What It Takes To Be A Successful Change Agent: Part IV of my series: "Change, Thrive On It Or Put it In The Tip jar

People who can see the future and want to impact it often get Jobapause:

Let’s be clear. As I said in earlier installments, when I refer to a change agent I am not talking about just being a provocateur that stirs up the pot and then leaves the mess for others to figure out what to do. At some time or another in our careers we have all experienced these types; they come into a room unload a volley of new discomforting ideas and then leave – leaving a room full of bewildered executives scratching their heads (the swoop and poop variety). 

No, I am talking about people who want to affects real change in an organization. These kinds of people, real change agents, have specific ideas about what change can look like and have ideas on how to implement that change. These are the folks that can get into a real funk when they can’t seem to get momentum in the organization for their ideas and how to respond to the future. Championing new ideas, being a change agent, can be a lonely, frustrating and wildly disappointing experience. This kind of experience can cause serious jobapause – you become inclined to just stop trying to help people see change and accept the status quo. To stem jobapause you need to ask yourself a few simple questions and be prepared to accept the answers.

Why do organizations say they want change but then resist it when it is presented to them?

• Because by the very definition of what you are trying to do, you are trying to make people aware of opportunities that require them to act differently. As I said earlier, it is a lot harder to do different things than to keep doing the same things, only trying to do them better, faster and/or cheaper.
• Because the mere thought of change in behavior is going to make some people uncomfortable. This is often a visceral, emotional reaction best described as fear – you can just hear their internal voices say, “Can I do this?” “What if it fails?” “Won’t this increase my workload?” “Is there really anything in this for me personally?”
• Because the people you are making uncomfortable are often more senior than you are in the organization. That means you may be making some of your bosses uncomfortable. This can result in dislike and distrust of you, not just your ideas -- and worse, for you that may mean a risk to job security. And yet, we are talking about the same people who tasked you with bringing them fresh ideas to move their organization forward.

Why is it that change agents develop enemies in the organization?

• “You have enemies? Good, that means you stand for something.” (Winston Churchill) Being a champion of new ideas invariably will put you in situations where you will create enemies. They are enemies of change. They want to keep on doing what they are doing; after all they worked very hard to get where they are. Not “bad” people just people not ready to move forward.
• Your challenge is to inspire enough curiosity and open-mindedness in other people to overcome their rejection. Notice I am talking about inspiring not commanding. Just because you don’t manage a group of people doesn’t mean you can’t affect change. I have created great change in organizations when I was a team of one.

How is it that sometimes we are successful in minimizing fear and maximizing support for change, and in so doing actually affect the change we seek? And, how is it that sometimes we are not?

• It goes without saying that being a change agent requires taking risks.
• But the more calculated those risks are, the more successful you are likely to be. I have spent my career trying to bring game changing customer driven ideas to big and little organizations, sometimes with great success and other times not.

As I see it there are a number of traits you need to develop and specific actions you need to take to increase the odds of success

Traits Of A Successful Change Agent

 In marketing there are 5 Ps that form the foundation for marketing success (Product, Pricing, Promotion, Place and Positioning). Well, I believe there are “6 Ps” for successfully driving meaningful change – Passion, Pluck, People Skills, “Parsibility”, Perseverance and Patience.

1.    Passion – the mere idea of change stimulates emotions and as I noted for many that means fear. Helping people overcome that fear requires that you have an infectious passion for the change you are advocating. I don’t necessarily mean becoming an evangelist but it does require being a pleasant passionate provocateur. “Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks. (Yo-Yo Ma).

Fairly early in my career while I was at Grey Global we were developing a new business presentation for Mars cookie candy, Twix. My colleague and I were in the midst of a heated discussion about what the personality of the brand was. We were debating whether or not the brand was “trendy” or “modern”. Our discussion got so heated that another colleague heard us down the hall. He came in to the conference room and said “Guys, guys, come down.” We looked at him and said almost in unison, “We are calm” and went right back at it. We were just passionate about making this brand famous and fortunately we did win the business.

2.    Pluck – the spirit and courage to stand up for what you believe in and then deliver. You also need to have the energy to keep at it because as we all know change doesn’t happen as fast as you want it to. My mantra in this area is “Start Me Up” (The Rolling Stones).

Early in my career I worked on Revlon at Grey Global; I had the pleasure of being part of an amazing team lead by a legendary Creative Director; and the brand was Flex Shampoo and Conditioner, the very first beauty oriented hair care line. We were presenting a new campaign to our client, the head of Advertising at Revlon. After our creative director presented the campaign, our Revlon client thought for a moment and said, “Its fine but couldn’t we do something more perky?” Our creative director sat straight up in his chair and simply said, “Perky? Perky! I could do perky but Flex isn’t perky.” At which point he stood up and ushered us all out of the room saying, “ Why don’t you give this a bit more thought in light of what the brand stands for and let’s talk tomorrow.” With that we left – the only time I have ever walked out on a client and I am quite sure the only time an agency ever walked out on this venerable hard nosed Revlon advertising chief. Well our creative director was right was right and in short order our Revlon client came around to it but that took a lot of pluck.

I knew I had pluck when my boss at Citi started referring to me fondly as “Sparky” – and occasionally, “Down Sparky.” When I was exhibiting a tad too much pluck.

3.   People skills: If You can’t Sell It, No One Can Buy It

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” (George Bernard Shaw). Let’s be honest if you don’t have any people skills you are going to have a very hard time being a change agent.

•  Communications is mostly taught about you … what you say and how you deliver it
• But it’s really not about you
• It’s not about what you have to say, how good you are on your feet or how well you capture ideas on paper
• It’s about the audience
• It’s about what they learn, they feel, they embrace and take away
• It’s about what they can tell others about what you said
• It’s about what they do as a result of hearing / reading / experiencing what you have to say

Malcolm Gladwin talked about how trends happen which I liken to ho new ideas in general catch on modeled after how epidemics happen in his best selling book, Tipping Point. He created a set of names to define the ecosystem of humans you need for trends to happen – mavens (have the idea/start the trend), connectors (connect mavens to spreaders) and spreaders (do exactly that).

In a company where you are trying to be a change agent you don’t have to be a maven – other people, companies, strategic partners may actually come up with the idea(s) but you have to be a spreader and a connector. While it doesn’t need to be your idea you do need to know its value and go with it. Sounds like you are stealing huh? Not at all, you are just unleashing the power of ideas that others have not. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most successful change agents were not necessarily the people that originally came up with those great ideas they sold into organizations but they sure were the ones that got them adopted. That means, if you are not a naturally gifted salesman you need to become one. Now there are people reading this who will bristle at that because they have a negative image of salespeople. Well get over your silly self and get with it. A critical component of your job is to literally stimulate excitement for new ideas AND the feasibility that they can be adopted by your organization. That means you have to explain it to them in a way they not only understand but can replay simply – this is where the “elevator pitch” comes in. You have to give them the 2-minute pitch that they want to share with others. Isn’t this what the essence of a successful salesman’s job is?

4.    “Parsibility” - In language the definition of to parse is to deconstruct a sentence or word and explain its parts. You need to be able to deconstruct the change you want to affect and then go after it piece by piece. “The man who moves a mountain starts by carrying away small stones” (Confucius). One of the most critical ingredients for change agent success is how you go about sharing your ideas. You must start small, sharing them with key decision makers individually to build a cadre of like-minded folks before sharing in big forums. This is tough stuff because it means clearly defining who you need to “get on your side” before you unveil your ideas to a larger crowd. You need to create your own “journey map” to get from here to there. And then you have to proactively go make it happen.

5.    Perseverance –Calvin Coolidge said it best, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

I have never seen a big change in business strategy or execution adopted right after the first time it was discussed. As a change agent, you have been thinking through just how important this change will be for a long while. It will take others a while to fully grasp and then adopt. They used to call Japan the “13th cup of tea culture” because it would take 13+ meetings with different stakeholders before a business decision would be made. Well, it may not take 13 meetings in your situation but it will take a few at the very least. So as a champion of change you must be doggedly focused on constantly demonstrating how change will positively impact stakeholders.

At Macy’s in 2007 I suggested to my boss that we overhaul our consumer experience (CX) measurement system because the measurements were not correlated with sales and the diagnostics didn’t provide sufficient feedback to get at the root causes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with shopping experiences at Macy’s – they didn’t tell us what we had to do differently to enhance customer loyalty.. “I don’t want to take THAT on.” He said, “Then I would have to bring a whole other group on.” Over the next two years in every management meeting I attended I went out of my way to ask questions that only a robust CX measurement system could answer – questions our system was incapable of answering. Finally, in 2009 my boss came to me and said I want you to head up a team to assess and enhance our CX measurement system. I did and we ultimately introduced a totally new system that today is a cornerstone of the customer intelligence that fuels management decision-making. . Interestingly enough this is the same guy who once told me I was “like a farmer”; I planted seeds, nurtured them and watched them grow. He was right I guess Persistence and patience.

6.    Patience – directly related to planning and perseverance is patience. “The future is already here, it is just not very evenly distributed” (William Gibson). Change agents can usually see the future before others. That’s why they are change agents. That’s also why change agents feel that bringing change to life takes more time than it should. That’s because the people you need to bring along with you don’t see it yet. Change doesn’t happen over night. You have to help others see the value of change; you have to give them a process and a plan that they can implement without disrupting business as usual; and help them see an outcome that will not only have positive impacts on the business but also positive impacts on them and their role in he organization. Narcissism is a powerful emotion to leverage in others.

And, yes, that even means you have to have patience with the very people who hired you to create change. Macy’s hired a new CMO, anew Head Of Advertising) and me ( A new Head Of Consumer Strategy) as change agents by Macy’s CEO, And yet the first time we presented him with what he asked for - a new advertising campaign that was designed to make Macy’s “famous” again – all he wanted to know was “Where are the ’one day Sale’ ads?” I was sitting next to the CMO in this meeting and shortly after he said this I heard a sharp “crack”. That was the sound of the heal on the CMO’s Emma Hope shoe breaking as she ground her heal into the carpet all the while continuing to speak in a calm metered voice about being sure we get the theme right before we developed the promotional ads. (Counting to 10 would have been cheaper but not nearly as interesting to experience). Months later we did finally get him to air that campaign and it was a business success. Now that’s patience and self-control.

So, remember, “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties and obstacles vanish.” (John Quincy Adams)

One of the most amazing change agents of our time is Andy Goldsworthy. That’s right the artist. He constantly displays all of these traits in his work and they are beautifully documented in his most recent movie, Leaning Into the Wind. See it and you will know what I mean.

Actions Of A Successful Change Agent

Get Proof – “Show Me The Money” (Jerry McGuire). Real change requires shifting priorities and resources. That involves investing both human and financial capital on different things – that doesn’t come easily.

In business, it takes demonstrating positive financial impact. To get folks to rally around making meaningful changes requires clearly and simply demonstrating the impact it will have. I am talking about the elevator speech not the PowerPoint presentation. The folks you are trying to get to take action will need to be able to explain the change and its benefits to others before they will own it themselves. That means you have to help them by providing simple ways of explaining it – in their own words, not yours. Simple doesn’t mean simplistic, but it does mean compelling and easy to grasp and repeat. And it includes tangible specifics regarding the positive financial impact it will have.

Have a clearly defined Process:

The guy at the end of the table sits up and takes a note, the woman at the other end says “mmm” and the CEO across from you says, Great, how do we make it happen?” This is the moment of truth you have been waiting for but if you don’t have he answer you will lose momentum and those great new initiative you just laid out will be delayed or worse it will die right then and there. But, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard ”Process kills creativity”. In fact I used to say it myself when I was a young upstart in the Ad Agency business at Grey Worldwide. But that is highly misguided. Creativity is a “what” and process is a “How”. For creativity to spread though an organization you must have a process or it will get lost, shrivel up and die. All of my creative friends in the agency business and elsewhere who read this will cringe. But hang on my friends; don’t you have mental processes that help you release your creativity? I would bet that there are very few, actually I will bet there are no self-proclaimed “creatives” who don’t employ some processes to their craft. So, as the COO of Citigroup once said to me, “Tim, be sure you have a process for getting this done or it won’t happen, it needs to become part of how we do business or it will just be a project project – we already have too many of those.”

Bring them along; If they don’t get it then they are not dumb, you are. No ideas are good unless they are appreciated and embraced by others, so YOU have to figure out how to explain it in a way they will get, appreciate and want to advocate. There can be a fair amount of trial and error here. And this is where persistence and humility really come into play.

Make your ideas their idea: let them have it. If ideas are not adopted by the whole organization then they don’t get acted on fully. The best way to do that is to allow other people to own them. No doubt sometime in your life you will share an idea with a colleague or boss and it will fall on deaf ears (at least so you think). Then sometime later you will be in a meeting when that person is talking about that idea as if it were his/her own. If your ego gets in the way that will piss you off. But if you are a true change agent then you will feel gratified because you are making progress.

Recognize the challenges you face are different depending upon where you come fromom -- from the inside or the outside:

 If you grew up in the organization you have a better shot then if you were hired from the outside to get that organization to do something the company wasn’t doing / wasn’t doing well. Why? Because they already know you and trust you. But you will still need to carefully socialize your ideas to ensure they don’t get killed.

Now, get this straight if you were brought into the organization to help create change it is a very different story. … People HATE hired guns and getting their support takes eating a lot of humble pie, the patience of Job, the communications skills of Bill Clinton or Roald Reagan and the persistence of Gandhi. Oh and yes passion, but if you didn’t have that they wouldn’t have hired you. So, let me be clear, the people who hired you will not be your first advocates and they will not protect you. They know that many people in the organization are not happy they hired you. These people think they can do your job (or know someone else in the organization who can) and see your hiring as a slap in the face – as if someone said to them “You are not smart enough so we got someone from the outside who is”. The folks who hired you know this all too well and so they will go out of their way to sit back and see what happens so as not to upset the organization.

Know How To Speak Truth to Power:

Whether you are homegrown or a hired gun, to get your ideas adopted you will need the support of people above you.

And, by the way don’t fall for the egotist’s mantra “If I can just get this to the C Suite, they will know I am right and make this happen.” HA, I can tell you more often than not this actually is a path to failure or at best a path to a longer development timeline. The C Suite doesn’t like mavericks – they scare them. After you have sold your heart out to the C Suite they will likely say something like what a CEO once said to me, “Tim, just because I tell them it’s a good idea doesn’t mean they are going to do it.” That is a thinly veiled way of saying go sell it into the organization and then we’ll talk. What they want is to endorse ideas that their one-downs support. So, that is where you must focus your efforts first, on the one-downs. Go find champions.

Now some leaders are more enlightened than that. The CEO of Citigroup’s Global Consumer group was a great example. After a long week of trying to galvanize support for a new initiative at Citi, I was whooped and on the verge of jobapause. We were trying to get the organization to adopt a common, real time marketing spend tracking system across the +50 countries in which the Consumer Business operated and we were getting push back from everywhere. I guess she sensed that and after a meeting in which my colleague and I informed her of what would be a politically very unpopular opportunity to better manage $100MM of spending on direct marketing postage, she looked at me and said, “Tim, always tell me the truth. If I choose to stray I need to know just how far off I am going to be.” Now some of you might say that’s not good. Well, actually, it is better than good -- it is great. It means you have earned the trust of a leader. It also shows you have a leader who will champion new ideas when she fells the timing is right. But, it doesn’t mean your ideas will get adopted fast. Ultimately we did get that spend tracking system adopted and it became known as Global Consumer Group Management Database (GCMD). But it did take a lo-o-o-ng time.

So here are a few ways I have learned to accelerate that adoption …

Engaging the organization, not just your group: Create a cross functional team to explore the idea. Now here is where real skill comes in. Just because “you know the answer” doesn’t mean you need to tell them. On the contrary if you want them to own it (and you do) then you need to let them (with guidance) come to the same conclusion you have. This may sound laborious but it needn’t be. In fact it shouldn’t be.

When I first came to the newly reorganized Global Marketing Group Citi the consumer banking and lending business was in 50+ countries and there was no standardized marketing planning or spend tracking system. Every country and often every business within a country did things differently. If you wanted to know how much money was being spent on TV advertising or the Internet you could find out if you made 50+ phone calls and waited a week – but even then I am not sure that we would have gotten an accurate number My CMO would cringe at the thought of being asked that question in a meeting. So she put together a cross functional team consisting of our media expert, our direct marketing expert our CFO and me. We quickly realized that the only way we were going to get an accurate read of marketing spend by country and by business and be able to track it on an ongoing basis would be if we require that it be entered into the general ledger.

• We started with the finance organization, showing them how by looking at the data across countries they could quickly spot places where spend was overly centered on infrastructure and not on marketing programs that drove business – nothing like another way to identify cost cutting opportunities to engage a finance organization.
• Then with their support we went around to all of the marketing heads of each region and many individual countries (that experience earned me over 1 million miles on American Airlines).
• We regional showed business heads how more transparency into markeing spend could actually help them successfully petition for bigger budgets not just be a means for Finance to identify significant cost cutting opportunities where there was over spend. It became a win-win process that got adopted by the organization.

·     Timing IS everything:

 How and when you present new ideas is as important as the idea itself. The people you are trying to coopt need to be in a receptive mood. Assessing the right time and place takes real strategic planning on your part. “Good idea but not now, we are too busy with other things.” How many times have you heard that? Even worse is if you give them ideas too late to be acted on in the business cycle because it frustrates the hell out of them.

I though I was doing the right thing when one May I told the women’s apparel merchants at Macy’s they needed to buy more 3 piece completer outfits for Fall. The only problem was they had already gone to market and bought their Fall line up. I felt foolish and they were frustrated. From then on I made sure that my team got to them before they went to market with consumer and competitive trends that would inform their buying decisions. Today market trend and competitive analyses that are are a foundational part of merchants’ strategic planning process at Macy’s.

Making Progress -- The leaders you are trying to inspire need to see results quickly so chunking out change in bite size pieces that produce tangible results quickly is critical. You want to create a work plan that has you updating them frequently to keep your efforts top of mind. Some people dread one-on-one updates with their bosses, I love them because they offer yet another opportunity to sell in your ideas and your progress – to give your leaders sound bites about the great progress you are making that they can share with others.

By now you will have realized that I have spent virtually no time talking about how to get new ideas and a lot of time on how to turn them into tangible actions that move an organization forward. That’s because new ideas come to you quickly – sometimes in a flash – the hard part is getting them to flourish.

Putting It All Together

I have liken what it takes to be a great leader to what it takes to be a great conductor. I liken what it takes to be a great change agent to what it takes to be a great trial lawyer. Pick you favorite or identify with one from below:

• Fictional ones: e.g., Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird; Perry Mason; Denzel Washington in Philadelphia; Paul Newman in The Verdict; or Jack McCoy - Sam Waterston in Law & Order
• Real ones: e.g., Gerry Spence – successfully represented Karen Silkwood’s family against Kerr McGee; Abraham Lincoln; or Mary Jo White – successfully prosecuted the mobster, John Gotti.

Clearly they all felt they had the proof to develop powerful arguments; they knew the process to get that proof and navigate the legal system; they knew how to make their ideas those of the jury and bring the jury along with them; they knew how to engage the entire courtroom; and their timing was superb. But that’s not what drove their successes.

• Some might call them plodding (but that’s their planning, patience and perseverance)
• Some might call them humble, unassuming and graveling (but that’s their people skills);
• Some might call them zealots (but that’s their passion and pluck). A successful change agent could have a very good career as a trial lawyer – and likely would have made a lot more money than he or she does now!

Having some but not all of these traits and skills is just not having a full quiver of arrows. If you have them all and you have the right tools to deploy in service of them, odds are you are going to succeed more often than not. After all didn’t your heroes win their cases convincingly? And they all took years honing their skills. As I said in the beginning these are learned behaviors and traits.

To paraphrase a great sales guy I once knew who went on to be the CEO of a number of large companies, “If you have the will you can develop the skills.”

So, How Will You Know If You Are Affecting The Change You Seek?

I was sitting in my office at Macy’s one day in 2008 when my boss, Macy’s CMO & dot.com Chief, knocked on my door. After a little chitchat he said to me in a rather perplexing tone, “Tim, they are listening to you. They are increasing the presence of market brand signage in the stores.’ To which I said, “Why do you sound so uncertain about that?” To which he said, “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.” Remember what I said about believing in your ideas? I said, “I know this is uncomfortable because it goes against the grain of what Macy’s has been doing recently.” (Downplaying market brands in favor of their own brands). “But people want to know we have the really good stuff, that we have curated market offerings so as only to bring them the best the market has to offer. And not to worry, once we reestablish our own brands as great stuff we will enhance their presence as well.” I am not sure he left my office totally convinced but he felt that I was convinced and that was good enough for him – he hired someone who knew something he didn’t and he let me do my job. Fortunately, this was a success. 

In the future I will share a last section that talks to how you can quickly recognize a company that embraces change and has built its culture around it.