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 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

Even though it spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs, the article, The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker had much relevancy to effecting change. It covered five tactics to do so and crystallized many of my experiences. This post covers the second tactic. Three future posts will cover the remainders.

The second tactic is strengthening relationships with employees. If change management were painting, then this tactic would be prepping and priming the surface. Just as the outcome of painting is largely determined by the prepping and priming of the underlying surface, the success of change initiatives is largely determined by the relationships management teams have with their employees.

This relationship building is best done through approaches that influence employees on an intuitive level, making emotional connections. Here are five approaches discussed in other postings:

1. Remembering and using employees’ names
2. Thanking employees for doing their job every 3-6 months
3. Shaking employees’ hands every 3-6 months
4. Learning to use compliments effectively
5. Tapping the power of personality in executives and senior managers

None of these requires any expense. However, they require a disciplined and well-coached management team. Ideally, these are happening on an ongoing basis not just when a change initiative is happening.

Some personality styles will be more comfortable with these, especially those with greater empathy, sensitivity or emotional intelligence. Managerial and executive assistants can help their bosses by scheduling and prepping them for these activities. They can even encourage their more reticent bosses.

Initially, if these approaches are new, employees might be suspicious so they will need some reassurance. However, regardless of the manager’s or executive’s interpersonal skills, employees will eventually appreciate them. The keys are consistently applying them and not expecting quick fixes.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

Even though it spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs, the article, The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker had much relevancy to change management. It covered five tactics to do so and crystallized many of my experiences. This post covers one tactic. Four future posts will cover the others.

The first tactic is picking the right moment. Everything has its time. You don’t paint when it’s raining, for instance. Effecting change is no different. As discussed previously, crises are excellent opportunities for effecting change. In another post, research indicated failure a better teacher than success. Teachable moments are a more moderate and individual form of this.

In organizations, divisions and teams, picking the right moment is more difficult. Here are a few:

• A particularly good or bad performance
• The gain or loss of a large account or piece of business
• Acquisition or sell-off
• Integration of new technology
• Layoffs and budget cuts
• Good or bad press
• Other game changing events

However, these events usually generate much activity in the form of capitalizing on or minimizing these situations. So, we miss tons of opportunities to effect change when we need to be asking:

• “What freshness can we add to keep the momentum going (or minimize the downturn)?”
• “What new actions can we take?”
• “What new ideas can we employ?”

Yes, people will likely squawk about having a lot on their plate, but remember change is about motion. Activity creates motion we can use. You can’t change the direction of something that’s not moving. That’s why you can’t wait for “slow time” to effect change. Besides, it’s usually too late by then.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

Many leadership models give the leader almost divine characteristics or minimally the best humanity can offer within a business context. These models often position the leader as the vanguard of change, the influencer who can move an enterprise from its current state to its future one.

Tunisia’s first lesson is just how conditional leadership really is. Rather than a visionary triggering and influencing events, the leader is often just trying to avoid being overrun. Tunisia’s uprising was not “ordered” by any leader. Tunisia’s second lesson is emotion’s power in galvanizing collective action around a particular point. Demanding free elections is that point in Tunisia. Finally, the third lesson is how small, simple, singular events can trigger these emotions. In Tunisia, the trigger was a college-educated street vendor who set himself on fire.

What do these lessons mean for business leaders?

First, a leader who fits one particular set of circumstances might not fit another. A large, mature enterprise defending its turf from competitors is going to require a different leader than a small, virgin one trying to tap an undeveloped market. Second, emotions are more powerful at galvanizing employees than any reasoned list of benefits. That means connecting initiatives to the particular emotions dominating the workforce such as greatness, safety, happiness and competitiveness. Third, the trigger doesn’t have to be grandiose. Small events that symbolize something greater about the enterprise can do it. This means small, almost invisible success stories can create a powerful narrative about the enterprise and its mission.

Overall, Tunisia reminds us that the number one resistor to change is often the leader of the enterprise. New conditions might necessitate a new leader.

On the Harvard Business Review site, I read the posting “True Leaders Are Also Managers” by Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He commented, “I kept bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged me: leading versus managing.” While I liked his main point linking good leadership to good management, he didn’t resolve the intuitive deficiencies I find in academic attempts to make a distinction between the two.

Figure 1: Good Leadership is Based Upon Good Management 

First, they overlook that leadership is an affect: an emotion in the follower producing an affinity for the leader. The subjective and personal nature of leadership is clearly expressed when we consider that we can manage things such as resources, investments and processes but we can only lead people. This affect transforms management into leadership, metaphorically in the same way we turn a house into a home. Figure 1 expresses the dependent nature of leadership on management as suggested by Professor Sutton. Thus, the difference between leading and managing is emotional.

Figure 2: Change Difference between Leadership & Management  

Second, academia tends to overlook that leadership is about change. It’s derived from lead which implies motion and in turn change – moving from one point to another. As Figure 2 shows, the greater degree of change we require, the more important leadership becomes; good management alone likely won’t be enough. For instance, we don’t say “They’re managing a revolution (extreme change),” we tend to say, “Leading a revolution.” When others respond to how they’re doing with “I’m managing” it implies “keeping up” or “going with the flow.” It doesn’t come close to implying any dynamic attempt of effecting change.

Just as economics is being transformed by behavioral economics, those same psychological influences need to begin transforming an impractical, out-dated, academic perspective of leadership.

Other links in this series:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part IV)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part V)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part VI)

This technique is one of the most effective for dealing with angry and anxious business situations. It has helped me and those I’ve instructed tremendously. Encouraging people to talk can help them feel better and present a better environment to present solutions. The diagram visualizes the technique for us. Its nickname is “sucking out the venom,” for we are extracting people’s anger and anxiety.

Venting Process – General Concept

Tips:

• Avoid stifling venting; you want to clean the air for your solution so you can present it on good ground.
• Encourage venting through your questions and demonstration of interest in their situation.
• Empathize with them by saying something like, “If that happened to me, I would be upset too.”
• Apologize if possible.  Depending upon the situation though, apologies can carry legal ramifications so a good apology can be along the lines of “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”  Consult your legal counsel if need be.
• Present your solution after the venting wanes; presenting it too early might leave deeper resentments unaddressed.
• Don’t worry about solving the problem; sometimes, all it takes is listening.

Translating the diagram into specific steps, we arrive at this:

Venting Process – Steps

1. Receiver (red square) expresses a negative thought or emotion to the presenter
2. Presenter (blue circle) pulls the negative expressions from the receiver by using open questions and encouragement (intensity of the feelings will likely increase for a short period)
3. Eventually, the presenter will begin to feel the negative energy dissipate in the form of cessation of talking, longer pauses, or quieter voice tones by the receiver
4. The presenter begins to isolate the negativity by clarifying details and  summarizing points
5. The presenter presents a plan (if possible) to address the problem

How do we change the impact of a message without changing anything about the message? In other words, as seen in the diagram, we don’t change the messenger, the receiver of the message, the message itself or the way it’s delivered . . . but, yet, we still change the message. Answer: we change how the person receiving the message feels about us because it alters how he interprets it.

Communication Map

Simply stated, if the person has a positive impression of us he will likely interpret what we say positively. Conversely, if he has a negative one, he’ll do so negatively. We most commonly see this when a commercial is pulled after the celebrity in it commits a crime or immoral act. That commercial is the same; it’s the same person in it, the same person viewing it, the same communication channel and the same message.  Nothing changes. However, because the viewer of the commercial now feels differently about the celebrity, she will have a different interpretation of the message delivered about the product or service.

This also applies to a whole range of emotions beyond those along on a positive-negative line. It can affect how much latitude people feel they have when we give them instructions. If they’re fearful of reprisals, they’ll be more inclined to follow them to the letter regardless if unforeseen situations arise. If they feel more confident about our relationship, they’ll be more likely to adjust.

What this means is that we can invest all our time in correcting “miscommunication” by learning to communicate better, but if we don’t solve the underlying relational problems, we are likely wasting our time. It’s the relational elements that affect how people feel about us, and in turn, interpretation of our messages.

We often anticipate and rationalize people’s decisions using a cost-benefit analysis. This perspective frequently leads to erroneous conclusions and restricts problem-solving capabilities. Consumer buying habits provide fertile fields for understanding this truth and the impact intuition has on people’s decisions. Pragmatically, these understandings can dramatically increase our range of low-cost solutions for our businesses.

A typical example of what grows from these fertile fields is a June 2009, Harvard Business Review (HBR) article by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton titled How Concepts Affect Consumption (research document). The article explores the emotional aspects of competition, expectations, goal setting and rewards in encouraging people to alter consumptive decisions without experiencing changes in their physical requirements. Of course, this does not mean that people won’t find rationales to support emotionally based decisions, but their intuitions will drive their cognition to produce these rationales.

For example, the HBR article suggests that “keeping up with the Joneses” is an emotion driving a competitively based buying decision; we have a need to buy what everyone else is buying in order to be socially accepted (i.e. peer pressure). Expectations affect people’s product experiences; price is a major setter of expectations. People will tend to like higher-priced beverages over lower-priced alternatives even though the beverages are identical. People will tend to feel better, quicker from higher-priced drugs even though they are the same as lower-priced alternatives. This effect even shows up tangibly as increased activity in the brain’s reward domains.

All of these changes and more were achieved without changing people’s objective requirements. Thus, when we grasp emotional drivers and how they impact people’s decisions via their intuition, we open up a whole new world of solutions for everyday business problems.

Many things are obvious to us consciously but our actions often betray us. Initiating change among employees is one of those things. We might consciously know that people aren’t light switches but we often expect change as though they were. How often do we say to our bosses, “Yes, I told them about the new way,” in response to pressure as to why employees didn’t adopt a change? Such a response indicates we are expecting people to be light switches.

Switch (FIG #1)

Tomato Plants (FIG #2)

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Look at Figures 1 and 2. Which is more analogous to employees, the light switch or the tomato plants? If we select the plants, can we fully expect them to grow with only one watering or feeding? If we view them as light switches, then yes, we could. Flipping them to “on” has them adopt the changes we want and flip them to “off” has them stop the old habits.

As you can see, my wife is growing these tomato plants by having them grow within a circular, vertical wire frame. This allows them to grow taller so more vines can bear tomatoes. Yes, sometimes the vines extend out of the frame, so she works them back in to encourage them upward. She just didn’t plop down the frame and then expect them to follow it.

The same holds true for people. They require follow up and regularly observation. It usually takes at least five enforcements of the change over a couple months before the change becomes the new habit. Even then, depending upon the change, a periodic refreshing of it is needed. That is why as managers our follow up is more important than what we’ve said.