A three-pronged approach to change: How change leaders turn guts into results

A three-pronged approach to change: How change leaders turn guts into results

Involving people can end up feeling like it generates a fire hose of information, with no shut-off valve!

When it comes to change, leaders get wake-up calls — whether they want them or not. The calls can come from the product quality group or the media, the customer, or a lone voice deep in their organizations. The wake-up call usually sounds like:

"What we're doing isn't good enough any more."

"What we did yesterday puts us at risk today."

"We have a new opportunity, but so does our competition — and whoever gets there first, wins."

Change leaders need the courage to put change into motion — to put their reputations on the line, and to make a claim for something better. Whether improving the dynamics of a small team, or achieving an organizational transformation, significant change does not come easily for the people whose lives are affected — and leaders need to make peace with this tough reality. Throughout any change process, they can expect noise from some sectors, and deafening quiet from others. Some people will object in writing. Others will avoid meetings. People may even attribute motives to leaders that are exaggerated at best, distorted at least, and sinister at worst.

Some leaders are particularly resilient in the face of these challenges. Beyond strong convictions and a good measure of self-esteem, they have ways to bolster their resolve and sustain attention and focus, and, ultimately, achieve successful outcomes. They embrace the unique responsibility of the change leader.

In our work with clients, we have found three change leadership strategies emerge as best practices. Successful change leaders:

• set up their organizations for success.
• build leadership alignment around the case for change.
• ensure the right stakeholders are engaged throughout the change process.

Let's look at how that's done.

Setting up the organization to succeed

Part of what makes change so hard on people and organizations is the dual requirement to stay on top of the change process, while simultaneously running the business. The work must go on. Just because you're turning things upside down doesn't mean your customers will forgive you if you falter in your ability to deliver.

To meet this challenge, leaders must put a change infrastructure in place. The more complex the change, the more robust the change infrastructure must be. The term "change infrastructure" probably sounds daunting, and costly, but it needn't be. Simply put, it's some combination of people and technology that enables on-going communication, meaningful involvement, and a work plan to get it done.

Following are some examples of change infrastructures, sized according to the complexity and depth of change:

• A pharmaceutical team needed to learn some lessons from past challenges and, from that learning, implement changes in roles and work processes. The only infrastructure it needed was a short-term planning team (comprised of the project manager, the team's leader, and an Interaction Associates consultant) and a work plan for meetings and milestones.

• A financial services corporation launched a major transformation in strategy and culture. The leader chartered a dedicated core transformation team, with ad hoc extenders in the communications, Human Resources, training, and Information Technology groups. Sub-teams were put in place to lead tracks of work, such as organizational design and development of a new market for the company's services. The transformation team developed Web-based capability to conduct spot surveys for quick feedback, disseminate brief news releases to keep people current with evolving changes, and rapidly provide special management communiqués, so that local leaders could be informed in advance of broadcast announcements.

• During the final stages of a medical center restructuring, a change leader convened a group of respected advisors ("the people everybody trusts"), representing several levels in the organization. She met with them on a regular basis to keep her informed about how the process was going, and where there were issues resulting from changes in the reporting relationships and expectations of staff.

A tip for managing a change infrastructure:

Keep the boundaries clear. No change team or consultant, internal or external, should ever act in the role of the people who have formal authority for leading the organization. No one, regardless of their passion and eloquence, can take the place of visible and vocal leaders. True, leaders can be deeply challenged by the constant need to stay on message and in the spotlight, and they may need help. At Interaction Associates, we see our role as fortifying leaders' resolve and capability, not doing their job for them.

Build leadership alignment around the case for change

Competing messages from the people at the top is the kiss of death for a change initiative. Important change initiatives will almost always cross the boundaries of groups, departments, and divisions. Creating and sustaining agreement among key leaders may be one of the most important factors for successful change.

For example, we have seen an IT implementation fail because of the loss of leadership alignment — not at the beginning of a project, but as it neared completion. The leaders and their project teams did a good job convening the right VP's for early agreements about strategy, scope, budget, and schedule. But nobody was reconvening them as the design evolved and the parameters shifted over time. The project leaders anticipated some senior level disagreement as the organizational impacts became clear. Unfortunately, they believed that if they let things get far enough along, the senior leaders wouldn't have any choice but to agree and go along. You have probably already guessed what happened: the senior leaders used their positional power to withdraw resources, stop the participation of their people, and appeal to the head of IT to block implementation!

Our clients tell us one of the most practical tools we offer them for building and sustaining alignment in a change effort is a simple framework for making a case for change. Clients are often astounded by how much they have in their heads that they haven't properly externalized or communicated.

One example of a business case is the threat facing the organization if it doesn't make some changes. Frequently leaders launch a change initiative because they see a problem or risk looming from their unique vantage point of leadership. In fact, if one of the differentiating characteristics of superior leaders is strategic thinking, it stands to reason that they would foresee problems before the rest of us. One job of a change leader, then, is to communicate not only the benefits and potential for change, but also any emerging risks that others may not yet perceive. Another critical task is to get the right leaders together and build alignment in private, until enough agreement can be reached for sustained support and clear, undiluted messages to the people who need to participate and own the change.

A tip on aligning leaders around the case for change:

Recognize the power of local leaders, both formal and informal, and do what you can to support their ability to be an effective force for change. I will never forget witnessing an entire roomful of managers, as if on cue, turning their heads at the end of a video conference in which their senior executives announced significant changes in the organization's strategy and structure. All eyes were on their local leader, and the questions began: "What does all this mean? What are we supposed to do about it? What's next for us?" If she hadn't had an opportunity to get pre-aligned with the senior executives' direction, she would have been unable to take the reins and maintain the confidence of the people she had been leading for years.

Engage the right people in the change process, and keep them engaged.

A colleague of ours often tells his clients, "When it's time to implement, you can't retrofit commitment." What he's talking about is the need to identify the critical individuals or groups who need to support or contribute to a change effort, and to involve them at the right level throughout the process. Some people will be so essential to your success you'll need to engage them early, and often. Others might be less critical players who would be satisfied by email updates on your progress. Still other groups or individuals need to participate in a direct, hands-on way, so that their interests and expertise help shape the final solution.

As a leader of change, you may not be the best person to do the actual work of engaging all the stakeholders, but ensuring maximum appropriate involvement will give you confidence that you have minimized the risk inherent when all stakeholders are not engaged. A 'stakeholder analysis' is a practical method for identifying and managing the involvement of all the right people. The process works best as a formal and structured aspect of planning change, and the resulting product is living document which is revisited and revised on a regular basis. Some of the critical questions to consider are:

• Who are the individuals or groups that need to be considered or involved at some point in the process?
• What is their importance to the ultimate success?
• How can we uncover their concerns, issues, and potential contribution?
• If they're opposing the change or refusing to engage with us directly, is there someone who supports us that could provide a better link?
• What methods of involving and informing stakeholders would help us strike a balance between efficiency and inclusiveness?
• Who are the losers, meaning the people who will have to give up positions, or people, or a valued way of working? How can we soften the blow, help them find other opportunities, or be involved in ways that help them save face and contribute?
• Who are the winners, the people who will gain the most from the change? They may be gaining political clout, or turf, or seeing their ideas adopted in the changes. How can we support their success?

Involving people can end up feeling like it generates a fire hose of information, with no shut-off valve! At Interaction Associates, we find it helps to map out the involvement strategy into phases so that people can be engaged at the right times with specific questions. For example, in the beginning of a process redesign, it is wise to ask key groups and individuals some open-ended questions about the problems with the current process, their ideas for improvement, and good ways to communicate with them throughout the process. As the design begins to take shape, useful questions focus on specific design choices and whether something important was overlooked.

A tip for identifying and engaging key stakeholders

The moment of truth comes in identifying the REALLY critical stakeholders — the leaders of critical teams or department, the smart people everybody listens to, the naysayers who have enough clout to shape opinions, the people who have succeeded or failed at similar efforts, or who may know things you don't. The resulting analysis becomes a highly sensitive document, not for dissemination, but to advise actions and strategies for meaningful involvement. Leaders of change are then equipped to determine exactly how to spend their limited time: if you only have a couple of hours a week to visit people face-to-face or in personal phone calls, make sure it's the people who are most critical to your success.

Finally — hang in there!

I recently had the good fortune to spend a transcontinental flight next to a senior executive in a high tech company (whose name you'd know but I won't repeat). For a couple of hours, we dissected various issues of change and leadership. Having led parts of massive corporate transformations over the years, he had noticed a recurring pattern. He struggled for the words to describe it: "You know, you go along, you keep plugging away, you have the conversations, you give the talks, you make the decisions, and nothing changes. And just when you think it's all over, you get a lift. Suddenly, people get it. They know what to do. They're in it. And the results start to come."

So, hang in there. Guaranteed, it won't go perfectly, you'll have miscalculated something. But as long as you show some guts, and take care of three critical priorities, your change is likely to be successful.

P. S. Don't forget the losers

I'll never forget watching a guy in the first few weeks of an organizational change that began with a senior level leadership transition. He was a vocal supporter of the new leader and the overall approach. However, within a few weeks, as the next wave of changes rolled out and the turf was redistributed, he had lost considerable political ground. It was hard to see his initial enthusiasm and hope replaced by equal measures of disgruntlement and dissatisfaction. He had lost, he had lost big. And he was vocal, but this time you can bet it wasn't supportive.

The really sad part was that once he got labeled as a trouble-maker, no one took the time to sit down with him, hear his concerns, and help him figure out his options. He was just committed enough to stick around, but so alienated from the mainstream he gradually got more and cynical and negative. At one point I had a conversation with him, just to check in, because I was worried about him. Since I was an outside consultant, working with his group on some other issues, he didn't even bother to edit himself with me. He let it rip. By the end of the conversation I was clear about what he really wanted: he needed his own boss, whom he felt had betrayed him, to sit down and tell him why various decisions had been made, and what it meant for his future. He figured if he was still seen as valuable, it would have happened by then. I knew his boss had simply overlooked this — he was so caught up in the demands of his ever-growing role that he hadn't taken the time to figure out whom he needed to re-engage.