“I’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT A BIG PROJECT,” THE WOMAN TOLD me on the phone.
She was a senior leader in a professional services firm, where people really are their most important asset. Only it turns out the people weren’t so happy. Theirs was a very successful firm with high revenues, great clients, and hard-working employees. But employee satisfaction was abysmally low, and turnover rates were staggeringly high. Employees were performing; they just weren’t staying.
This firm had developed a reputation for being a terrible place to work. When I met with the head of the firm, he illustrated the problem with a personal example. Just recently, he told me, a client meeting had been scheduled on the day one of his employees was getting married. “I told her she needed to be there. That the meeting was early enough and she could still get to her wedding on time.”
He paused and then continued, “I’m not proud of that story, but it’s how we’ve always operated the firm.” Then he looked at me, “So, Peter, how do you change other people?”
I’ve often heard people say that you can’t change other people; you can only change yourself. But, the reality for many of us is that we’re constantly trying to get other people to change. Parents try to change their children’s behavior, spouses and partners try to change the behavior of their significant others, and people at work are trying to change each other’s behavior all the time.
Still, most of the time, we fail, or worse, we encourage the exact behavior we’re trying to change. Our failures aren’t for lack of trying, and they’re not because the task is impossible. It’s just that the way we try to get people to change is often counter-productive.
So what do we usually do that doesn’t work? We try to tell people what to do, often in anger or frustration. Or we try to reward people, financially or otherwise. We send e-mails and communications to highlight what we’re looking for. And we try to punish people who don’t follow our direction. None of that seems to work predictably.
So, if none of those things work, what does?
In the late 1970s, University of Illinois researcher Leann Lipps Birch conducted a series of experiments on children to see what would get them to eat vegetables they disliked.13 This is a high bar. We’re not talking about simply eating more vegetables. We’re talking about eating specific vegetables: the ones they didn’t like.
You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables—and reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help. But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea hater was eating peas like the pea lovers.
Peer pressure.
“Stories.” I said to the head of the firm.
“Excuse me?” he responded.
“You change other people with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it’s the story you tell. That story conveys what you expect of people simply and reliably. And I’m certain you’re not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change people’s behavior, you have to change the stories they hear and the ones they tell.”
I told him not to change anything else—not the performance review systems or the reward systems or the way people are trained. Don’t change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the old ones. And that disconnect will create tension. That tension represents the transition from the old behavior to the new one. If you stick with it, over time, the new stories will take hold.
To stimulate people’s change all you need to do is two simple things:
1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the change you want people to make. Then let other people tell stories about it.
2. Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the change you want people to make. Then tell stories about them.
For example, if you want people on your team to move faster and focus less on perfectionism, move quickly on an issue by sending out an e-mail with typos in it. Or if you want people to communicate more effectively, stop checking your computer in the middle of a conversation every time the new message sound beeps; instead, put your computer to sleep when they walk into your office. Or if you’re trying to increase people’s happiness at work, instead of making the bride work on her wedding day, give her the week off.
We live by stories. We tell them, repeat them, listen to them carefully, and act in accordance with them.
We can change our stories and be changed by them.
Often, the way we try to get people to change doesn’t work and ends up encouraging the exact behavior we’re trying to change. Since we tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us—and that behavior tends to conform to the stories people tell and hear—create change by telling the right stories.