Making Change Last
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Click here to view and download this month’s worksheet to utilize on your own or with a Group and/or Team over the next 12 months.
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“You’ve got to prepare the soil if you expect change to take root.”
Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
We continue our quest during quarter two of 2023 to be and become change ready at the individual, team, and organization wide levels. Our resource is the outstanding book, Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers, authored by Drs. Robert Kriegel and David Brandt. The book contains a powerful tool, the Change Ready Profile, as well as extensive strategies on how to make change last.
As leaders, we may unconsciously or inadvertently mislead team members about change. The first thing we tell our colleagues is, “We’re going to make some changes and you are going to love them. Everything is going to be great!” Team members need leaders to be truth speakers; the reality is change is challenging, change is difficult, and change can even be painful.
Leo Tolstoy said, “Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” The truth is the time to plan is when you don’t need to. The time to build trust is not when you need it. The time to prepare for change is always. As Kriegel and Brandt note, “You’ve got to prepare the soil if you expect change to take root.”
Key organizational disciplines that create the foundation for highly change ready individuals and organizations include creating extreme clarity about organizational DNA, building a culture of trust and caring, creating and consistently implementing business, strategic, and succession plans, and coaching, training, and equipping every individual on your team when you are not on the verge of change or are not being forced to change.
Leaders take a long term, systemic, and strategic approach to making change last, an approach that includes:
Identifying the challenges of change, resistance drivers, and methods of resistance individuals employ when faced with change, and developing and implementing a change management strategy
Establishing benchmarks and expectations for navigating change and understanding and developing change readiness
Recognizing the Executive/Leadership & Human Resource Professional roles in creating systemic organizational disciplines, methods, models, and applications in response to the Associate Development Process
Developing tools to implement effective change management strategies and create high performance teams and leaders at all levels of their organization
Implementing a change ready strategy and creating a change ready environment means developing a specific road map complete with action items. Taking the following five steps according to Dr. Kriegel and Brandt will create the framework for making change last, but first, the soil must be prepared:
Rounding Up Sacred Cows
Developing a Change Ready Environment
Turning Resistance into Readiness
Motivating People to Change
Developing the Seven Personal Change-Ready Traits
First, start the process by hunting and rounding up sacred cows in your organization. Drs. Kriegel and Brandt suggest examining everything through the lens of these five questions:
Why are you doing it? What is the rationale?
What if it didn’t exist?
Is it already being done by someone else?
How and when did this practice come into being and who started it?
Can another person, department, or company do it faster, better, or more easily?
Second, commit to developing a change ready environment which means ensuring first and foremost the leaders of the organization can be trusted. Leaders are the facilitators and navigators of change and the success of the organization rests on their ability to earn and keep trust. Levels of trust can be evaluated by asking if the following is present in the leadership:
Honesty – Can you believe what they say?
Integrity – Do they keep their promises?
Openness – Do they share what they know?
Third, turn resistance into readiness by creating strategies to openly deal with each of the four drivers of resistance. Drs. Kriegel and Brandt outline the four resistance drivers as follows:
Driver #1 – Fear – “What if… I lose my job, look stupid, can’t adapt, etc.”
Driver #2 – Feeling Powerless – “Not one asked me!”
Driver #3 – Inertia – “It’s too much effort, too uncomfortable.”
Driver #4 – Absence of Self-Interest – “What’s in it for me?”
Fourth, motivating people to change means consistently taking steps to overcome inertia and fear. The four keys to inciting and impelling team members to act are:
Urgency – Use data to illustrate the need for change now.
Inspiration – Demonstrate the courage to take risks and never give up.
Ownership – Allow team members the authority to make decisions and own outcomes.
Rewards and Recognition – Employ intrinsic as well as extrinsic strategies.
Fifth, develop the seven personal change-ready traits, achieve one of the tenets, and cornerstone 1-1 coaching. Creating a change ready culture means developing and coaching change readiness in every individual team member. We discussed the change ready profile and change ready strategies in the April Tool of the Month and May Tool of The Month, respectively.
As you prepare the soil consider all stakeholders, internal as well as external, and recognize everyone has varying degrees of self-sufficiency and levels of change-readiness. Tilling the soil of change is both an art and a science. Assign tasks in relationship to the capacity team members possess. Adjust your pace and expectations, never lower your standards but always adjust your expectations of others as you meet them where they are.
The route to creating change readiness is to never stop creating change readiness. FM Alexander said, “People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” The most highly effective leaders recognize the habit of planting and tending to their team and organization if they desire to make change last!
-LS
This Month’s Worksheet
Click here to view and download this month’s worksheet to utilize on your own or with a Group and/or Team over the next 12 months.
Recommended Quarterly Reading
Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
By Drs. Robert Kriegel and Robert Brandt
2023
Managing From The Inside Out
Winter 2023
February 1, 8, 15, 22
March 1, 8, 15
AM Classes: 8:30-11:30 A.M.
PM Classes: 1:30-4:30 P.M.
Spring 2023
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June 7, 14
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