Why It's So Hard Being a Change Agent

If you want to get someone’s attention, tell them that you’re going to spend a leisurely afternoon at the Museum of Failure.?

Very much a real thing (https://museumoffailure.com/ ), this is a traveling exhibit of well known consumer product failures.?Right now it happens to be at the Mall of America here in the Twin Cities, so my wife and I decided to check it out with a friend of ours.?

Not to be viewed as a sad or tragic thing, the premise of the exhibit is to show how failure is an essential part of innovation.?Many of the products featured in the Museum of Failure have led to other products that were life changing.?But a few of these products really stuck in my memory – more by the story of the companies behind them than the failure itself.

There were three companies that I’m still thinking about that serve as a powerful case study on change:

• Blockbuster Video:?Cited as holding onto their outdated business model because leaders in that organization could not let go of the late fee policy that had been the backbone of the company’s profit model
• Pontiac:?The vehicle cited in the museum was the Aztec, a precursor to the modern sport utility vehicle. ?Leaders of this project fired anyone who espoused concerns/criticism about the car’s design or lack of customer appeal
• A German adding machine company (name escapes me) was also profiled, with the leaders refusing to acknowledge that cheap digital calculators were flooding the market – and this refusal of reality remained right up to the day the company went bankrupt

All three of these companies cease to exist now.?This serves as a warning to us that while change is hard, not changing can be fatal.

Why Change is So Hard

Despite what you might say in a job interview, most people struggle with big changes at some level.?That’s not socially acceptable to acknowledge in most corporate cultures, so we say that we “love change” or that we “live for change” – hoping that will please the person listening to us so we get that job, that project, or that raise that we’ve wanted for some time.

The reality is that most people view change in terms of loss.?We rarely think about what we’re gaining; instead we think about what we have to give up.?And depending on what we have to give up, that change could be threatening to a variety of people:

• A loss of expertise
• A loss of prestige
• Fear of the unknown or the future
• Fear of losing something considered part of one’s identity?

Now many of these losses are never realized, but the fear of the unknown is powerful and needs to be examined before people are truly bought in.?And buy-in is something we desperately need to move an organization into a new reality.?According to Harvard professor John Kotter, you need about 75% of all leaders in an organization to believe that not changing is more dangerous than changing.???If you are not intimidated by that statistic, you should be.

So how then can we be change agents for our respective organizations when the odds are clearly against us??We have to employ multiple strategies to move the needle at all.?Here’s how to get started:

Seeing Intrinsic Value

If we want people to be committed to something – be it a new way of doing work, a new business venture, or a new way of looking at how a company makes money (or serves clients) – you need people to come to their own conclusions that what you want them to do is truly the right thing to do.??Long ago in one of your Psychology 101 courses you heard the term intrinsic motivation.?This is the secret sauce you need.

Intrinsic motivation refers to internal (i.e. you) motivation, versus extrinsic motivation which comes from the external world.?When you get up at 6:00am to get to work on time, that tends to be extrinsically motivated.?Show up enough times late and you might get fired.?When you get up at 6:00am on your day off because you love golfing, that would be intrinsic motivation.?

Interestingly we often use extrinsic motivation during change efforts, but they only gain you compliance.?People will do what you want them to do, but they’re not committed to it.?And the minute you are gone they may revert back to the old way.

Influencing others to gain true commitment isn’t easy, but the research would say there are three main ways you can tap into a person’s intrinsic motivation:

• Logic:?Using facts, data, and logical reasoning to help others see what you see
• Inspiration:?Tapping into someone’s values, sense of right/wrong, or hope of a better future can move people into action
• Consulting:?Allowing others to be involved with your change as to have a say on how the change is implemented.?This involvement can help others see benefits instead of only losses

What is Meaningful… to You?

While we can use the influence tactics above to gain the commitment of others, the content of our messaging is also vitally important.?Too often we consider only information/insights that are meaningful to us versus the people we’re trying to convince.?

If you’re dealing with a broad audience of people, finding meaningful data can be a real challenge.?A colleague of mine who did some outstanding consulting work with one of my former companies stated this in a simple but profound truth:

“Different people are motivated by different things.”

While that may sound like I’m vying for the Captain Obvious award, I would like to remind you that common sense is not common practice.?We tend to influence the way we wish to be influenced.?Very rarely does this work for a wide variety of people.?So instead we need to consider the content of our influence messages in four dimensions:

1. Threats to the organization in the short term:?"What would happen soon if we don’t do x?"
2. Threats to the organization in the longer term:?"What would happen in the next 1 – 3 years if we don’t do x?"
3. Opportunities to the organization in the short term:?"What could we gain now by changing?"
4. Opportunities to the organization in the longer term:? "How might we set up the organization for long term success by changing?"

An organization’s culture will very much come into play as to which of these levers you decide to pull.?As an example, I was rarely successful in trying to convince senior leaders at my former organization using the threats model.?The company’s culture was founded on optimism, so we had to use opportunities instead.?

The Missing Ingredient in Most Change Efforts

You will recall that change is hard for many people because it becomes a study in loss.?And if I said that to you, you would nod your head and say “Yes Jim, that makes sense”.??But as change agents, we rarely keep this truth top of mind.??We have stakeholders to engage with, deadlines to meet… and we lose patience when things go slower than we would like.?We lose one of the most important ingredients in driving transformational change:

Empathy.

You know what it means – the ability to “walk in another person’s shoes”.?And if people are experiencing loss during your change (whether real or perceived loss), they need empathy.?It’s in short supply because as change agents we’ve been working on this project for a long time.?But we have to constantly remind ourselves that what’s old news to us is brand new (and often frightening) to the people the change is going to effect.

So the next time you receive the concern/challenge regarding the change, or get a question you’ve heard a thousand times before, or sit down with someone who is genuinely grieving… remind yourself that this is all new to them, and they need you to sit with them in their grief.

Being extremely human during a change is sometimes the best thing you can do.