The IT team raised concerns about the portal hosting.In just ninety days, two pharmaceutical companies would merge two divisions to create a leader in their space. In preparation, eighteen people from different parts of the world met to discuss a new employee web portal. A representative from each department spoke up:
The IT team raised concerns about the portal hosting.
The security team shared a ninety-page document on compliance.
The marketing team demanded that the portal reflect the new brand.
HR shared their concern about employees’ readiness for this big change.
As I observed the conversation, it hit me. Each department stuck to a script of what could go wrong. No one was empowered to make decisions. In other words, all the naysayers were present, but not a single person with the power to say yes was in attendance.
No one seemed to care about the big picture at all. Each participant was interested only in protecting his or her own turf by raising red flags. The fact that a multibillion-dollar merger was on the line didn’t seem to faze them. They were passively rejecting change and hiding behind their processes and procedures. If only the new CEO had been there to see how ill-equipped for change his team was!
While mergers and acquisitions present an extreme case of disruption, they share many characteristics with other change efforts, and therefore illustrate the urgent need for change-resilient leadership. When people adopt this kind of tunnel vision, every strategy and change is at risk of failing or losing momentum.
In this chapter, we’re going to focus on how to lead change. It’s filled with advice from some leaders who don’t just passively accept change, but who live and breathe it. It’s a crucial chapter for leaders of teams and organizations, but also for everyone committed to change. After all, you must take a proactive role in changing your own behavior. That will mean sitting in the CEO’s seat and holding yourself accountable to your vision.
There’s another reason to put yourself in the leader’s role. If you start making positive changes in your life, you can bet people will start asking how you did it. Here’s your opportunity to think about how to scale your efforts so that you can help others live their core causes.
This requires you to think about how the change will affect those around you and how to bring others on board to support your efforts. How are you building trust and leading people to change? Are they mentally, intellectually, and operationally ready to leave behind old practices and deliver the Next?
Are you?
In the world of performing arts, Deborah Rutter is regarded as a true change agent. As I write, she is on her third mission—this time, leading a new initiative at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. As the CEO of the center, she is working to leverage its rich heritage while ensuring its continued relevance.
In the past, guests of the center defined culture as ballet or classical music performances, whereas today the definition has expanded to include street art and participatory theatrical experiences.
Rutter arrived at the Kennedy Center after completing successful transformations with the Seattle Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her first piece of advice?
“Know your cultural ecosystem.” In other words, change resilience ought to be developed based on what is natural to people and, therefore, intrinsic. Do not attempt to change who anyone is; rather, make sure your initiatives take into consideration their beliefs and values—and build from there.
“Seattle is a very different city from Chicago,” Rutter explains. “Understanding the cultural foundation will enable a leader to act differently and amplify the change based on who they naturally are.”
While Seattle is all about independence, what makes Chicago tick is its bootstrap nature. The cities naturally require different approaches to transformation. Rutter also recognizes that the Kennedy Center serves several distinct groups—the local, national, and international communities. Each has its own characteristics and requires that the change feel natural to them.
Rutter and other veterans of successful change initiatives advise: be realistic. Do not just read change success stories and assume you can copy another company’s every move. While I enjoyed reading about Tony Hsieh’s success with Zappos in Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, I knew that it bore little relevance to most companies. Why?
Because the DNA of Zappos is not the DNA of every other company. Some organizations would reject Hsieh’s advice as if it were toxic. The reason it worked for Zappos was that Hsieh assembled people whose personalities fit that specific culture. He also opted to take $36,000 a year as a CEO salary. The average CEO must go through something like $36,000 in expenses per week!
The change resilience of any organization ought to be an integral and natural extension of the organization’s identity. Start with the culture you have and build on that.
As for individuals, take into account your own habits and culture. If your family used to bond over big Sunday dinners, for example, you might bring your love of breaking bread with family into your routine. You don’t need to eliminate what you love—just replace some of the dishes with healthier options.
Change resilience isn’t about throwing out what we love—it’s about building on it.
In a world of diminishing centralized authority and growing distributed authorities, leaders often ignore a simple truth that is right in front of them. Their organization is the sum total of their employees’ decisions. It is Susan from Accounting and David from Operations and Jane from Sales and Sean from Customer Service who every day make hundreds of decisions that shape the future of the organization. They are the new authorities in a world distrustful of authority. Leaders need to accept the fact that their role is not to decide, but rather to empower decisions. After all, it is not the BIG decision made in the boardroom that matters much. It is the millions of small decisions employees make every day that activate the desired change in many ways.
When employees are inspired and empowered, change will be accelerated. If employees are cynical and restricted, change will drag out until it becomes irrelevant.
Leadership is about activating the causes of employees and aligning them with a vision, tools, and the confidence to drive the transformation. It is about leveraging the newly discovered authority within each employee to the point of collectively making a difference.
Eric became CEO of a national distribution company the old-fashioned way. After decades of devoted service to the company, he’d risen through the ranks. He was known to be a shrewd operator and he was no stranger to change—he’d already lived through several different incarnations of the company. He was also deeply analytical—the kind of guy who’d make red marks on every slide. So when we presented our strategy for growth to him, he’d already run his own analysis.
“I’ll sign off on this strategy if you can guarantee me a success,” he told us.
“Anyone who will guarantee you a success in transformation is either selling a commonsense idea they already shared with your competitors,” I said, “or they are lying.”
I am surprised at how frequently even the most accomplished people forget what change is all about. Transformation is, by definition, risky. You are attempting to do something you’ve never done. You don’t know how it will work. That is part of the excitement and the fear.
When you repeat something you’ve always done, on the other hand, that’s safe. Unfortunately, it’s also no longer special or distinctive. You can’t have it both ways. If you want the excitement of the new, you must assume the fear of the unknown.
Here’s how a couple of change veterans do that:
Steve Cannon is the former CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA and the current CEO of AMB Group—the company that owns the Atlanta Falcons. His words of wisdom about change?
“You can’t have a complete plan when you start.”
Yes, you need a clear vision of the future—but be prepared to build on it as you go. You need to learn from your mistakes, try new things, and experiment. That is the only way to transform. No consulting firm can provide you with the complete strategy in advance.
Cannon is currently working on redefining the fan experience at the new Atlanta Falcons stadium. His greatest competitor?
“You can enjoy the game on an eighty-inch TV at home,” he told me. “Why bother coming to the stadium?”
What does the new live sports look like? How can it be miles beyond the televised version (especially when you take into account Atlanta’s notorious traffic jams)? While I’m sure Cannon will come up with something exciting and unexpected, you can bet it will combine elements that will need to be tested and refined.
Rutter echoed Cannon’s belief that you can’t map out your entire change journey on day one.
“How could you possibly know the future?” she asked. “To assume a fixed, predefined strategy is simply not realistic.”
Just as you expect your people to be patient and open-minded about change, be honest with yourself. Transformation is an open road: you know where you want to get to, but have few clues about how to get there. Let your culture guide you.
The gap between what leadership promises to do and what they actually do is probably one of the most significant challenges to executing a successful transformation. Over time, that gap will devolve into eroded trust.
“We are planning to instill a Nordstrom culture here,” a CEO told me. He was referring to The Nordstrom Way, the book about how the retailer gained its reputation for excellent customer service. “I have read the book and I am ready to do it. It will not be optional. Everyone will have to buy into it,” he continued enthusiastically as we walked through one of his bigger stores.
I reached into my pants pocket, pulled out a tissue, and, much to his surprise, threw it on the floor.
“What are you doing?” he asked me.
“Pick it up, please,” I said.
“Let me arrange for someone to clean it up.”
“The CEO of Nordstrom would have no problem picking a piece of trash up off the floor,” I said. “He wouldn’t need to arrange for someone to do it for him.”
This story speaks to the heart of the challenge that leadership faces during transformation. It is not that leaders fail to declare change. They do that abundantly well and with boisterous words. It’s that they fail to convince people and, even worse, fail to become the role models for change. Give them the text and they will recite it to the last word. Ask them to take action and you will see them squirm.
I once worked with a Japanese executive who considered himself enlightened. He told me that loving the customer was essential in his company. He even paid for his executives to partake in a program at the Disney Institute. But when I suggested that he call one customer a day to thank them for their business—a practice that would take less than five minutes—his attitude completely changed. He was unhappy with the recommendation and considered it unreasonable for someone so busy.
Change often fails because employees simply do not trust leadership’s commitment to transform. They see leaders asking them to change but refusing to change themselves. Employees follow actions, not words.
If you’re serious about developing change resilience among your employees, you must build their trust and convince them that the new change is for real and is here to stay. Plenty of programs-du-jour come and go. Employees live to see them evaporate after a magnificent—and often expensive—launch. The launch-and-abandon graveyard is full of great intentions that never materialized. No wonder so many employees take a wait-and-see approach to change. They expect their leaders to take the lead.
People won’t follow you if they don’t trust you. If you’re leading a transformation, ask: “How can I demonstrate that I am personally committed to change?”
What actions will you take to convince the cynics that “this time is different”? What will you do to shock them into belief? The credibility factor is critical. Only when your people believe you will they follow you.
If you’ve gotten this far in a transformation, you’ve likely identified some change blockers. While you try to steer the ship to the left, they are desperately holding you back by steering it to the right. They do not agree with your vision. They are not interested in change. They have a different vision of the future—a return to the good old days.
Maybe you’ve already gotten them on board. But if you’re anything like most of the people my teams work with, you are avoiding them. If that’s the case, you can and should try to make them understand and believe in your position. But eventually you will realize there’s no room in the organization for the change-resistant—and that epiphany will come sooner than you think.
First you’ll try to change your actions and become a role model, but that will win over only a portion of the change blockers. That will be your moment of truth—the moment when you need to say good-bye to those who refuse to join the movement you are trying to create.
It is not going to be easy. Nostalgia will take hold and try to convince you to keep them. Don’t let it. They are not here to change with the times. They are here to keep the status quo—and in so doing, they will jeopardize the entire company. They have no right to do it. The only reason they’ve gotten this far is because you let them.
Whether you’re a leader grappling with cynical voices in your organization or an individual struggling with unsupportive people in your life or naysayers in your head, the responsibility to remove them is on you. Keep in mind that everyone else is watching. The resisters are working behind your back in staff meetings and lunches and informal conversations you are not part of. Or they are making decisions to thwart your efforts. They procrastinate and delay to no end the necessary change. If you do not take action—and fast—they will contaminate the motivation and excitement of the rest. You simply cannot afford employees who are dead set against your strategy for the future.
There is no one who can have more of an impact on this situation than you. You become a role model when you remove a change blocker from your ecosystem. You build trust with the rest of the organization. It’s not fun, but it is the only way to build a change-resilient personality or organization.
Think back to the last time you tried to get people on board with a new idea.
Maybe you led with some stats or a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation full of charts, arrows, and numbers. Then, after a series of questions that you managed to dodge, right before you were about to present your closing remarks and declare the meeting a victory, you slid in something about social impact.
Now, let’s be honest. What message did you send when 90 percent of your talk focused on your pride in the latest figures, and less than one minute was dedicated to a rushed message about the impact the company had on human beings? Is that really a commitment to a cause or just lip service?
People are very astute when it comes to noticing what’s important to others. We pay attention not to words but to actions, passion, pride. Are you invested in your cause or in your numbers? What really matters to you? Where is your heart?
Too many leaders see themselves as Guardians of the Process. They mostly communicate the numbers, trends, statistics, percentages, and financial goals. Listen even more carefully and you will note what you do not hear: their core cause.
Here is a reality check: people don’t change for the numbers. You want people to feel ready to change? Start talking about the cause. As a leader, you must be the bearer of the cause torch. The numbers can help bolster your argument, but they should not be the endgame.
Every meeting, every town hall, every conversation is an opportunity to talk about your commitment to your cause. You should repeat it as many times as possible. People need to believe you are truly committed for the long haul. Remember, people will be skeptical about your seriousness. Thanks to years of number-crunching, they expect change initiatives to be short-lived. You must win them over, and it will not be easy.
Whatever you do, be authentic. Tell personal stories, not someone else’s story. If you find yourself thinking, This will be great PR, take a step back. Let other people make the call about whether your initiative is newsworthy or not. It’s your job to be genuine.
Remember AMB CEO Steve Cannon? He has another valuable piece of advice about leading change:
“Your most important role is to own the conversation. If change resilience is what you are seeking, make sure everyone knows it. Weave it into every presentation and communication. Increase the frequency of the conversation and make sure everyone is speaking the same message.”
The biggest mistake leaders make is to assume that if they say something once, people will immediately do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you say something once, people will doubt it—if they hear you at all. When you say it twice, they may listen a little longer—and still dismiss it. When you repeat it for the third time, they will start paying attention. By about the tenth time you say it, they may actually consider doing something about it.
Before you have a complete operational plan in effect, you should have a clear and comprehensive communication plan. Your employees, colleagues, friends, and family hear new ideas every day. You’d be surprised how few of them understand your strategy or where you want to go—and I’m not even talking about the change-resistant who are actively trying to thwart your ideas. (You haven’t let them go yet? What are they still doing here?)
Develop a communication plan and make it clear there is no time for hesitation. Use every possible “real estate” space available—both physical and virtual—to communicate your message. And when you advocate for change, do not forget to express what doesn’t change.
Make it easy for others to tell their stories about how they’re embracing change. You can do this whether you’re a leader at an established organization, an activist hoping to launch a new social movement, or a marketing consultant seeking more subscribers to your newsletter. Here are a few simple strategies:
Create videos featuring top executives, influential members of your community, or people with powerful stories sharing their vision of transformation.
Share your message at a panel or workshop.
Set up a meeting or event to share your message.
Whatever your format is—and the more, the merrier—make sure your message is unified. Doing so will remove any doubts as to where you’re headed. It will help those on the fence—the helpless, the curious, and the hopeless—to make up their minds and, most importantly, take action.
Every transformation is different. As much as you may want to schedule and plan every step of it ahead of time, you need to be ready for the unknown. In this kind of organic, authentic, “no script” transformation, conversation is your most effective tool to align and rally people toward the future. The more transparency and commitment displayed by you and your team, the greater the chance of getting others on board.
Be honest and sincere and do not make promises you cannot keep. Make sure everyone understands that the transformation is a journey. Don’t fake confidence—people will pick up on it and you’ll lose them. However, you should show how passionate you feel about the future. Explain the why. Invite others to experiment and share their progress. Make it clear this is a conversation.
“In our company, we are all empowered to make the right decision.”
This was one employee’s response to a question about empowerment. The other employees in the focus group giggled. They knew exactly what that person meant. In an organization where employees are only empowered to make the right decision, everyone defaults to the safest option—the one we used yesterday. The only way to avoid making mistakes is to avoid making decisions.
Take an honest look at yourself/your organization: Do you reward yourself and your employees for repetition or for exploration? For trying something different or for being compliant? If you’ve built a strong culture of trust, you can very easily introduce new transformation initiatives without a detailed strategy. Instead of commanding others, you empower them to jump on board when you introduce new ideas. You also empower them to deliver amazing service that goes above and beyond.
I was standing outside the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles when the doorman engaged me in a simple conversation.
“How are you enjoying your stay with us so far?” he asked.
“There were some good things and some bad things,” I replied.
“What were the bad things?” he immediately asked. “I want a chance to fix the bad things first.”
He wrote down my points of contention and referred them directly to the right person. Later that day I had a letter of apology and an assortment of fruit waiting for me in my room. Needless to say, I was impressed.
I would expect that type of response from the general manager, not the doorman. The issues I’d experienced were not in his area of responsibility; nevertheless, he felt a sense of ownership. He listened and acted immediately. What impressed me most was the fact that he downplayed the good things I’d experienced. For him, the good things were a given. It was what they could do better that mattered the most to him.
Performing this way requires a sense of pride and ownership and a focus on improvement. The doorman wasn’t afraid of taking a complaint because change and improvement were natural to him. This kind of “we can always do better” attitude is the cornerstone of a change resilience culture.
I think of change resilience as “a relentless pursuit of What’s Next.”
When a relentless pursuit of the Next becomes an integral part of employees’ daily activities, you are creating a change-resilient culture. That way, when big changes come, your team will be ready. Culture is the result of the daily choices of every employee. It is a group of people who share a vision and passion, who act despite uncertainty and create exceptional experiences one action at a time. You don’t need a one-size-fits-all process when you share a vision.
A change-resilient culture never accepts the status quo or yesterday’s success. It’s a culture of curiosity: seeking new ideas through customers’ comments, employees’ ideas, new technology, and competitors’ moves.
Want a simple litmus test for how change-resilient your culture is? Look at your customer satisfaction programs. Many customer satisfaction surveys look more like a scorecard seeking a perfect 10. Companies look for validation that their performance was, in fact, good.
It’s almost desperate.
Imagine if, instead, in the next survey you asked questions to find out what else you could have done to make the experience or performance better: What were the missed opportunities? What else could we have done to delight you?
Such a survey would give you much richer insights about how to “Create the Next.”
It might not be the perfect score you were seeking, but it could be instead the key to your future.
Now that we’ve covered some strategies for building a culture of change resilience, let’s look at some ways you can continue to support and empower your teams.
How powerful do those on your team feel? As if they can conquer the world or are like cogs in the machine? As a leader, your main purpose is to help others reach new heights of performance. The more they achieve, the better your results will be. Consider the following techniques to create a culture of engagement:
1. Set aspirational goals to motivate them. What is the next “exceptional” for them?
2. Identify the tools they need to succeed and empower them to accomplish their goals.
3. Provide a safety net that allows them to feel comfortable to experiment and do things they’ve never done before.
Leading with your core cause will provide the why. The next step is to set employees up to succeed in accomplishing their objectives.
The question “How can I help you reach higher?” cannot wait for an annual performance review. Smart companies are abandoning this practice and encouraging leaders to engage in frequent conversations about that question. But the questioning process is only part of it—you also need to set aspirational goals that challenge employees to step out of their comfort zone.
Instead of creating and enforcing a one-size-fits-all process, give people breathing room to make the change their own. Recognize that everyone may reach the goals you set differently, but as long as they seek to fulfill the same cause, different executions are welcome. The cause is the unifier, but the tools may vary. Ownership should take precedence over process.
During a customer-experience training with employees from a pharmaceutical company, one participant raised his hand and asked to be excused. He was part of the IT team and saw no need to sit through training on customer experience.
“What are you working on?” I asked him.
“I am part of the SAP implementation team,” he replied. “It has nothing to do with customers. It’s a back-end system.”
“Why is the company allocating millions of dollars to implement an SAP system?” I asked.
“I don’t know” was his answer.
“Who is your internal buyer?” I asked. “Would you please check for me why they are investing in the SAP system?”
After a few phone calls, he returned with the following story: “The company is investing in SAP in order to better understand their costs. They hope to be able to develop a better pricing model so they can penetrate business in countries where their drugs are currently too expensive.”
“How many patients are affected or can use your drugs in those countries?” I asked.
“Fifty million” was his reply.
And at that moment, he got it. His work affected fifty million suffering patients. Just because he didn’t see or speak to patients directly didn’t mean he was not part of the cause. SAP was his tool. But his cause was to help patients who could not get access to the drugs they needed due to high costs.
I don’t blame him for initially wanting out of the session. In team meetings, his leaders measured progress using timeline and budget metrics. They buried themselves in spreadsheets, graphs, and charts. They never contextualized the project or spoke about the impact that the project would have on people’s lives—which is kind of odd for a pharmaceutical company dedicated to saving lives.
Fifty million patients is an impact. Yet no one focused on that. Because talk centered on tactical goals, no one saw the face of the patient in need. No one was connected to the company’s core cause.
It doesn’t matter what kind of initiative you’re leading—your core cause ought to be the central theme in every conversation you have with your team. Every bit of conversation should start and end with the human impact. If your organization does not serve customers directly or only provides back-office support, then sharing impact becomes even more critical. Consider the following strategies:
Use stories or customer testimonials to make the impact on customers clear to everyone at your organization.
Every completed task should include a description of the impact it made on real people who live with the outcome of the team’s work.
Weave a human story into every presentation of financial or operational results.
Let’s face it—a lot of leaders are trained to measure success using charts and graphs. But that’s not what moves people to change. You need to make sure everyone from the front line to the assembly line understands how his or her actions affect customers.
“No matter what happens, do the human thing first.” This is the mantra that all of my employees live by. They know I have their backs when they do the human thing. There is no way you can go wrong by sending a bouquet of flowers with your condolences to a client who recently experienced a death in the family. You will never be criticized for making a donation to your client’s favorite charity after making a mistake. No need to ask for permission. Just do it and hand us the expense report. We will pay for it.
When you live by your core cause, doing the human thing first becomes almost as natural as breathing. Put people first and the rest will follow. Employees who know that their organization puts people first will be more apt to act responsibly and proactively—even in the most challenging moments.
In December 2009, I faced my toughest business challenge. It was my company’s worst year—and we weren’t alone. Millions of businesses were struggling through the great recession and none of us had a textbook for how to deal with it.
On January 1, 2009, I’d realized we had enough orders to stay in business if I tightened the budget belt. By January 30, 90 percent of those orders had been canceled. Not because our services were no longer needed, but simply because companies panicked and backed out, assuming we wouldn’t go after them for breach of contract since everyone was in deep financial trouble. I had no idea what to do.
My anxiety was high and I was all out of ideas. Many sleepless nights didn’t provide an answer, only more fears and desperation. I had a family to take care of. My oldest daughter was going to college. How would I pay for that? I had employees and their families who depended on me for their livelihood. The burden of leading others was never as heavy as it was that year. It felt like everything might collapse in a matter of seconds.
During 2009, several employees approached me and said they knew that if I fired them, the chances of the company’s survival would increase. They saw me laboring to stay afloat. I ended up reducing employees’ salaries in order to keep the team together. Budgets were cut drastically, and I doubled our efforts to find new business. We survived while some of our competitors reduced in size or scope or disappeared altogether. We even made a modest profit as the year drew to a close. But the visibility for 2010 was still cloudy and unclear. Everything was shaky.
Then, that December, the moment of truth occurred.
We have a company tradition that began the year I started the company. At the end of every year, each employee receives money from the company to donate to his or her charity of choice. At our holiday party each year, every employee proudly discusses the charity they chose—it’s a way for us all to connect with each other’s core causes.
Now, I would rather have kept the year’s profits to finance 2010. Every dollar mattered—a lesson I’d learned the hard way in 2009. I had to ask myself: Do I keep the charity tradition alive or not? I reasoned that I could just make a small donation to one charity on behalf of all of us to keep the spirit of the tradition alive—but it didn’t feel right. Perhaps I could increase some of the salaries I had initially cut.
Instead, I opted to keep the original tradition of individual donations intact. My message to my team was: “There are people who suffered more than us this year. Let’s do the human thing first.” I believe it is not our words but rather our actions that speak the loudest—and this was a moment when my values were put to the test.
Do your values supersede everything else, or will you compromise them at the first sight of a challenge? It was both a difficult and an easy decision. The financial issue was ever-present, but the experience of being able to look in the mirror and know that I lived by my values, even in a time of hardship, was priceless.
More than anything else, it became a proof point to all employees who later joined our team: Doing the human thing first is not a slogan. It is who we are. Living by our cause is not a convenience. It is what we do.
Leading a culture of change resilience is about constantly living by your cause. It is living the change you want to see in everyone else. Your actions give others permission to reach for What’s Next. It reminds people that adaptation is not about giving up on anything important, but about working with whatever tools you have to live your cause.
In this 140-character-limit era, CEOs often ask for the shortest version of what it means to lead with cause. “How do I know that we’re making it?” My answer can be consolidated into a single word: pride.
Take a look around you. Are your people proud to be here? And I do not mean just when you participate in a Habitat for Humanity project or during the alcohol-infused holiday party. I am talking about on a day-to-day basis in your office. Do they look happy? Are they sharing their work with pride? Do they see the connection their work has and the impact they are making? Are they smiling? Pride is not a superficial expression we wear in order to stay employed.
Tough times give organizations an opportunity to come together. We all love a crisis. It has this galvanizing power that makes people go above and beyond and show what they are capable of. We rise up to the superhero within us. Give us a superstorm, a terrorist attack, or another threat to humankind, and we will be there: creative, passionate, and ready to own the cause. No process or procedure can stop us. We will find a work-around for any obstacle.
But where is this passion most of the time? Just sit outside your HQ building and take a look at people’s faces at 5 p.m. Do their expressions impart the pride and excitement you saw on their faces that last time the going got rough? Why not? They worked hard today. They showed up for their colleagues and customers. They made an impact.
So what do you think they say as soon as they get home? Do they brag about the impact they made, or do they complain about the bureaucracy?
Pride can help us stay relevant, but when our pride in the past is greater than our pride in our cause, it can hold us back. As a leader, your challenge is to create a sense of pride that will propel people forward. Inspire them to seek new ways to fulfill their promise to their customers. That pride must start with you. I am not talking about producing self-congratulatory videos with tear-jerking images. (I like a powerful story, but stories are not enough.) I am talking about the active pride that creates a sense of urgency to change and improve. I am talking about the pride that destroys obstacles. The pride that makes us challenge our processes every day so we don’t get stuck.
Pride is not a passive state of nirvana. It’s active and it’s powerful. It means empowering everyone to ask: “What’s Next?”
It can be scary leading your organization toward a new vision when you know the path to success will be paved with obstacles. There will be moments of doubt when you wonder if the naysayers’ arguments are true. Everyone who’s tried to change has encountered them. They’re normal, and you are not alone.
As a veteran automobile industry executive, Brian Fulton, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz Canada, is no stranger to change. His biggest piece of advice?
Relax.
“Be confident in your beliefs,” says Fulton. “If you are doing it for the right reasons, it will work out. People will recognize the authentic nature of your endeavor and support you.
“Don’t try to pull it off too fast and by yourself,” he adds, noting the importance of a team that shares your commitment to your cause.
Build your inner circle and make sure they are all on board with your vision.
Accept that not all of the details are going to be ironed out before you start.
Take the time to develop the internal buy-in you’ll need. It will pay off in the long run.
While doubt will try to take hold in your mind, trust your convictions. Don’t be arrogant, but do not lose your confidence either. If your cause is the right cause, and if you are trying to make a difference in people’s lives, your team will recognize it. They will see through the fear and recognize that you are trying to do the right thing. Do not let the naysayers beat you down. You will need to hold tight to your belief in your core cause if you want to capture the imagination and commitment of the rest of the team.
Fear and doubts are a natural part of any transformation. Hold on to the cause and stay confident. As doubts try to creep in, recognize that the unknown aspect of transformation can be a source of excitement.
“If I had the recipe already, life would be boring,” Fulton concludes. “I enjoy the adventure and the sense of discovery of the unknown.”
As I was concluding my conversation with Deborah Rutter at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she said to me, “Here is my last piece of advice: when it comes to change, it is terrible, but if you don’t do it, it is worse.”
There is never a perfect time for change. We often delay changing in the name of getting the timing, the strategy, the people, the finances, the environment perfectly right. You and I both know there is no such thing as perfect.
Opportunity does not always bang on your door. It gives a quiet little rap. Wait too long to get off the couch and it’s gone. If your organization waits for the perfect strategy or timing, you’re basically handing the future over to your competitors.
Transformation requires the confidence to operate with incomplete information and deduce from trends what the future will bring. If you wait for complete validation, it will simply be too late.
How fast will you act when change appears on the horizon?
Are you comfortable stepping out in the first ray of light, or do you need the midday sun to convince you of an opportunity?