A Lesson in Change Management: Getting Them On Board Your Bus

I like to analogize organizational leadership with being a bus driver. For the moment, consider that management in your organization is asking you to buy into a change. It might be a fundamental change in direction, it might be an operational change, or it might be just a technology change. The change is a bus, and management (the bus driver) is asking you to get on.

When the bus pulls up, which of the following three factors will most compel you to get on board? Is it (1) the bus driver, (2) the destination, or (3) the journey? I’ve asked this question hundreds of times in leadership workshops, and I’ve kept a running tally over the years of the thousands of individual responses I’ve received. The results may surprise you. About 48% of those surveyed have chosen the bus driver, 33% chose the destination, and 19% chose the journey.

There's a valuable change management lesson here. The 19% – about one out of five – chose the journey because they enjoy change and are likely to take on any initiative with a sense of adventure. But the rest -- four out of five -- don’t love it and will need more to get them to buy in. They’ll need confidence in management and a clearly communicated, compelling vision of the destination. In fact, they will tolerate an uncomfortable trip if they are sold on the bus driver and the destination.

In my experience, too many managers focus their energy on the journey -- the management details that move the initiative from point A to point B -- and then are surprised at the level of apathy or resistance they encounter from employees.

Potential riders always read the destination sign at the top of the bus when it pulls up. If it says "NOT SURE" or "TRUST ME", employees are not likely to get on board. Even if you possess other great leadership qualities, you still need vision. I'll give you more on vision in a later post.

Think about a change you’re wanting employees to make. What's compelling them to get on board your bus? In what area -- your leadership presence, the vision you are pursuing, or how you will get there -- do you need to pay better attention?

A Teachable Moment With Lady Gaga

I admit I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga’s music or performance style. However, she’s caught my attention recently for something other than just her music and costumes.

Her name keeps coming up in respected business journals and television news stories. For example, Forbes named the 24-year old Lady Gaga the 4th richest and most powerful entertainer in its most recent ranking. She was named the #1 most creative person in business in 2010 by FastCompany. Polaroid named Lady Gaga Creative Director of a specialty line of Polaroid Imaging products. Harvard Business Review has blogged about her social influence, and 60 Minutes recently did a segment on her.

Here’s what I’ve learned about her.

• She knows what she wants. Years ago before she was Lady Gaga, Stephanie Germanotta told friends she intended to become a superstar entertainer.

• She has a fierce passion for her work, saying that her passion for her work is "so strong I can’t sleep."

• She is a self-described "master of the art of fame." She has studied why and how others have achieved (and lost) fame and has applied those principles to her own work with fearless discipline.

• She connects with her followers in a way that is meaningful for them. Having felt different and alone in high school, the primary message to her predominantly teenage audience is to be yourself and love yourself – you are perfect just the way you are.

• She appears to protect her "self" in the process. Her constant costume changes help her maintain some level of privacy and not give away too much of herself. She is quoted as saying, "Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no trouble, noise, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart."

In short, she’s visionary, passionate, principled, connected to the people she serves, and seems to be rooted in a strong sense of self. That’s a textbook list of peak performance qualities!

All too often, fame changes people. Whether or not Lady Gaga can hold on to herself and the principles that have propelled her to fame is yet to be seen. However, her commitment to peak performance principles certainly got her this far.

For those of you who are worried about the influence pop stars might have on young people, consider re-framing how you talk about them with your kids and grandkids. Regardless of how they might present themselves from an entertainment perspective, many are real-life examples of the principles of peak performance, and we all can learn from them.

How Leaders Influence Ethical Decision-Making

Ethical decision-making is, of course, a personal choice. Influencing employees to make every-day decisions that are consistent with organizational values and purpose means getting personal with them – getting into their heads and hearts – so their choices are more likely to be consistent with yours.

In our work with leaders over the past 17 years, we’ve identified a few practices from those leaders who have most successfully affected the way their employees think and act. Here are some recommendations based on what we’ve learned from them.

1) Be clear about your organization's values and purpose and set high expectations for ethical decision-making.

2) Make your own decisions based on a strong set of internal guidelines and business considerations. Weigh alternatives thoughtfully and talk openly about how you came to your decisions. Whether your decisions are right or wrong, you will show employees the process and considerations you used for getting there.

3) Pay close attention to and ask questions about the ethical issues present in everyday decision-making. Your employees will learn to expect these questions and, as a result, begin to see potential ethical issues for themselves.

4) Recover with grace when you find you haven’t made the best decision. Don’t deny, defend, justify, or shift blame. Instead, take ownership and talk openly about what can be learned from the situation.

The toughest ethical issues are not those that are black and white, but instead are shades of gray. The frequency and nature of the conversations you have about ethical issues will shape your employees' ability to see them, think about them, and resolve them.

What are you doing to raise your own awareness of ethical issues, both obvious and subtle? What are you doing to "institutionalize" ethical decision-making? We’d like to hear from you.

How Strong Leaders Deal with Resistance to Change

In my last blog, I drew the connection between dealing effectively with difficult people and working relentlessly on knowing who you are, where you are going, and who you want to take with you on that journey. Today I’d like to talk about another leadership challenge – resistance to change – and how focusing on self development matters there, too.

As anyone who has taken an important step toward achieving a goal or initiating a change knows, leadership always triggers resistance. Learning to deal with resistance is as important to leadership as any other quality.

When faced with resistance, some leaders capitulate to resistors and back away from leading. Some attempt to overcome resistance by exerting a stronger will than their opponents. (These leaders more often than not fail and burn out in the process.)

Many leaders fall into the easy – but still less effective – options of trying to understand the nature of the resistance, diagnosing why the resistance is happening, working hard to convince the other side, or trying to adapt solutions that appease the resistance but compromise the needed change.

The best strategy for dealing with resistance may also be the most difficult to execute. Strong leaders deal with resistance by first doing the following three things:

1) remaining emotionally calm while staying the course;

2) looking at themselves (instead of the resisters) to see where they might be stuck, and

3) staying connected to the resistors throughout the process without getting pulled into the drama.

Leaders who work on being emotionally separate and true to their aspirations while staying connected to those they lead provide the stability and maturity their communities need to move through the change. During any crisis of leadership, the better able leaders are to stay focused on themselves – to dig deep for clarity about what’s important – the better able they are to be decisive and move forward.

How Strong Leaders Deal with Difficult People

First of all, let’s make sure we’re talking about difficult people, not different people. When asked to think about difficult people we work with, more often than not we think about people who have different goals, approaches, methods, styles, and (sadly) even appearances. Those folks aren’t necessarily difficult; they are just different. Learn to tell the difference between difficult and different, and a lot of your stress goes away. Even better, learn to appreciate the value of differences, and begin to seek them out.

Some people, though, are just plain difficult. Difficult people take many forms. Some are agitators who get vocal over any perceived slight. Some are negative gossips who engage in personal attacks and back-stabbing. Some seem to indulge in judging and criticizing projects and ideas just for the sport of it. Whatever the behavior, difficult people cause lots of discomfort, waste time, and disrupt progress.

How do strong leaders deal with difficult people? They tell them that if they want to be part of the community (family, group, team, organization, etc.), they have to adapt to it.

While this may sound authoritarian, the point is that strong leaders don’t require conformity of thought. On the contrary, they give everyone permission (including themselves) to say no, to take risks, to ask for what they need, to challenge the status quo, and to be willing to rethink everything they know on a daily basis. These permissions unleash energy, encourage individuality, and stimulate creativity within an organization. They fuel growth.

Requiring difficult people to adapt to the community means requiring conformity of behavior. It forces them to be accountable for the things they do — not what they think — that are harming the community.

Requiring everyone in the organizational community to conform to certain behaviors also defines the values and character of the leader who sets the requirements. When leaders assert themselves this way, they define who they are. The people in the leader’s community can clearly see who the leader is and can opt in or opt out as followers. Setting behavioral boundaries is risky business, but it is what strong leaders do.

Leaders who are able to take these kinds of stands with difficult people know themselves well and have the courage that comes naturally with confidence in one’s core values and aspirations. This leads us to what we continue to emphasize in our work with leaders. The most effective leaders we see are those who work relentlessly on knowing who they are, where they are going, and who they want to take with them on that journey. They are not afraid to assert their well-defined selves into their community’s culture and, in the process, protect it from the invasive damage difficult people can inflict.

Give Yourself This Gift This Holiday Season

We keep a reading list. It’s made up of the professional development books and articles we most often recommend to others. The books that make it onto our list get there for one reason or another. Some provide compelling research on the nature of leadership and achievement. Some tell great stories about successful leaders and companies, and some simply shed light on what makes people tick.

We’ve just finished reading a book that’s going straight onto the list. The title of the book is Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time, by Susan Scott. This is a must-read for any leader or aspiring leader, and it has important cross-over value for your personal life. It’s an easy read and provides a step-by-step guide for having those tough conversations at work and at home that you have been avoiding or having with marginal or no success. Since all your conversations in life include you, the author begins by challenging you to confront the issues that are keeping you from having your most powerful, productive conversations. It’s all good stuff, so give yourself this gift for the holidays.

How do we decide which books to read for our continuing education? We listen for the sources other people reference — the books, articles, blogs, videos, webinars, and other medium that have impacted them — and when titles and authors keep coming up, we check them out. That’s how we found Fierce Conversations.

We’re always in the hunt for something that will challenge our way of thinking, create a light bulb moment, contribute to our understanding of leadership and personal growth, or inspire us to live with courage and purpose. Tell us your favorites. What have you read or seen that has made a difference in your work or home life? What made it important to you?

Getting To Know The People You Lead

In previous blogs, I’ve talked about how different communities are today from the ones in which most of us grew up. Among other things, we are an older, more diverse, and more mobile population. Something else has changed in America.

In his book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documents the decline in what he calls "social capital." Social capital refers to the social networks and organizations that build relationships and trust among people. Examples of traditional organizations that have nurtured social capital include church groups, PTAs, fraternal organizations, service clubs, and labor unions.

For reasons we have not been able to explain, social capital in America has declined steadily since the turn of the 20th century. One well-documented consequence of lower social capital is declining civic engagement. Why does civic engagement matter? Researchers in global democracy have discovered that people who are civically engaged create communities that are more economically vibrant than those where people are more reliant on the state. By principle then, it appears that a community with a higher level of social capital prospers more than it would otherwise. All other things equal, the communities with the highest social capital win.

There are signs that the decline in social capital may be reversing course. With social networking systems such as Facebook and Twitter becoming more mainstream, people are beginning to connect and converse in ways they didn’t five to ten years ago.

In an interesting article published today, FastCompany magazine asks whether or not the number of Facebook fans a candidate has can predict the outcome of an election. Here are some interesting numbers from their article:

In Florida, Charlie Crist has 101,127 fewer Facebook fans than his Republican rival Mark Rubio. Kentucky congressional contender Jack Conway has 74,285 fewer fans than Republican Rand Paul. In California congressional challenger Carly Fiorina has half as many fans as Democratic incumbent Rep. Barbara Boxer.

We’ll know soon enough after the election if there is a correlation between social networking strength and success at the polls. What I take from this now is a growing conviction that all leaders — public and private sector alike — need to plug into the new ways in which people are choosing to socialize.
Marion Anderson, UN Peace Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, was quoted as saying: "Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it." Electronic social networking is a growing, important mechanism for leaders to find out what’s in the hearts and minds of those they hope to influence.