My life, just like yours, is always changing. I work at an organization that is transforming itself and transforming banking for the greater good. I am raising a child (my first) and he is developing at a fairly alarming rate. When I have spare time I am reading This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Needless to say, I feel well positioned to deliver three tips for smashing through barriers to change.
Apathy, greed, inertia, confusion, fear, laziness, and busyness are all barriers to change. People struggle with changing everything from our diets to our professional processes. Sometimes the changes in our lives are slow and gradual and sometimes they unfold at such a lightning-fast pace that we can barely keep up. We are, as Fast Company’s Alan Deutschman argues, often our own biggest barriers to change – the odds are nine-to-one against a human being making a change that would save our life.
Given how terrible we are at changing ourselves, leading people through any kind of change is an incredible challenge. In fact, both Forbes‘s Greg Satell and change leadership guru Leandro Herrero suggest that building a culture of change – where people are comfortable, or even excited, by ongoing transformation of people, technology and processes – is the most efficient way to execute changes within a community.
Culture is basically how people live and what we talk about in our communities. So here are three ways to talk about making change happen at work, at school and in your neighbourhood so that it becomes part of your community’s social fabric.
Know the Most
You have all the answers to all the questions and, when you don’t, you know that the phrase “I don’t know, but we’ll learn together” is the right thing to say.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change,” said Albert Einstein. Every great change agent knows as much as there is to know about everything. Not, like, everything everything, but definitely all factors involved in the change process.
Start with the people (robots tend to be pretty okay with change, after all). Learn about the champions, detractors and non-committers. The more that people know about what’s changing the more likely that they’ll willingly participate in the process, so be sure to communicate openly, honestly and frequently.
In addition to peoples’ histories, know about the community’s story. Whether you are changing an IT department or a neighbourhood it is essential to know how they were, how they are, and how changing the status quo reflects (or doesn’t) the space and its people within it.
Empathize
You engage people where they are at because you understand their needs.
Change is really hard.
And if this sounds like an understatement to you then leading change might be something that you struggle with.
People are resistant to changing how they live and work. We form powerful connections to routines and processes like how we get to work and the way that we produce reports or write (some might say overwrite) blog posts.
Change agents have the unique ability to understand what motivates people and what scares them. Most importantly, people who excel at leading change know what will excite people about the experience and customize the explanation of what’s changing for individuals and teams. For example, when I worked in Student Services at the University of British Columbia we framed changes around the delivery of a world class student experience, because that’s what we all wanted to provide. There was change, but there was also a positive purpose that most people could get behind driving the process.
Be the Change
You are comfortable in ambiguity and make others comfortable, too.
Great change agents walk the talk and also talk the walk. You must be able to lead by example and demonstrate to enthusiasts and sceptics alike how things are changing for the better. You also need to clearly and engagingly articulate what is changing, why it is necessary, important and/or exciting, and how you are living the change experience always and everywhere.
For example, in This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that those of us who want to change the world – or save it – need to live our lives accordingly (consume less) and that we also need to join in a worldwide movement against an unjust status quo.
Whether you are creating viral change in your organization by building grassroots peer-mentoring-pods for managers or overthrowing capitalism as part of a global movement because, well, Naomi Klein is right, people will get inspired to make small or large modifications to their work and life when they see you living the change itself.