“Management will never fully support these changes.” In fact, management had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in new equipment and process redesign.Picture a small, brightly lit conference room. A dozen employees sit around a few tables, ready for a change management workshop. On a long table at the back are a couple of urns of coffee, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and two large platters of stale pastries.
Typical workshop, right?
Now, picture those same employees leaping to their feet in anger, faces purple, shouting and hurling insults at the top of their lungs. Picture them doing that for two solid hours.
The object of their rage? Me—the guy presenting at the front of the room. You’ll recognize me by my futile attempts to regain control of the situation. It seems funny in retrospect, but it wasn’t at the time. I was legitimately scared. It was arguably one of the most violent change workshops I had ever led. Participants even made verbal threats toward me in full view of management.
“We know people like you,” they told me.
“We’re watching you,” they said.
It was clear they felt they had nothing to lose, and it occurred to me at one point that if things got physical, I’d get no sympathy. Face down a biker gang and you can hold your head a little higher in that full-body cast. Face down the employees of an auto dealership in a conference room? Not so much.
I left the workshop shaken and scared. Some of the employees came up to me afterward to apologize, but that didn’t do much to settle my nerves.
Given their behavior, it might surprise you to learn they actually recognized that the change I was suggesting was necessary to catch up with their competitors. It might also surprise you to know the change I was suggesting: providing their customers with express car service. Yes, that’s it. Customers were requesting faster turnaround—a service their competitors were already offering.
The employees in the workshop were reasonable, experienced professionals, so why were they resisting such a logical change? Well, they had a multitude of reasons—excuses ranging from changes in the work schedule to compensation shifts they believed would result from working differently. All of the rational arguments I had prepared to address each concern seemed to fall on deaf ears. They refused to listen.
In other words, their response was totally illogical.
The question is: Why? The facts to support the change were very clear and quite compelling. The change was not going to be difficult to implement. It wasn’t a case of a lack of resources or of laziness either. These were well-intentioned, hardworking people who were proud of their work and the service they provided.
And still, they were not future ready.
What I was seeing was not unique. When looking back at all the transformational projects I’ve been involved in, one thing is clear: people’s responses to change have nothing to do with logic. We’re hardwired to hold on to the Now instead of embracing the Next. After all, the Now is comforting and predictable. We do not want to leave this presumably safe, familiar place. It is reassuring and comforting. Losing it is like losing a piece of ourselves.
The Next, on the other hand, is hard. Why? In a word: fear. Anything that deviates from the status quo scares people. We reflexively resist new ideas and new ways of doing things because we cling to the past. For an individual who hasn’t developed change resilience, even a small change can trigger an existential crisis.
I meet people struggling with this every day. Believe it or not, you can see the signs of agitation in their eyes. These people are experiencing genuine panic over something as innocuous as the implementation of a new fulfillment system or a modification to the company’s reimbursement policy. What’s going on here?
Psychologists will tell you that these employees are in fight-or-flight mode. After all, the typical human response to change is anxiety. When the human body experiences fear, the brain releases potent chemicals into the bloodstream to help us either defeat the threat or turn tail and run for the bushes. This instinctive response is useful when there’s a bear in your campsite—not so much at 9:30 a.m. Monday morning in conference room C. Fight-or-flight brings increased strength and endurance, and quicker response time. The one thing it doesn’t amplify is rational thought.
I’ve run some tough sessions in my career. My teams have engaged with more than a million employees at organizations ranging from government agencies serving citizens and cruise lines delighting vacationers to logistics operators managing overnight shipments and health-care providers treating life-threatening conditions. Every transformation effort is different, and introducing change is never easy. The workshop I described at the start of the chapter, however, was on another level. The raw emotion and resistance were like nothing I’d ever experienced. While the participants acknowledged that the service would help them against the competition, customers wanted it, and something along these lines was necessary, this change had to be stopped.
I can imagine you’re shaking your head right now.
Come on, Lior, you’re thinking. I’m not like those people. Sure, I’ve resisted change in the past. I may even be pushing back right now. But my reasons for resisting change are always legitimate, logical, and reasonable. These people were clearly just . . . crazy.
But they weren’t.
What could lead reasonable, experienced professionals to aggressively resist a logical improvement, one that had become standard in the industry, one that customers now demanded?
To be fair, they had their reasons. Unfortunately, their reasons weren’t very logical. Here’s a rundown:
“Management will never fully support these changes.” In fact, management had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in new equipment and process redesign.
“This is just the program du jour. We have a track record of launch-and-abandon.” Management was committed to some major structural changes, and employees knew it. In fact, the dealership was due to begin constructing a permanent interior installation, featuring newly designed signage, the day after I left. Such investment does not represent a launch-and-abandon mentality.
“Our customers don’t want that.” All their competitors already offered this service, so it was pretty clear customers did want it.
“This will mess up the work schedule.” Yes, the new express service would change the work schedule, but for the better. Because express work was an optional choice for customers and would be handled separately, workers would have more flexibility when it came to important but nonurgent work.
“This is going to affect my paycheck.” In fact, the new express car service offering would take low-margin services such as oil changes off employees’ plates, freeing them to focus on more profitable, large-ticket services that they’d previously had to refuse or refer elsewhere due to lack of resources.
“They will outsource our work to less-qualified technicians.” Yes, the change would require additional labor, but every profession has degrees of specialization and, with time, every employee gains more expertise. By fighting the natural expansion of offerings, they were destroying the dealership’s ability to grow and evolve.
All my responses to these concerns were met with grimaces, crossed arms, and blank stares. They didn’t just refuse to listen—they couldn’t hear me at all. Their fear was too loud. Eventually, the shouting began.
The employees at the dealership demonstrated a remarkable lack of change resilience. But their negative reaction wasn’t truly unusual. Dial it down from a ten to a seven, and you have an example of the typical employee reaction to a change effort. Every time I work with a new company, I meet smart people who are generally proud of what they do. They want to do good work and serve the customer, but they still fail to adapt and stay relevant.
Why?
Few words in the English language conjure both fear and excitement the way change does. We might get excited about something new, but we can’t help but fear the mistakes we’re sure to make, the uncertainty involved.
Change, in other words, is terrific—as long as we don’t need to do any changing ourselves.
Everyone wants to reap the benefits of a positive improvement, but people still resist letting go of old behaviors in order to make room for new ones. They’d prefer that transformation be painless, fast, and immediately rewarding. A quick trip to the Promised Land without the jet lag or the turbulence. We want to break one of life’s cardinal rules: “No pain, no gain.” Since we can’t come out and admit a motive so childish, we rationalize our delays or idealize the past:
“New is not necessarily good.”
“How come no one else is doing it?”
“What’s so bad about the way we do it now?”
“Go prove it with others first.”
“My customers are different.”
“There is no need for a solution because there isn’t a genuine problem.”
“If there were really a need for it, someone else would have invented it already.”
“Give me a few more days/weeks/months/years.”
“My grandmother lived to a hundred and two without it.”
These are all ways to avoid saying what we really mean: “I don’t want to change.” I have heard all of these excuses—and many more. If you’ve ever tried to implement change, you’ve heard some of them too. Anyone who’s tried to change has likely come face-to-face with the incredible hidden strength of the human spirit: we are amazingly crafty and tenacious when it comes to resisting change and holding on to old behaviors. Sometimes we even hold fast to the tried-and-true while preaching change to others!
Given the speed and scope of change today, we simply don’t have time for these excuses anymore. This pervasive lack of change resilience has a real and tangible impact on organizations:
For one leading US credit card company, we identified $20 million of additional customer charges a month if they delighted only 5 percent of their unhappy customers. (Imagine the financial impact if they delighted more than 5 percent!)
For a global over-the-counter pharmaceutical manufacturer, we identified a loss of $104 million for every 1 percent loss in customer satisfaction.
A manufacturer that refused to change its invoicing practice discovered that the outdated method was costing $21 million a year.
And on and on. Change represents an opportunity to either increase revenue or decrease costs. When change is delayed, losses mount. Yet most employees still fall back on a multitude of tricks to avoid change at all costs, paying lip service to it and then abandoning it when no one is looking. It all comes down to fear.
As the diagram illustrates, the top of the pyramid reflects the type of change resistance that’s most visible. For example, people will frequently express concerns about the future such as “What will it be like?” Such statements, however, are deceiving. If you attempt to address them, you will miss the deeper, underlying issues. Underneath every future-based fear, there are two deeper fears: fears rooted in the past, and fears triggered by the challenge to one’s identity. When people are stuck in the past, they struggle with how to contextualize their past performance with a need for change. They need to place their performance in a positive light before they can engage with the future-based fears. Identity-based fear takes this a step deeper. Often people feel that the upcoming change is a threat to who they are and not just what they do. They struggle with more existential questions about the impact of the future on their values and how they define themselves. Addressing those deeper fears is essential to preparing for the future.
Let’s look at a very real and very significant example of disruptive change in action.
Sweden is rapidly becoming a cashless society. One in five transactions happens digitally (the vast majority are credit-card based), and cash payments amount to less than 2 percent of the value of all payments in the country. Retailers aren’t required to accept physical currency and many don’t, preferring payment by credit card or smartphone. Swedes can’t even use cash to pay for public transportation and many other key services.
As a result, many Swedish banks no longer keep cash on hand or allow deposits. ATMs are vanishing rapidly. Most financial transactions of any kind are completed electronically, and the trend is only accelerating. Within five years, cash will be a thing of the past in Sweden.
Such a radical shift poses a serious threat to, let’s say, a twenty-year bank veteran who believes her job is to accept and dispense cash. To an ATM engineer tasked with installing and maintaining these soon-to-be-extinct machines, this is a crisis.
Change initiatives are always presented as the Next Big Thing, announced with much fanfare as the big breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for. For employees, however, these initiatives read as an assault on their hard work. Past achievements are being painted, in retrospect, as archaic, inadequate failures.
When announcing a new change, don’t forget to celebrate the past and acknowledge the hard work it took to get where you are. A change shouldn’t be an assault on the past—it’s a way to build on a legacy.
For a Swedish bank teller with decades of experience at the counter, cashless banking tells her: “You’re useless.” She will struggle to reconcile the hard work she has invested over the years with the shiny new technology that renders all of it obsolete. She will wrestle with accepting what is, to everyone else, an unambiguous improvement.
Typical change initiatives are so preoccupied with celebrating the future that they fail to recognize the importance of the past and those who labored to get the organization here. It is only when we respectfully acknowledge the significance of the past that we begin to get people unstuck. This requires proactive communication and a genuine understanding of the history of the organization leading up to the change.
If you’re leading a change program at your organization, it’s your job to make people comfortable by creating a meaningful transition between the past and the future. If you’re an employee tasked with adapting to a new change, you have the opportunity to help your colleagues and customers embrace the change by demonstrating the connection between the past you’ve lived and the future you will build.
We’ll dive deeper into exactly how to do this in the pages that follow—and I’ll address exactly how to face all the fears you or the ones you love may be having about a looming change. For now, what’s important is to remember that change is not a complete break with the past, and it’s certainly not a dismissal of anyone’s hard work or past achievement.
Many people reject change because their previous experiences with it have been so negative. So let’s take a moment to get clear about any preconceived notions you might have when it comes to change. Ask yourself:
The last time you made a major change, were you excited or reluctant about it?
Take a look at the software or communication tools that you’re using. Were you planning to adopt that new technology? Did you embrace it immediately? Or was it something that you were dragged into?
If you were dragged into making a change, why was this the case? What was your initial reaction?
When working with employees around digital transformation, it’s very easy to see the sadness in their eyes. They recognize the need to adapt, but deep down they fear that they are being replaced. They see the relationship with technology as a zero-sum game in which every advancement makes them a little less valuable. While they know that customers seek new technological solutions, they feel marginalized in the process. Their life’s work is being reduced to an iPhone app, diminishing the value they used to create for their customers.
To them, change is an existential threat.
When I work with teams who are being asked to adapt to new technology, I ask, “How much value do you add by filling out forms for a customer?” Often, this question helps them reframe the situation. What they failed to see was that the technology was actually liberating them from this chore, freeing them up to spend more time adding value to their customers’ lives. Now they have much more time to consult, advise, and, ultimately, help people make the right decisions.
Change usually opens up new opportunities. That’s why we should ask the following questions whenever facing a new change:
How does the change impact or support my core cause?
What do I need to stop doing as a result of the change?
What time/resources/mind-set will I gain from making this change?
How does the change liberate me to pursue my core cause?
Let’s be honest about why change is so scary. As technology evolves, it does render certain kinds of jobs obsolete. New jobs are created, and they usually demand skills that those in eliminated positions don’t yet possess. All too often, companies fail to put a plan in place to help employees evolve into these new roles. So people who have long identified their worth with their work find themselves cast adrift, desperately seeking a role—and a new identity.
Is it any wonder that so many of us are scared of change?
Before we completed our research into this phenomenon, I often wondered how rational and intelligent people could make such sloppy and irrational arguments against obvious improvements. Today, I have a much better idea why people resist the inevitable.
If you’re unsure why those around you are having such a difficult time embracing a new change, read on. This methodology is a step-by-step plan for involving everyone in the process of change: after all, change shouldn’t be an excuse to leave people behind. Just as managers expect employees to stay current with the demands of their industries, managers have a responsibility to involve their employees in the evolution of their companies.
And if you’re worried that shifts in the economy or your industry are putting your job in danger, take heart. Notice that I said that change renders certain “roles” obsolete. But what it can’t destroy is the need to provide high-quality services to people in need.
Like opera, change rejection is an art, one that has been perfected by the human spirit. Just when you think you’ve covered all the arguments, someone will miraculously discover a new aria to lengthen the final act another few bars. It’s astonishing—and infuriating too, if you’re the one trying to make change happen.
While the excuses themselves will vary by company and industry, I have identified six common change rejection “personalities.” When encountering resistance—whether your own or someone else’s—it’s incredibly helpful to identify which one you’re dealing with, because each personality responds better to different approaches.
You’re probably unaware of the many small ways you put up resistance. Diagnosing your change rejection personality can open a window onto your unconscious behaviors and offer a path toward solutions.
Nothing in this meeting should be coming as a surprise to anyone. All the relevant stakeholders have reviewed the latest customer study. Everyone knows the severity of the customer issues and the consequences of not taking action immediately. We have gathered this morning solely to sign off on the new strategy. Yet, as we cover the core findings one last time and begin to review everyone’s next actions, Chris, a marketing director, speaks up.
“The numbers are conclusive,” he declares cheerfully. “They leave no doubt about what needs to happen next.”
Then, the punch line.
“Just to make sure, though, would you mind running the numbers one more time in a slightly different way?”
Every team has a marketing director named Chris who decides at the last minute that he wants to compare the data from single women over the age of fifty in southern Florida with what we have from young families in Seattle. Chris is one of the six types of change rejecters: the staller. Chris will never object to the data per se. You can’t argue with the facts, right? Instead, he will innocently dig his heels in using tactics like this and make you drag him the rest of the way.
Back to the meeting. Here’s how I worked with Chris’s resistance—and how you can handle your own staller.
In the interests of consensus, the project champion looks ready to agree to Chris’s request for additional analysis. Time for me to step in.
“What are you trying to establish that isn’t in the report already?” I ask. “And how would you measure the cost of delaying the original plan against the added value of any new information you might find?”
Silence in the room. Chris was counting on his colleagues to let him get away with stalling once again. He certainly wasn’t expecting a challenge.
“We have frustrated customers,” I add, in the hope of restoring the sense of urgency in the room. “Every day we leave them that way is another day they can shop around with our competitors.”
Chris’s forced cheerfulness evaporates.
“Okay,” he responds, defeated. “Let’s do it.”
The staller’s fear is simple: the proposed change might uncover that he didn’t do his job as well as he could have or neglected something critical. Stalling the change effort is his last desperate bid to protect his reputation. This was why Chris was so resistant. He’d made some mistakes in the past—and the proposed change was going to bring them to light.
The best way to handle a silent delayer is to dig deep into these additional requests by asking questions like:
Why do we need more information?
How will what we might learn affect the proposed change?
Will the additional value offset the cost of the delay?
Don’t play nice with the staller. Instead, emphasize the very real damage that delays will have on your overall strategy. If you know you have a staller in your midst, approach him in advance to address these issues in a way that minimizes the damage to him and to the change effort. Even better, find new opportunities for the staller to own the new change instead of fearing it.
On encountering one staller, my team discovered that he was afraid of the additional work that the new program would add to his plate. He was comfortable in his marketing role—his department activated many fun sponsorships that afforded him trips to glitzy events. The new program and additional responsibility meant fewer fun events and more customer interactions, something he wasn’t looking forward to. We presented a compromise: a new reduced role that would allow him to stay involved with sponsorships while a new director of marketing was appointed.
“These customers are stupid,” he repeated angrily. “They just don’t bother to read the manual.”
He was one of my R&D managers at Hewlett-Packard. An engineer through and through, he was in love with his products. Generally speaking, engineers don’t like change—unless it’s on their terms. They also tend to suffer from acute NIHS: Not Invented Here Syndrome. For someone with NIHS, the only thing better than a good idea is his idea.
“We show your products to everyone,” I replied. “Apparently, only the stupid ones actually buy them. So until I get different products, we’re stuck serving stupid customers.”
The engineer—who doesn’t, of course, have to be an actual engineer—is very open to change, as long as it’s her change. Unfortunately, there is no room for this kind of monomaniacal thinking in today’s world—not even if you’re the CEO. Good ideas come from everywhere—and sometimes someone else has a more appropriate solution than we do. To adapt, people need to be ready to embrace the optimal approach regardless of its provenance.
The engineer shuns risk. She is most comfortable with the clear, the proven, and the predictable. But change is often none of those things.
If you’re an engineer or you’re trying to convince one of the need for change, it’s time to do some research. Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the old way is no longer valid. Engineers are more likely to accept that innovation is necessary if your case is made with copious rigor and detail. Give them (or yourself) all the facts they can stand in order to activate their change resilience.
It’s also helpful to develop a set of milestones for change. This systematic approach reassures the engineer that data will continue to be collected, analyzed, and incorporated along the way.
“Are you kidding me? I don’t have time for change! I’m needed in five different places right this very minute. In fact, I’ve received more than fifty critical e-mails since we started talking.”
The busy bee is the manager with too much on his plate. Sometimes it seems as if his chief responsibility is to convince everyone else of his importance to the organization. The company’s very survival depends on him—or at least, he’d like people to think so. The busy bee’s typical response to a change effort is contempt: “I can’t be bothered worrying about the future when I’m playing such an instrumental role in closing the quarter!”
The busy bee is afraid of losing his prominence in the organization. He puts out fires; saving the day constantly garners him respect. This change on the horizon may cause the busy bee to lose his privileged spot by extinguishing those fires for good. How will he prove his worth then?
The busy bee uses today’s problems as an excuse not to deal with tomorrow’s crisis. Often he runs a chaotic department in operations or customer service, one lacking any real structure. This chaos feeds the busy-ness that makes him feel needed and important.
The busy-ness, though manufactured, is still real. If the presence of an obviously distracted and overwhelmed busy bee is derailing your change effort, assess how much you really need to include her in the process.
If you can get started elsewhere and get back to her once you’ve built up momentum, do so. Otherwise, use the change as a vehicle to improve her operation and create more structure and effectiveness there. If you can show the busy bee that change is not something being layered on top of what she does but rather a smoother alternative, you may have a shot.
If you’re the bee, ask yourself: Do I really need to put up so much resistance? Can I take some time during one of my quieter moments to better understand the change? You may find it can make life easier once you get past the initial learning curve.
Make no mistake, however: busy bees need systems that give them as many opportunities as possible to solve problems, earn respect, and feel important. They thrive on adrenaline, but successful, positive change can deliver similar thrills if they’re open to it.
“But I made my numbers the old way!”
This is the cry of the salesperson, another classic change rejecter. Often this person literally works in sales—but not always. The salesperson is anyone who regularly declares victory for making monthly, quarterly, and annual quotas. She will actively resist anything that might put her predictable revenue streams and juicy commissions in jeopardy.
For the salesperson, change is first and foremost a threat to the revenue stream. As she sees it, change means greater risk and longer sales cycles. She will do her best to keep change far away from her territory and minimize any disruption to her hard-earned track record. Any proposed change will threaten the company’s revenues, its stock price, its very existence.
The salesperson follows a peculiar logic all her own. “I’m happy to change,” she might say. “We just need to renegotiate my quota for the year. I have no intention of losing my target commission and my place in the President’s Club trip. So as long as you can guarantee that all the risks involved in this change are off my plate, I’m in.”
This attitude deals the death blow to your change program. There are no guarantees in any change, and the salesperson knows it. By shifting responsibility to everyone else, she is protecting herself at the cost of the company’s future.
The fear here is simple: loss of money and status. Salespeople have a formula for success. They follow it, make their numbers, and reap the rewards. Messing with their formula endangers their standing. Because of their direct impact on overall revenue, salespeople often have the clout to fight change to a standstill. In fact, many organizations try to sidestep sales entirely when it comes to change. They will ask me to approach sales last during the change process. While this is sometimes an option, more often it is not.
The way to handle the salesperson is through the CEO. You’ll need the CEO’s unconditional buy-in and support to effectively tell the sales department—or anyone charged with hitting some sort of quota—to stop playing the oldest game in the book. The CEO must establish the change effort as the top priority and refuse to accept any ultimatums. Yes, there are ways to minimize the risks to immediate revenues due to new programs; but at the same time salespeople should refrain from inflating the risks they do face just to stop the change at any cost.
Don’t let the salesperson get away with using outlier examples to make general objections to the plan. Focus on addressing what will work in most instances and worry about exceptions later.
If you’re the salesperson, then you know well what motivates you. It may help to create a new formula to define success and talk to your colleagues about it. You’ve been trained to be reward-driven, so celebrate successes early and often. Between progress-based rewards and new opportunities for elevated status, you can overcome your natural resistance to change.
Change requires sharing. Change requires collaboration. Change requires a willingness to be measured together, not individually. You can’t hide behind your personal or team performance at everyone else’s expense. To a silo builder, change is a threat to his carefully cultivated turf.
The silo builder wants to be judged on his own merits and has no intention of standing with the team. He will maintain the walls of separation within the organization and oppose any changes to them. He will rationalize his stance by talking about accountability: “By increasing collaboration and breaking down silos, how will you hold people accountable? Change will only breed chaos.”
What the silo builder really fears is increased responsibility. If you’ve been managing a small, well-controlled process, it’s scary to consider becoming responsible for a broader program where you can’t control every aspect yourself. Collaboration means depending on others who might fail.
While assuring the silo builder that accountability is a good thing, emphasize that no man is an island. Each person is ultimately responsible for executing the company’s strategy and delivering superior value to customers. Like it or not, everyone is in this together. It doesn’t matter if one person meets his numbers if he does so at the expense of everyone else in the organization. Allowing individual accountability to trump the organization’s larger strategy impairs everyone’s efforts.
Assure silo builders that the proposed change will drive organizational accountability. Point out the differences between micro and macro accountability, and tally the costs of following a shortsighted, micro-only approach.
If you’re the silo builder, it’s your job to strengthen your relationships with others. Think about times when someone from another department really came through for you. Remember a moment when a team member helped you do a more effective job. Deep down, you know that you can’t do the work alone. The good news is: you don’t have to.
Underneath all the so-called rational arguments against change you will find emotional motives. Ignoring the emotional impact change has on people will only result in increasingly creative methods of sabotage. Only when we understand the different forms resistance takes can we develop the change resilience we need to bring our organizations into the future.
Which brings us to the sixth change rejecter, someone who is perhaps the least invested in making the changes necessary for evolution:
The veteran is two or three years away from retirement. She’s not looking to make any waves, and change is not a part of her retirement plan. She plans to keep things just the way they are, thank you very much.
There are some ways to appeal to the veteran. You may focus on the legacy she will leave behind. For those who are very proud of their work and intrinsically motivated, this approach may work. In other cases, you may want to break the required operational changes into small, bite-size activities that may seem less daunting. A combination of intrinsic motivation and bite-size changes may be appropriate for some veterans.
But in some instances, the best way to ensure a change initiative’s success is to begin it the day after the veteran’s retirement party. Considering that every day you postpone change is a day you lose more money, you may even consider expediting that party. Despite all the organization’s appreciation for past performance, it cannot afford to allow one person’s love of the past to hold everyone else’s future hostage. In some cases, change resilience is about letting go of those who refuse to take the next step in the journey. That can be scary—but as we’ve seen in this chapter, change is all about courage in the face of fear.
If you’re a veteran reading this book, then I believe you care about your work and your legacy. You may need to swallow your pride and ask for assistance embracing the Next, but the payoff is worth it.
When a Korean-based global manufacturer announced that it would enter the high-end segment of its market, the responses were less than enthusiastic. Far less, to be honest. When soliciting advice from experts as to how to go about it, they were told: “Give customers coupons.”
It seemed everyone was looking forward to seeing the company fail.
After all, they were still a relatively new brand—one known for low-cost, low-excitement products. Theirs were the products for those who couldn’t afford more expensive brands.
While the company had already introduced more sophisticated models that were priced about 50 percent higher than their typical products, producing and selling a product that cost twice as much as anything they’d made before was far beyond anyone’s imagination.
To test the company’s readiness for selling a high-end product, we sent out mystery shoppers to retailers offering some of the early high-end models. To our amazement, when our shoppers pushed hard on the price, salespeople proposed something we had never heard before. They offered to replace the company’s emblem with a nondescript logo so “no one will know you are using this product.”
This level of lack of pride and belief in the product was shocking—definitely not a good foundation for leaping into the high-end space.
When we tested the concept in focus groups with salespeople, they dismissed the idea of moving into the high-end segment. They did not see why people would buy the new product when they could buy an established, proven high-end product. “It is not who we are,” they said. “This is not our market.” They could see starting a new brand dedicated to luxury models, but did not see any value in extending the existing product line into the luxury space.
But for this company, introducing a premium product was not just a whim. It was a strategic move—not only did the company’s leadership want to cover a complete lineup of offerings, they wanted to grow with customers as they grew in age and affluence. They wanted to develop an integrated approach that kept customers for life. The problem? No one, including the company’s own salespeople, believed in this strategy.
While the reactions to the change seemed logical, they were in fact more emotional than they might appear. There was a strong cynical voice in customers’ and salespeople’s heads, telling them: “This is not us. This is not who we are. This is not our identity and personality.”
If we wanted to move forward with the strategic change, we needed to confront this personality crisis head-on. This became a much bigger issue than moving into a new market. It was putting people’s core convictions and sense of identity and purpose to the test.
Before developing the new blueprint for how to execute this market extension, we needed to develop a narrative to preempt the cynical voice. We had to reestablish the company’s personality—and we needed to start with the employees.
The answer was Bold Forward, a theme-based internal campaign and brand training that we designed to reframe the company as a bold player in an industry full of old thinkers. We helped reposition the manufacturer as a challenger that would appeal to customers seeking a product that was edgier and cool. Leveraging success stories from the company’s past, we developed a personality that was authentic and relatable. Combined with new behaviors and practices that were instilled during special workshops, we were able to accomplish the mission. Within six months, the new high-end product was being sold at full price. No longer were retailers or employees apologizing for their brand; they were proud to talk about what it was and what it stood for.
This is one of the truly exciting aspects of change—and it’s one that applies equally to individuals. Change can be uncomfortable because it means growing into who you really are. But instead of being proud of who we are and what we are, individuals and companies alike often compare themselves to others. If you find yourself in this position, consider the words of Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
A final note about fear: while it’s true that we don’t want our fear of change to paralyze us or hold us back, a little anxiety can actually be a good thing. In fact, I often call my leadership style “management by butterflies in the stomach.”
In other words, if you’ve lost the butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling when it comes to your work, you’re on autopilot. You will take people for granted. You’re acting as a process operator, not a high-impact performer.
When you operate on autopilot, you take your customers for granted. You assume you already have the answer to their wishes and do not engage in exploration of what they truly need. This is a rule that I adapted when I speak in public. The day I lose the butterflies in my stomach is the day I know I will fail. Because the alternative—being on autopilot—means neglecting or taking for granted the audience that came to hear me.
Think about it: Why do so many of us have anxiety? Because we’re afraid to fail. And we’re not just afraid of letting ourselves down—we usually don’t want to disappoint someone else. We recognize that there is someone on the other side of our work. We know that what we do matters.
When you drop the anxiety, when you no longer have a few butterflies floating around, you become like the singer who rests on the laurels of his biggest hit or a stand-up comic who tells the same jokes over and over. A little bit of fear can be your secret weapon. It’s not your weakness, it’s your power. It keeps you aware. It keeps you focused. It keeps you thinking about what’s Next.