Posts tagged ‘change management’
Four Keys to Successful Change
Ever try to get someone to change the way they do something that they’ve been doing the same way for years? Ever try to break one of your own habits? It’s not easy. Not because people are intentionally contrary or obstinate, but because big parts of our brains operate on autopilot, in deep grooves of habit, and establishing new pathways is hard.
This can be a serious problem for individuals or managers who find themselves in the midst of major change efforts.
There are four things you can do to help make change happen:
Sell the problem, not the solution.
People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see or understand, writes William Bridges, author of Managing Transitions. For example, prehistoric humans were probably more inclined to give up their hunter-gatherer ways to grow crops once they really understood that the wooly mammoths were dying out.
Prehistoric man only began raising crops in earnest once the wooly mammoths started dying out
To really sell change, you have to touch people’s emotions. “Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word,” says John Kotter, Harvard professor and best-selling leadership author. People have to feel a sense of threat, crisis or dissatisfaction before they have enough motivation to start the process of unlearning and relearning, according to Edgar Schein, an MIT Sloan professor and expert in organizational culture.
However, you have to be careful with how you use burning platforms, warns Kotter. If that’s all you do, you can create a panic that stops new action. Fear makes people focus on self-preservation instead of organizational transformation. The way around this, says Schein, is to make sure that while people feel a sense of threat in the old, they also feel a sense of psychological safety about learning the new.
Focus attention.
Once you create the impetus for people to move away from the old, you have to provide them with a clear vision of the new alternative. Imagine the panic among the cavemen and women once they understood that their prey was disappearing from the land and before they realized they could domestic certain plants and animals to generate their own source of food.
Focus is essential because the working memory part of our brains can only hold a few concepts in mind at one time. The worst thing you can do in a change effort is overwhelm people with lots of extraneous information and detail. (For a great talk on this topic, check out David Rock speaking at Google on YouTube.)
It’s important to distinguish between the overall mission of the group and its specific objectives. As long as you can show people that the new objectives still support the mission or core purpose of the group, it will be easier for them to switch. Early man’s mission was to eat to survive, not to hunt and kill mammoths.
Engage everyone in the change.
Everyone should have a role to play in the change – otherwise it will be something that’s being done to them. People have to be able to see themselves in the new future, and that will be easier if they play a part in shaping it.
The prospect of change causes uncertainty and anxiety in people. That anxiety is overcome when people have a personal insight. People have an insight by paying attention and reaching their own conclusions. And such insight is solidified when people voice their ideas. In fact, brain research shows that paying attention, having an insight and voicing ideas create a lot more activity and connections in the brain than reading about or hearing someone else voice a new idea.
What’s more, insight makes people feel better. Just as uncertainty causes anxiety, reaching a personal insight causes real pleasure. This reinforces the learning in ways few other things can.
Craft a message that’s simple and strong.
There are three keys to communicating change.
- When formulating your message, choose your words carefully. Words matter, and many a change effort has been derailed by a careless remark by a company leader.
- Images are better than words to create an emotional connection, so show, don’t tell, by telling stories that paint a picture or using actual physical evidence or demonstrations to emphasize your point.
- Effective communication requires repetition. There is so much that can get in the way of human communication. It’s rarely sufficient to tell something once and expect the message to get through. Don’t stop at the memo; use blogs, posters, town hall meetings, one on ones…. and then ask questions and listen to make sure your message is getting through in the way you intend.
Most people don’t resist change intentionally; resistance to change is part of our DNA. So if you want to change people’s behavior, remember these four things:
Sell the problem, not the solution – you’ve got to help people get unstuck from where they are.
Focus people’s attention – be very clear about the new priorities.
Engage everyone in the process of solving the problem – this is much more important than any particular solution.
Finally, keep your message simple, strengthen it by painting a picture that captures people’s imaginations, and broadcast it far and wide.
See my recent presentation, “Leading in a Turbulent World,” on Slideshare. You can view the slides on my previous post, but to read the substance of the talk, go to the Slideshare version.
How to Survive in a World of Constant Change
About five years, ago, when I was still editor in chief at CIO, we began a major transformation from a print-centric media company to online. During that time, every day brought new challenges, frustrations, discoveries, joy and despair. I think many of us thought we’d power our way through all that turmoil and, eventually, things would get back to “normal.” After a couple of years, it began to dawn on us that if there was ever to be a new normal, it was well over the horizon, and in fact, we’d better learn to live in a state of change.
Change is a process
I’ve been interested in the topic of change since I started working with CIOs over 20 years ago. Information technology is a serious catalyst of change. In the course of my research – and through my own experiences, I’ve come to believe that change in itself is neither a negative nor a positive, but it is a force – a force to be understood, reckoned with and, to some extent, managed.
We published a great article by Chris Koch on the neuroscience of change back in 2006. It explained:
Change hurts. Not the boo-hoo, woe-is-me kind of hurt that executives tend to dismiss as an affliction of the weak and sentimental, but actual physical and psychological discomfort. And the brain pictures prove it.
Change lights up an area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is like RAM memory in a PC. The prefrontal cortex is fast and agile, able to hold multiple threads of logic at once to enable quick calculations. But like RAM, the prefrontal cortex’s capacity is finite—it can deal comfortably with only a handful of concepts before bumping up against limits. That bump generates a palpable sense of discomfort and produces fatigue and even anger….
The prefrontal cortex crashes easily because it burns lots of fuel of the high-octane variety: glucose, or blood sugar, which is metabolically expensive for the body to produce.
Given the high energy cost of running the prefrontal cortex, the brain prefers to run off its hard drive, known as the basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity and sips, not gulps, fuel. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.
“Most of the time the basal ganglia are more or less running the show,” says Jeffrey M. Schwartz, research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It controls habit-based behavior that we don’t have to think about doing.” Like, for instance, many aspects of our jobs.
This explains why even when people buy in to change intellectually, they often fall back on the old way of doing things.
So how does change happen? First, it’s important to really understand that change is a three-stage process, not a flip of the switch. William Bridges, author of Managing Transitions, describes the three stages as ending or letting go; the neutral zone; and the new beginning.
This of course is a variation on the classic three-stage model of change –unfreeze, change/learn and refreeze – developed by Kurt Lewin, one of the pioneers of organizational psychology, and adopted by many practitioners and consultants in organizational development.
The first stage involves overcoming inertia, defense mechanisms, existing biases and ingrained behaviors. As William Bridges writes, “every new beginning starts with an ending.”
The second stage is where the change occurs. The old is gone, but we don’t yet have a clear picture of what the new reality will be. This is a time of both great potential and innovation – and of uncertainty and trepidation. Of all three stages, this one is where things most often go awry.
The third stage is about locking down the new behaviors, norms and beliefs.
Change requires that people feel at least two seemingly conflicting emotions at once: what Edgar Schein calls survival anxiety – or fear that staying the same is dangerous – along with a sense of psychological safety that comes from seeing that it’s possible to solve a problem and learn something new without a loss of identity or integrity. For people to change, survival anxiety must outweigh what Schein, an expert on organizational culture and change, calls learning anxiety.
In fact, a culture of change is a learning culture. Jack Welch has said, “An organization’s ability to learn, and to translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” So what exactly is a learning culture? First of all, the organization’s assumptions, values and beliefs must support adaptation, learning and empowerment. And, pay attention, all you perfectionist managers: It’s more important to be committed to the process of solving the problem than to any particular solution.
These days, with waves of change following one upon another, a learning culture may be not only a competitive advantage – it may be a condition of survival.
Of course, to Welch’s second point, learning in and of itself is not enough if you don’t quickly translate what is learned into action.
In my next post I’ll write about four keys to successfully managing change.
See my recent presentation, “Leading in a Turbulent World,” on Slideshare. You can view the slides below, but to read the substance of the talk, go to the Slideshare version.
Great Communicators: Steve Bandrowczak on What CIOs Can Learn from Sales
Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO at DHL, Lenovo and, most recently, Nortel, knows what IT leaders can learn from sales and vice versa because he has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role himself. As vice president of global sales at Avaya after that company’s acquisition of Nortel, Steve leads sales, marketing, channel strategy, services and service strategy for Avaya’s data business. I spoke with him recently. This is the third in a series.
Steve Bandrowczak
Abbie Lundberg: You’ve made the shift from CIO to leading a global sales and marketing organization. What are the differences and similarities of those two roles?
Steve Bandrowczak: Sales & IT have a lot in common. The thing that you learn from sales and can take back into the IT world is that every customer is different. Every customer has a unique set of challenges in terms of how you communicate, how you work with that individual company or customer.
To be an effective CIO leader, you must understand the different parts of the various groups you serve. The way you speak to the head of sales is different from the way you speak to the head of operations, the CFO or the head of R&D. In order to be effective leading IT, business transformation and change, you have to understand what various leaders are trying to do within their own business area, align with that, and then communicate the value that IT brings.
If you start talking to the head of sales about IT or operational metrics, they’ll glaze over very quickly. If you go in talking to them about how am I going to help you drive sales, how am I going to help you drive sales productivity or lead management, you’ll have a much better reception than if you go in there and simply say we’re going to implement Salesforce.com and give them a project plan. You need to show them you understand their challenges as well as the value proposition of what IT can bring.
Where a lot of IT guys get hung up is they talk about “the data center is up 7/24” and “I’ve got five nines reliability” or “I can role out projects…” But you know what? That’s a commodity these days. The real value that you have is where you understand a business unit and its key metrics. I’ll just take a real simple example: If you’re going to roll out a CRM project, the sales team, in general, is looking for… well, they’d say it’s really about lead management, it’s about getting my contacts in a single database, it’s about making my day easier. No it’s not! It’s about sales productivity and driving revenue.
And oh, by the way, if I don’t understand where my baseline is today and where my competition is – meaning the best in the industry – then I don’t know what gap I’m trying to close and how I’m going to improve it. One of the things the CIO brings is understanding the baseline of what that business is doing. So very simply, in sale, if you know that the average revenue per head in your company is, say, $1 million per head, and you know the best in the industry is $4 million, then your CRM goal should be, how do I triple my productivity, not how do I implement CRM. Big difference.
The more that IT executives understand those business goals and metrics and then can bring successful programs to close that gap – that’s where they’re hitting home runs. What we’ve seen through the years is that, from an IT perspective, people focus on: I hit every single milestone – SAP was in on time, on budget. Then five months later, the company’s going out of business.
A lot of IT professionals are uncomfortable with the idea of “selling” or “marketing” IT to their colleagues in other parts of the business. Is this really necessary?
What you’re talking about is communicating the value that IT brings to the business, and that’s absolutely essential. If the only thing the IT organization is doing is the same thing that an EDS or IBM Consulting Services or Accenture is doing, the reality is they can be outsourced. And because external companies are variable in cost, they become more attractive. The difference between the two options becomes variable versus fixed cost, and am I lowest cost versus an external provider.
Where I bring value and why we need to communicate about the value that we bring, lies in understanding the business and being able to communicate about the value IT brings to the business and how IT helps to drive that business transformation. That’s where the uniqueness and the challenges come in. CIOs today – and it’s not just CIOs, it’s the whole IT community – need to communicate the value in a business-centric set of communications. That’s where you become much more effective and much more valuable.
Communicating that value is necessary, and it needs to be frequent. We used to do an annual newsletter. We used to do a monthly achievements memo. Whether it’s in staff meetings, one-on-one, big presentations to groups, newsletters, an annual report… there’s never, ever enough communication.
The key there is it’s not just IT communication – it’s we rolled out with the sales force and achieved these things, we rolled out with finance and achieved these things, as opposed to we did an SAP system, and we did it on time, on budget. No, we worked with the finance community, we redesigned the receivables, the payables, collections, and here are the end business targets that we’re going to achieve and the timeframe in which we’re going to achieve it, and by the way, we’ll give you updates on a monthly basis. Much different than you’re tooting your own horn.
What separates a good communication program from a bad one?
If somebody doesn’t understand what I am saying, it’s my fault, not theirs. I have to take ownership that if somebody doesn’t understand something, it’s because I have not communicated effectively.
Bad communication is when you have sent out a monthly communication or whatever it is, and the business is still shaking their head or they don’t understand it or they just haven’t paid attention. If that happens, you haven’t done your job. And you see that from a lot of IT organizations. All too often, IT says, “I’ve communicate that 100 times. Why doesn’t the stupid business understand it?” You know, “we tell them what we’re doing; what’s wrong with them?”
The reality is, everybody is different. Every CEO is different. Some CEOs have a sales background, some have an operations background, some have a finance background. Each CEO likes to be communicated to differently, and you’ve got to be able to communicate the way the business units want to be communicated to.
Each level is different too. The way you communicate to a senior VP is different from the way you communicate with someone inside a call center or warehouse, but equally important. Everyone is important.
So what makes effective communication? When you talk to the business and they understand the last 10 projects you rolled out and how you did it and what the value was. And you’ve got to keep checking that communication vehicle that you’re sending.
Does it mean you do one-on-ones and staff meetings? Yup. Does it mean you do town halls with business units? Yup. We used to have something we called breakfast with Steve and meet your customer where I’d talk to the IT community about a particular function – this is what’s going on with sales, this is what’s going on with supply chain, this is what’s going on with the finance community. Meet your customer. Someone from that function would come in, explain from their perspective what their top 10 challenges were and why they needed IT and how important IT was. That’s the way you close the gap and eliminate this Chinese firewall where they do the requirements and throw it over the wall, you do something, you implement it and hopefully it works for them.
How do you check the fidelity of your message? How do you make sure that the message you intended to communicate actually got through?
There are a number of things. We used to do quarterly surveys – that’s one mechanism. Also, spending one-on-one time with the senior management team and just getting a feel for, OK, what can we do better? Do you know where we are with this rollout?
I used to have one person on my staff sit in with each business unit/function. My head of operations would sit in with their head of sales, and sit in on their staff meetings and global communications meetings. So we had someone inside the function, understanding what the function was doing, who would bring that back to the IT executive leadership team.
What’s the role of effective communication in change management?
It’s huge. It’s huge in establishing the right set of goals, showing how you’re doing along the path, and when you finish a project, seeing the benefits post implementation. It has to be a running track alongside any transformation initiative.
Describe a change effort and how you used communication to make things go more smoothly.
When DHL acquired Airborne, we had a significant external set of eyes on the integration. FedEx and UPS were just sitting there waiting for the integration to fail, and it would have cost us significant market share. When you do large integrations like that, you tend to do some unnatural things in terms of timelines and the way you put things together. So the communication aspect of that is very important, in terms of why you’re doing it this quickly, with this kind of 7/24, 15-week effort. In that particular one, we were going to lose something like $10 million per day for every day we couldn’t integrate.
When you communicate in that perspective and set that kind of burning bridge, teams understand why the pressure, why you’re making the decisions you are, why you’re taking some risk. If you don’t communicate the reasons, that sense of urgency is just not there, and that’s important when you do large-scale transformation programs like that.
I always pick what I call the top-five burning bridge things. What are the top five things that, when any other question comes up, you raise them against those five goals. So a simple example: Many people do SAP implementations and say, “I need this report before I go live.” So we would say, what is the value of going live? Whatever it is, let’s just make up a fictitious number and say I’m going to gain $5 million per week operational savings. Which means that for every day I don’t go live, I basically waste a million dollars. When someone says, “I need this report before we go live,” you simple say, “OK, where’s the million dollars?” “Well, I don’t have a million dollars.” “Then you’re not getting the report.” It puts the conversation in perspective and gives it a definitive metric and focus so for every single question that comes up, you can target against a broader set of objectives.
Why do IT professionals often have trouble communicating with business colleagues?
We teach IT as a science, not an art. That touchy-feely soft stuff we’ve learned through the years around program management, change management, training – that’s not taught in the schools today. Everything is black and white, ones and zeros, on and off – they don’t really get that communication set of skills. And by the way, many of them don’t have the business set of skills either. What you’re starting to see now is people from the business who have worked on a project coming over and having some of those skills get into the DNA of IT.
When I got to Nortel, they had just completed an evaluation of the entire staff, and they ranked them for me, one through seven, with one being the best. After my own two-week evaluation, the order was completely flip-flopped. The quote/unquote “best” IT person was my worst. Why? Because the best IT person, the way it was ranked, was the best technical person – no business skills, no transformation skills, no leadership skills. Tremendous technically – but I can go buy that. The person who was ranked the lowest was the one who was touchy feely – focused on training, worried about employee sat, retention, customer sat, communications, business value. She didn’t know anything about IT operations, networks, the technical side of it, and that’s what I loved about her. She turned out to be one of my top leaders.
What are some classic communication mistakes IT professionals make, and what can a CIO do about them?
The first thing is putting out a status report that doesn’t have any business impact in it. Focusing on the top 10 IT accomplishments – we implemented a local area network, we had five nines reliability, the data center had zero down time – being too IT centric and not realizing the business doesn’t give a hoot about those things.
The second thing is one size doesn’t fit all. Whatever the format, each function needs to be communicated to in a different way.
Most IT organizations tend to have one or two people who can do that, but it tends not to be widely shared across the organization. The also don’t focus on it, don’t measure it. One thing IT people are good at: when they have a clear set of metrics and goals, they tend to get things done. But go survey the top 100 IT organizations and ask them how they measure the effectiveness of communications. You’ll get blank stares – what do you mean?
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about communication in the course of your career?
There tends to be a certain arrogance around the CIO role. That’s partly because they got where they are because they’ve been successful, and they think they understand. But when you start with, “I don’t know anything, I’m humble, and each business day is something I can learn from customers, employees,” that’s when you really understand the art of communication and can be most effective. When you have arrogance around, “I’ve said it, therefore everyone must understand it,” you’ve got nothing but a lose/lose.
Storytelling and the Art of Change
Storytelling is a powerful tool when you want to drive organizational change, sell an idea, or just make a point.
There’s nothing new about storytelling. As a species, it’s in our DNA. Long before we had books and newspapers, telephones and telegraphs, the Internet and Kindles, our ancestor’s sat around the fire and told stories. More than storytellers, we’re story consumers. Even people who think they’re no good at telling stories generally love to hear them. We just respond better to information when it’s delivered with a memorable anecdote or example (i.e., story).
I’m reading The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, by Stephen Denning. It describes how to use storytelling to move people to action, build trust (in you as a leader or in your company or brand), convey your values and vision, and drive change in your organization – outcomes that all managers need to deliver today. While “analysis might excite the mind, it hardly offers a route to the heart,” Denning writes. “And that‘s where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires transformational change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways.”
Stories are not a natural part of the business dialogue in most companies. There’s an executive bias toward data-based analysis and objectivity to the exclusion of “softer” means of persuasion. How often have you heard someone apologize for a point of evidence being “just anecdotal”? But the two are not mutually exclusive. “Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story,” Denning writes.
Then there’s the issue of language itself. People who are perfectly fluent in human terms outside the office start babbling away in corporate mumbo-jumbo as soon as they cross the company lobby. Put them in a conference room or onto a stage and it gets worse. It doesn’t have to be that way.
One of the things I like right away about Denning’s book is his message that anyone can learn to tell a good story. And that’s a good thing. In “The Irrational Side of Change Management,” published in the McKinsey Quarterly and excerpted on Forbes.com, Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller point out that even managers who buy in to the power of stories fail to achieve the change they want by telling the wrong stories. They don’t realize that what motivates them as company leaders and stewards won’t likely motivate the mass of people they’re trying to influence. Leaders tend to focus on the impact on the company, but this is only one of five areas that matter to employees. The others are impact on society (is there a “green” angle to your data center consolidation?), the customer, the team they’re a part of, and their own interests (personal development, compensation, etc.).
A second excellent point Aiken and Keller make is that it’s much more powerful to let people “write their own story.” In other words, before you tell your story, ask a lot of questions, really listen to the answers, and incorporate what you hear into your change program. This is about buy-in. “When we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome (almost by a factor of five to one). Conventional approaches to change management underestimate this impact. The rational thinker sees it as a waste of time to let others discover for themselves what he or she already knows—why not just tell them and be done with it? Unfortunately this approach steals from others the energy needed to drive change that comes through a sense of ownership of the answer.”
Stories are useful in all parts of the change process, starting with selling the idea to the CEO, board of directors or investors. There are different types of stories for different situations: comparative examples with positive outcomes; parables that convey a set of values; narratives with an identifiable protagonist; and problem/resolution stories.
You don’t have to have been born with the gift of gab to be an effective storyteller. Managers can increase their effectiveness by learning which stories to tell and how to tell them. The right story well told will engage your audience in ways all the data in the world on its own never will.
