Mike Lehr's Blog

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the fifth and final part of that series.

Many times we teach people the change we want. We even repeat that training. However, we often don’t ask them to demonstrate the change at later times to see if they’ve learned from the training. Three important reasons exist for this.

First, we need to observe how they integrate the change with their other activities so we can advise them on prioritization. Frequently people say, “I don’t have enough time.” It’s only through observing them integrating the change that we will ways to save time on other aspects of their jobs.

Second, as any physical therapist will attest, people have difficulty doing therapy at home, alone. That’s why it’s important for the therapist to observe them doing the activities. This will ensure that the patient will pick up the habit correctly. Eventually, they won’t need the therapist.

Third, and more subtly, we emphasize the importance of the change by investing our time to ask for demonstrations of the change. The more we invest ourselves in encouraging the change, the more our people will see it as important. These interactions also give us the opportunity to resell the change and address any objections.

The key to making this work is ensuring we break the change down into small, simple observable steps. If we are experiencing difficulty with employees modeling the change, it will most likely be a result of not having the change broken down finely enough.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the fourth of a five part series.

One of the biggest problems we have in promoting change is the assumption that people are light switches. We expect to say something once, and they will change. Advertisers learned long ago that running an advertisement just once doesn’t encourage behaviors of consumers and build brands inside their heads. Repetitively encouraging people to adopt change is a natural part of the change management process. Generally, we should expect to have to instruct and model the change three to four times, maybe more.

The problem is that we often position this more as following up to ensure people do what we told them. Typically, we code this as accountability in our business jargon. It’s better to position this repetitiveness more as a normal part of the instructional and modeling process; it’s a natural part of the change management process. We can do this by saying something like:

I don’t expect you to learn and perform these changes well overnight. There will be challenges. Therefore, I will commit to being available to you on a regular basis so we can help one another make these changes as easy and natural as possible for all of us.

This language establishes an expectation that our follow up is normal and not punitive. It indicates we’re in this together. Otherwise, they could easily construe our actions as micromanagement. The actual frequency of our repetitive instruction and modeling will depend upon the nature and scope of the change.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the third of a five part series.

Tactic #3 involves breaking down and delivering change in very small, simple steps. For organization-wide change, every manager has responsibility for detailing this for every one of his employees. This is difficult.  Usually, there are two problems:

1. Failing to uncover some important details
2. Seeing only one step where there are two or more

Unfortunately, the difference between too little and too much detail isn’t clear. Generally, it’s better to err on the latter; while keeping in mind timing and the threat of over planning, and accepting that we will always overlook some details.

When we bring the change to the individual level, it’s extremely important that we break down the change into small bites and deliver them one at a time. Emotionally, the change is too daunting if we show someone all of it at once.

Often, the worse person to detail these steps is someone who performs them well because they come naturally to her. Thus, what she sees as one step could easily be five to ten. In these cases, someone with a project or process management orientation is helpful. He can observe and work with the model to detail the steps. If the change is dramatically new and lacks a model, he can jointly work with the expert on the new process and those affected employees to detail the new steps.

Once detailed, someone with a training attribute can help organize them into a developmental plan for the manager’s use with his employees.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time