Suzanne Elshult, http://hrnow.net Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance.
The last several years I have picked a “personal annual focus” as a way to go below the surface and explore new territory for myself. Last year my focus was on “social media.” I immersed myself: got on Twitter, developed two blogs and became an avid user of Facebook. In 2010 my focus is on “deep change.” My bias is that my home brain and work brain is one and the same (just as my life and work have become inextricably intertwined), so I am delving into “deep change” from both a professional and personal perspective. While I am doing personal work to become more aware of my own deep seated patterns of being, I also, as the founder of several executive roundtables, decided to involve my marketing and human resources executives in discussions around “deep change.” As executives we have plenty of opportunities to get exposed to change models and change management techniques. Our recent roundtable discussions were specifically designed to NOT go there, but to instead help us as leaders in our organizations take a close and personal look at who we are and how “who we are” determines how we position and lead change.
Change is certainly becoming the constant in our organizations. It is coming at us from all directions – global, financial, technological, environmental, personal, social, regulatory. Some say that change today is different from yesterday –it has a stronger emotional component than used to be the case..perhaps some nostalgia about the good old days. There is certainly more competitive pressure in the changing landscape, and because of the sometimes staggering velocity of change we are facing, we have less time to wait for people to come around. There are all kinds of compelling reasons for us as leaders in our organizations to develop change mastery.
Why is change so difficult? Can the answer be found in brain research? It is fascinating to me that scholars seem to be increasingly paying attention to the relationship between behavioral and neurological sciences. So, what does brain science tell us about change?
First and foremost, according to John Medina (author of Brain Rules), “safety” will hijack everything and anyone all the time. In other words, the first priority of the brain is “safety.” In our organizations, as we roll out change, the fundamental question every single individual will have is one of “Am I safe?”
Second, once the brain is “safe” it starts looking for what’s interesting – the brain doesn’t want to be bored. And, since boredom and interest is relative, the challenge for leaders to find compelling reasons for change is huge and complex.
Why do change initiatives fail?
About 70% of organizational change initiatives fail, probably not because the change was a bad idea, but because leaders failed to help employees feel safe, further complicated by the fact that each and every employee has different risk tolerance levels. What feels safe for me is probably not feeling safe to you. What is an opportunity for you may feel like a risk for me.
One of my marketing executives shared an interesting story. At one point in his career he had been the catalyst for a major change initiative taking an organization from an engineering focus to a sales focus. While business results coming out of the change were impressive, they were not sustained when he left the organization a few years later. So, what was the problem? This change initiative included significant personal change for individuals at all levels of the organization and he had failed to make sure that the whole organization felt safe and invested in the change. He had focused too narrowly on the functions most immediately impacted and as a result, the change could not be sustained as employees gradually returned to the comfort of what had felt safe in the past. This executive had let his own results orientation and sense of urgency get the better of him and failed to recognize the importance of reaching out to the whole organization as a critical element of sustainability.
Another executive shared the pitfalls of having been too passionate in leading change and mistakenly assuming that everyone else would feel the same. In reality people on the receiving end of his passion became fearful. As a leader he had to ask himself how willing he was to stop himself and start asking some tough questions. Why am I doing this? What are my employees feeling unsafe with? Are they even aware that they are feeling unsafe?
What is the key to successful change?
Between the two groups of executives tackling this question, several themes emerged:
• As a leader, you have to be courageous and be willing put yourself out there and take risk at a personal level: “You have to become that thing you are saying you want us to become.” The reality is that the eyes of all employees will be on you. Will your actions match your words? Dissonance WILL be noticed….for example the CEO who takes a BIG bonus at the same time as the workforce is severely cut back….You had better be prepared to ask yourself whether you are willing and prepared to change and demonstrate the behaviors you ask for before you roll out the change.
• If you don’t come up with a compelling reason to change, you cannot successfully work through the natural resistance to change. Can you answer the question: What bad things will happen if we don’t change?
• As a leader you have to demonstrate humility, be in a constant state of learning and be transparent about your own weaknesses. You have to embrace learning, no matter what the source is.
• You have to surround yourself with other agile leaders. One of the HR executives for whom this had been a particularly important element of working through change at his company said: “They challenge the hell out of me!”
• You have to be keenly aware of your own personal leadership style and risk tolerance level. When you position change you do it from that perspective and run the danger of ignoring and forgetting that others have different needs. Leadership style profiles, such as DISC, can be a valuable tool to help leaders become more aware of their own styles, how they impact others and how to adapt (DISC is a cornerstone of my executive coaching practice, and there are many other good assessments such as the Behavior Style Profiles of the Effectiveness Institute).
What is HR’s Role
The HR executives also had a discussion around the unique role HR can play in organizational change initiatives. Here are some of the nuggets from that discussion:
• Present the raw truth to your CEO – smack your CEO right between the eyes – you may get pushback, but over time your honesty will be appreciated. Realize that you have to earn the right to be this direct and couple the truth-telling with humility,
• Realize that it is not HR’s role to save everyone, but rather to help educate employees to make choices and decisions that they ultimately own personally,
• HR has a bird’s eye view that provides a unique opportunity for HR to act as a connector and as the face of change.
• Develop a learning organization culture where change has become the constant.
• Be genuine and approachable. An open door is sacred. You cannot allow yourselves to hide behind it.
My 2010 journey into “deep change” has started. I understand that this year will provide me with an unprecedented opportunity to wrestle with both personal and professional change. I also understand that some of the change I am facing has both risk and opportunity and how I manage and try to mitigate risk and fear goes back to deep seated patterns that have developed over a lifetime. I look forward to the challenge. Stay tuned.
Lastly, my thanks to George Myers from the Effectiveness Institute for working with me to make the HR and Marketing Roundtable discussions on Deep Change productive and truly meaningful for myself and the close to 50 execs from my roundtables that participated.