Lean Into Gravity: Let Your Role Models Lead the Movement

Quick question: When designing a change initiative, do you first identify the people who most need to change or the people who are already excelling at the behaviors you want to see adopted? If you said the people who need to change, you identified one of the main reasons change initiatives have such low levels of success. Finding the people who need to change centers the program on outcomes that haven’t been tested and singles out the people you want to join the movement.

This is the wrong approach on a several levels, but most importantly, it chooses to ignore your greatest asset in creating change: your role models. In every organization there are people throughout who are surpassing expectations so make them the centerpiece to your change movement. Let them lead your movement.

I call this “leaning into gravity.” Rather than devising a fully-baked, but untested, program and rolling it out to the whole organization, allow those who are already shining examples of where you want to go (gravity) and let them create a movement people will want to join. Give them the framework and end goals and allow them the freedom to co-elevate their peers.

Who are your role models

I say this often but it’s important to remember you don’t think your way into a new way of acting, you act your way into a new way of thinking. At Ferrazzi Greenlight , our work with clients over the past decade has proven that people’s behavioral readiness to change their actions and habits is even more critical to reaching desired outcomes. We call this “porosity” or the measure of a person’s ability to open themselves to change intellectually and, more important, to let it through so that it affects their behavior. People may be psychologically on board with an idea, but until they show signs of changing their behavior, they remain a barrier to achieving the desired result and making it last. Employee involvement in the process of managing change is also believed to be able to increase meaning and self-determination and thus increase employees’ readiness for change. [1]

To capture the full range of people’s relationship to change, our Porosity Matrix plots into four quadrants the psychological versus behavioral readiness of individuals to act on an organizational change imperative.

These two dimensions are represented by mindset (what people think about the change) and behavior (how much they are actively participating in the change).By focusing on these two dimensions at once, organizations may intervene with the appropriate approach—such as workshops, coaching, and missions—to move leaders and their teams to a state of intellectual and behavioral porosity.

Your role models will be fully accepting of the change and practicing the new behaviors. They’re both intellectually and behaviorally committed to the new way: they’re Evangelists. They are the employees who are personally invested in the new way and the tasks they undertake aren’t done by rote or in fear of not meeting management’s expectations. Rather, they’re executed with a strong sense of purpose that resonates with their values. Evangelists are quick to try out new practices and tools and provide input and feedback for their refinement. They learn from their own successes and failures and quickly recalibrate as they discover which practices provide the highest returns.

Role models are already finding new ways to meet new challenges. Empower and support them to create the change you want to see. Their mantra is “find a way.” And they will—resourcefully.

Finding your role models

In large organizations it can seem impossible to find those five or 10 individuals who hold the key to transformation. And it is impossible if only the executive team is searching so let them identify themselves.

• Ask for volunteers. Either through a challenge talk or a request from the executive team, allow the individuals or their managers to recommend their participation. In our work with the World Bank Group, leadership chose the core group to design the program who then identified the people and projects that were most likely to succeed within the pilot.
• Encourage managers to celebrate their stars. Managers want to keep their best and brightest happy. By encouraging them to pay tribute to their individual MVPs, you are both identifying the people who will lead your transformation and priming them to want to lead that transformation by singling out and celebrating their good work.
• Give them permission to “cheat.” Try not to restrict them in the process. Give these role models the time, breadth and support, both emotionally and materially, to create a movement others will want to join. Have them be the example of not only what success looks like but the practices everyone can learn to be successful as well.

Change movements are organic processes that morph through iterations and often look very different from the original framework while still accomplishing their goals. Rather than hamstring your movement, and organization, and set the program on a path to failure, encourage, enlist and celebrate your role models and give them the latitude they need to set it on a path to success.

[1] “The Role of Psychological Capital and Psychological Empowerment on Individual Readiness for Change,” Ayu Aprilianti Lizar, Wustari L.H Mangundjaya, Ahmad Rachmawan, Universitas Indonesia, The Journal of Developing Areas, 2015

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Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash