Define and visualize successWe are at the final step of a long journey of self-discovery. Not only did you confront the truth of the need for change, you courageously recognized your emotional resistance to it. You explored how the change can help you better achieve your core cause. You developed new confidence around change, then explored how to incorporate change into your daily routine.
Now it’s time to really own it.
To own change, you need more than just determination. You need a plan with goals and milestones. You need to celebrate successes and create a process for learning and adapting to whatever new changes come your way.
Remember, change is not a onetime event.
Many people have a vision of success but have no plan to operationalize it. Others have the opposite problem: they take all the right steps but fail to recognize success when it arrives. They simply let it pass by without any sense of jubilation and accomplishment.
To be change-resilient, we must address both issues. How? By developing an “ecosystem of success”—a set of activities that will allow you to activate new behaviors and weave them into your life. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to:
Define and visualize success
Create visual reminders
Develop daily rituals
Capture the success stories
Experiment every day
Add aspirational challenges
Solicit feedback
Create a milestones journey
Plan to fail
Celebrate achievements
Change resilience is not just a mind-set. It requires action and planning. In the last chapter, you began to explore how the change would affect your daily routine. Now it’s time to start visualizing success.
By clearly stating your vision, you’ll be taking a big step toward turning your intentions into actions. Start by painting a clear picture of success—then move backward to identify the steps to get there. What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing? What steps are required to achieve this journey? The clearer the operational plan you document and practice, the greater your likelihood of succeeding.
Whenever I work with call centers, I meet people who don’t feel their work has much impact. They spend their days dealing with often-disgruntled customers, then they go home. I remind them that the average call-center employee takes ten thousand calls a year, which might make them understand their impact a bit better, but not much. Then I ask them to envision themselves standing at the center of a stadium filled with ten thousand people crying out “Help me!” This visual always get them: it reminds them just how powerful they are, the difference they make in so many people’s lives.
One of my teams worked with an airline client to develop an interesting program based on the same general principle. Just as frequent fliers rack up airline miles, airline employees collect millions of customers. With every flight, they make more of an impact, and we celebrate when employees reach 100,000 customers, half a million customers, 750,000, and then one million served.
But impact need not be solely quantitative. When working with another company, we created a storytelling competition, bringing customers in to talk about the impact the company has had on their lives. Simply by asking customers about the difference you’ve made in someone’s life, you start seeing that you are much more powerful than you think.
At the most basic level, change is about replacing old habits, behaviors, and thought patterns with new ones. One of our clients came up with great wish lists of behaviors they’d need to start—and those they’d need to stop—in order to fully operationalize change. Use their insights to inspire your own list.
Focusing on the power we do have
Understanding our customers’ emotions first
Recognizing that the future is already here
Understanding that change is a process
Asking the right questions
Strengthening our cause
Being creative
Adding value in every interaction
Realizing it’s okay to be afraid
Being proud of our emotions
Focusing on our impact
Making change intrinsic
Focusing on transactions
Declaring victory before the customer is happy
Treating customers as a means to an end
Keeping the existing process at all costs
Repeating yesterday’s performance
Sticking to old convictions
Ignoring people’s emotions
Have you ever seen a football team hitting the field without a huddle first? No! The huddle is part of the prep work necessary to align hearts and minds and win the game. Spending time in a tight circle aligns the whole team around their mission. Those who bring conviction and passion to the huddle are more likely to feel connected to their fellow players during the game.
Your daily performance is no different. A passionate, authentic daily ritual will get you aligned and connected. That’s why my teams refer to our daily rituals as “huddles.” Here’s a basic rundown of what our huddles look like:
Whenever I talk about the importance of daily rituals with a new client, I get the same reaction: “We can’t do it every day. Is it possible to skip some days?”
“Sure,” I respond. “You may skip the daily huddle every day that you are willing to compromise your performance. On those days, feel free to skip it.”
The manager of a sustainability initiative was reluctant to introduce anything like a daily huddle to his team because he’d tried a similar technique in the past and failed.
So I asked him: Why had it failed?
As it turned out, his team had simply sent a memo to all frontline supervisors explaining what a daily huddle was and advising them to start using them. Unfortunately, not many people feel comfortable speaking in front of others. Many more do not know what a huddle in a business context looks like. No wonder the practice never took off!
Building this kind of ritual—or introducing any new technique or tool—requires confidence and practice. Without repetition, we get distracted and veer from the plan. Without practice, an intense commitment to the plan will melt into a lukewarm “going through the motions.”
Daily rituals remind us of our commitment, reinforce the rationale behind it, and demonstrate that we are making progress. They should refocus your attention on your core cause and remind you of what you need to do differently to bring your commitment to life.
We also need daily rituals to celebrate progress. Reflect on the impact you’re making as a result of the change. Draw strength from the power you have and the inspiration you create.
While some may perceive daily rituals as redundant, we find them critical to success. Organizations that embrace daily huddles or jump-starts experience a higher level of employee engagement and focus around mission and values.
Yes, you read that correctly. Just a few pages after asking you to visualize success, I’m challenging you to plan for failure. Why?
Because you will.
Because no journey is a straight line between intention and success.
Because we are human and we have weak moments.
Because there are always unexpected occurrences that will throw us off our game.
And because we need to be ready to get back on track when all this happens.
Most people do not plan to fail—they try to power through to success on sheer commitment and willpower alone. But, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely has written, willpower is a muscle that can get tired over time. When that happens, we tend to cheat on our diets, miss a day at the gym, and go back to all those bad habits we thought we’d kicked.
We need to recognize the temptations, time pressures, and inevitable obstacles, and accept them. We will fail on our journey. We can also forgive ourselves—as long as we know we are ready to get back on track.
Accept it.
And keep going.
What’s your screen saver?
Consider changing it to reflect your commitment to change.
How about the photo on your desk, the magnet on your fridge?
Just as daily rituals are verbal reminders to stick to the plan, reinforcement visuals emphasize your commitment. Think creatively: use a new luggage tag for your bag, a new sticker for your laptop. Make your vision visible.
As you venture on the road to personal or professional transformation, you’re going to achieve a number of quantitative objectives. But first you will experience qualitative progress. Do not ignore that progress. In fact, oftentimes I encourage our clients to focus on the qualitative results even more than the quantitative ones.
A qualitative result is a story about the impact you’ve created. These reaffirming stories build your character, confidence, and commitment to continue on the journey toward transformation.
Before you try to change the whole world, change one person’s world.
As we were working on the Mercedes-Benz transformation, we collected thousands of inspiring stories from the field. But one story stuck with me:
The story begins on a Long Island highway. Cue the heavy rain. A car washer who worked at a local Mercedes-Benz dealership saw one of their models on the side of the road. He stopped and asked if the driver needed help.
“I’m good,” said the driver. “I’m waiting for roadside assistance.”
“Well, in that case, please allow me to just stand by you until they arrive,” the car washer said. “I don’t want any of our family members to be alone during such a time.”
Without getting paid for this gesture, he stayed outside in the rain out of a sense of personal duty to the people whom he works with and for. He made the choice to treat a customer as part of his extended family.
It was simple. It was powerful. It was human. It was a person who was seeking to make an impact right then and there.
Write your own book of stories like this, and they will fuel your passion and commitment and lift you during the down moments. We become future ready by making an impact one life at a time.
Remember the study I shared about musical taste stagnating at age thirty-three? The same is true of other aspects of our lives. We settle down on our favorite food, beer, news feed, social tool—and often stop trying much else.
But when we stop experimenting, we stop evolving.
One way to get yourself future ready is to start experimenting in different areas of your life. Let’s start with fonts: I bet that, like the majority of people using Times Roman or Arial, you ignore 99 percent of the fonts available to you. It’s time to try some new styles.
And when was the last time you tried a new PowerPoint template? Animation? Or any new feature, for that matter?
Dedicate fifteen minutes of your day to experimenting with the tools you already use. Need a reminder? Try new passwords. What about “TryNewThings” or “WhatsNext?” Words like this help you kick off your day with an experimental mind-set.
Push yourself—but do so gently. As you explore the new change you committed to, don’t just stick to the plan. As you see that you start reaching your goals, extend your boundaries bit by bit. Explore new ideas.
I’ve made it a habit to explore one new website a day. To learn something I didn’t know. It can be as simple as listening to a TED Talk about a new subject. Regular visits to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo also help me flex my change muscles. Check out what people are inventing. You might think some ideas are stupid. But others may inspire you.
The goal is to keep exploring.
Stay curious.
Feedback is funny. Everyone welcomes it as long as it is positive and makes us feel good. But negative feedback? Despite our attempts to disguise it as “constructive,” we hate it.
I’m not immune. When a participant in one of our sessions wrote a nasty comment about something I’d said, I was hurt. The fact that the majority of the participants loved the workshop didn’t matter. I let that one negative voice cloud my perception of the whole event. (I am not proud of this, but I know it was a human reaction.) It took me some time to reflect and understand where that participant was coming from.
Ask people for honest feedback. Invite them to rate—and even coach. Except for those who suffer from an acute inferiority complex, most of us rate our own performance as above average and declare victory before it is achieved. Let others help you reflect more accurately and support your progress.
You can use formal surveys or simply ask the people you work with how you are progressing:
Do they notice something new?
Were they expecting something different?
Does your behavior seem authentic or fake?
Let the people you are trying to impact guide you on the journey. A final few words of advice about feedback:
Listen carefully to everything they’ve said.
Don’t just gravitate to the negative feedback. Ask people to let you know what you do well, not just criticize what you are missing.
Positive and negative feedback come hand in hand. And you will need the positive to support your efforts to improve what you still need to work on. Positive feedback will build your confidence and enable you to face the areas that need improvement with the right attitude. So listen to everything, and accept it all.
For success to last, it needs to be visible. Just as it is important to assign goals and a time frame for our targets, it is equally critical to celebrate when we reach those milestones. Reward yourself for sticking to the change plan and making it this far. At every milestone, take some action to make success visible and celebrate it.
What makes a good reward? It depends on you. It does not have to be expensive, but make sure it is memorable and supports your goals in some way.
One European logistics company could not reward employees with anything of monetary value because of union regulations—so they got creative. The company’s number one asset was its fleet of thousands of trucks. Employees who exceeded customers’ expectations got to have a truck named after them for a month. They felt like a million dollars (okay, maybe euros), yet it did not cost anything to implement the program. It was inspirational, memorable, and aspirational. Other employees upped their game because they wanted the same recognition.
The cynic in you may say, “I’d rather have more money,” but the truth is that money does not have the same impact. Extra cash will be spent quickly on basic necessities and forgotten very quickly. Memorable experiences carry a far greater impact and make for a more sharable story.
Be creative with your rewards—and make sure that achievement does not go unnoticed. Celebrating success is about reinforcing the plan and ensuring its future success.
Change resilience is not a destination, but a lifestyle. Change rushes at us constantly, and if we don’t want to drown, we need to go with the flow.
What distinguishes people from animals is our ability to imagine and create. We have the resources to come up with new ideas and bring them into being. We have the power to reinvent the world. A world with advanced medicine is a better world. A world with breakthrough transportation is a world reaching farther. A world with art is a more beautiful world.
Humans are creators. Humans change the world. And the transformation should never stop. Yes, some have changed the world for the worse. I would argue that what unites many of history’s most infamous tyrants is that they lacked the core cause of making a positive difference in the world—not just for themselves but for others.
The world will never stop changing. So we must continue to ask ourselves: What is the next big change? How does it impact my core cause? What should I start doing? What should I stop?
We have the opportunity to approach every transformation from a position of strength. It requires asking: How will it better enable me to achieve my core cause? To answer that question, it helps to understand what will stay the same and what will not. Every time a new challenge or scenario presents itself, ask yourself two questions:
Answers might include your values, your achievements to date, the people you serve. The point of asking this question is to remember the strengths you’ve already established.
What will shift?
The shift you’re about to experience may be small—for instance, establishing a new social communication channel. Or it may be as significant as rethinking your whole model for engaging with new potential clients and customers. Either way, your established strengths and skills will help you transition into the new way of doing things.
Ask these questions with your core cause in mind. Doing so will strengthen your change resilience, ensuring that while the tools of your job might change, your mission and values will not.