough. I wish!

I got derailed a couple of times by political attacks that were happening against me behind my back, which changed the way I was viewed inside the organization. It’s a risk that you have to be aware of. I think nothing succeeds like success. That's still the number one principle. But if you’re performing above the norm, you will draw the crabs.

There will always be politics, and there will always be people who would rather see you not do as well as you are doing. It can get quite competitive when you've got a lot of ambitious people wanting to get the next promotion. So just be aware of that. It shouldn't change the way you do things. You still need to be true to yourself and the way you want to lead, but be aware of the politics and make sure that you understand where the risks are coming from, because a stakeholder who's not aligned with you can derail your efforts.

BREAKING THROUGH THE RESISTANCE

The concept of having people above you who don't actually ‘get it’, and don’t give you the support they should, comes back to you – you have to manage the situation, so start with yourself. Make sure that you're accountable for communicating, for influencing, and for managing.

You're the one who's got to change the people around you. You can't expect them to decide to change. That means you've got to be able to demonstrate the benefits of doing things differently.

Then, you have to think about building an island of excellence. Not everyone in your team is going to want to be part of that. That's okay. If they don’t want to be there, then you don't want them working for you either. You want them working for someone who is going to set a lower standard and be more tolerant of under-performance. Let them go there. They'll be happy. The other leader will be happy.

You can bring the people who do want to do the job, who do want to play on a winning team, and who do want to achieve results and feel as though they're going forward and having an impact. So don't expect everyone to be on board.

Make sure that the people above you are at least neutral, and don't stop you from doing the things you're doing. That's critical. They don't have to be raving supporters, but they at least have to give you freedom.

If you run into constraints where you're told you can't do things a certain way, and that’s completely contrary to your leadership ethos, then you might have to vote with your feet. That's okay too. As long as you're in the fight, as long as you're doing the hard things that are going to help you to be better, then that's a win every day of the week, regardless of what your boss says or regardless of what the organization tries to force you into.

The above article is from Episode 298 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or on your favorite podcast player.