Everything Must Change

At this year's Wharton Leadership Conference, Fiona MacLeod, president of convenience retail in the US and Latin America for BP Products, spoke about why change programs often fail. According to MacLeod, the corporate world is "addicted" to serial change management programs that consume massive resources but ultimately fail to solve the problems they aim to address. She was struck by how many of these change management programs fail, only to be followed by similar initiatives within one or two years, often before the original program is completed.

MacLeod urged her fellow leaders to ask themselves: "How can we ... free ourselves from our addiction to episodic change and move to a much more healthy habit of continuous business improvement?" She compared the phenomenon to a yo-yo dieter who loses weight only to put it back on because he has not come to understand what's causing his weight gain, or has failed to adopt the healthy lifestyle that would keep the weight off.

Leadership thought leader Dave Ulrich told Human Capital that in order to achieve sustainable change it is useful to separate events from patterns. "Change is too often an event, not a pattern. People go on diets, but don't change lifestyle. Changing patterns requires stable and sustainable actions that are woven into daily actions of employees and organisational practices - for example, staffing, compensation, communication, training. Sustainability comes when there are new routines in the company," he says.

Di Worrall, author of A Climate for Change, advocates a new model of sustainable leadership, but this too faces serious stumbling blocks. Part of the problem, she suggests, are the high expectations placed on leaders to perform a certain way. "Our traditional education told us we need to control everything. We've always been told the leader is the one who is supposed to have the vision and who will control processes and handle the tough decisions. It's very much a top-down bureaucratic approach," she says.

The new model of sustainable leadership mindset involves a paradigm shift from the controller to enabler. If a leader is not controlling, what does he/she do? They enable things to happen, and they tap into the creativity of the workforce. They also remove obstacles. "By removing obstacles you allow counter-intuitive change to start to take hold within the people. A key to sustainable change is that it sustains itself," says Worrall.

There are new leadership models emerging, which break free from what Industrial Age thoughts of what a leader was and how they should act. Worrall cites an Indian company called HCL Technologies which is following in the footsteps of Brazilian company Semco.

"Semco is questioning the need for one person or one CEO in particular to lead the business. It's questioning the traditional role of the manager having to know everything, to control everything. HCL has won a Hewitt Best Employer award so it's actually producing impressive results. They are getting the change they want. They are shifting from the need of the leader to have to have the vision to something that's actually shared. They are deconstructing the hierarchical structures to allow the creativity, innovation and ideas from within the company to emerge," she says.

Manager as coach or enabler asks employees: what is your vision, what is your answer to the problem and, possibly the biggest shock, asks whether the employee can actually manage themselves? Can they set their own targets?

Indeed, many change programs fail because they are so dependent on the leader - to the point where if the leader takes a leave of absence the whole program comes crashing down. Why? They have tried to control it, rather than spending the time upfront to give people the opportunity to connect with it themselves, and find their own meaning and importance.

Leaders without followers
Organisations often revert to old habits because employees do not understand why change is needed, or they lack the tools and training required to sustain the new approach. Leaders may be effective at identifying what is wrong and how to fix it but less effective at the 'soft side' of change management - that is, capturing people intellectually as well as emotionally.

"When people know the why they accept the what and how," says Ulrich. "However, many leaders focus on what to do and how to do it, not why to do it. The 'why' or rationale for a change requires both cognitive and emotive cases for change. The intellectual comes from data and showing what is wrong or could be better. The emotive agenda comes from capturing feels through experiences or stories."

Dr Tim Baker adds that managing change is as much about managing the emotional stages of change as it is about the change process itself. Leaders must acknowledge and appreciate that their staff go through four emotional stages of change - denial, resistance, exploration and commitment. Therefore, leaders must design their change management around these four emotions. "One of the challenges for managers is that they do not readily recognise and empathise with their staff and put in strategies to help employees move through these four emotional survival instincts," he says.

An example of inviting people to make their own connection with change - described by Worrall in her book as a 'masterclass in the message of change' - is the film An Inconvenient Truth. The message in the film is carefully constructed. Despite the controversial subject, the film does not say, 'this is how it's going to be and this is how it is'. Instead it presents the situation of global warming and potential consequences from many angles. It presents the facts and figures but then asks the viewer the right sort of questions to get them thinking about where they stand. It suggests a potential way forward but invites the viewer to make up their own mind. "Invite people to make their own connection and

Urlich has identified three levers of change: information, behaviour, and reinforcement.

• Information: surround people with information about the rational for the change from legitimate and credible sources.
• Behaviour: get people to behave as if they are committed to the change in a public way.
• Reinforcement: when people make the changes, reward them publicly for what they have done.

Open communication is crucial. Basic psychology reveals that people comprehend information in different ways. Some people like facts and figures; some like stories; others prefer the person speaking to them to really know their subject; someone else likes to know the other person cares about them. Some people need to blurt out their opinion without thinking about it, other people need to digest the information and perhaps share their opinion anonymously later on.

"These are basics that if you construct every piece of communication this way when you're trying to communicate to large numbers, then you'll hit most of your population - or at least most of the population will have the opportunity to connect with the information in the way they know and can hear," says Worrall.

At the same time, leaders must accept that there will always be people who will never be onboard. The role of a leader or change agent is to decide early on who's in their environment. Worrall suggests doing a stakeholder analysis test: who's with you; who's not, who's on the fence. She goes further - who are the people who are really well connected, who are the people that people listen to, and who's likely to be a saboteur.

A new way of tracking progress
For any change initiative, people like to know which direction they are heading and how progress is being measured. While stakes in the ground are important, Worrall believes the concept of performance management needs to be re-assessed. Worrall cites a US-based 'super coach' Marshall Goldsmith. Instead of feedback, which is the traditional notion of performance, Goldsmith turns this around into 'feed forward'. This allows employees to participate in their future, not only once a year but as frequently as they like. The employee talks to everyone in their surroundings - managers, colleagues, clients - and they develop ideas of how and what they need to work on.

"It gives me more control as an employee. You can tell me I need to achieve this, this and this, but what motivates me? Where does my energy and creativity best come from? Also, what are the two or three things - because I can't do more than two or three - that I'm going to improve upon?" says Worrall.

Returning to the message of change, this new way of thinking about performance introduces the notion of collaboration. It removes the third party structure and helps to increase personal accountability and responsibility. "That's why things actually change - because I've got my personal motivation to get up in the morning to actually change something. I'm energised to change because I've got control over it," says Worrall.

This article was abridged from the original text that appeared in Human Capital. Source: http://newsletters.keymedia.com.au/1716.aspx