Five Ways to Make Change Easier
There’s a simple reason that change efforts are difficult, and it’s not that people are lazy or resistant or stupid. Change is hard because it disrupts behaviors that are on “autopilot.” If you were forced to start brushing your teeth with your opposite hand, you’d struggle. When you ask your employees to start acting in a new way, they’ll struggle, too. But here are five ways you can ease that struggle: Find your bright spots and clone them. Psychology tells us that we’re wired to look at the negative. In times of change, we tend to obsess about the problems we’re having, but we need to flip that mentality and search out the “bright spots”–the early signs that things are working. Once we find them, we can clone them. Let’s say you’ve launched a new sales process, and the results have been mixed. Two sales reps have doubled their sales, five others are neutral, three others are down, and one is threatening to quit.Most managers would spend their time dealing with the four struggling reps. Instead you should go study your two “star” reps. What are they doing differently? If you understand how they’re succeeding, you can spread their practices to others. When undertaking any change, ask yourself: What are we doing right now that is working, and how can we do more of it? Shape the environment to support you. Consider Rackspace, an internet hosting company. Early in the company’s history, founder Graham Weston was frustrated with the company’s poor customer service, so he asked where he could find the phone queueing system. (That’s the gizmo that picks up the phone and says, “Press 1 for worthless info, Press 2 for a directory of unfamiliar names, and Press 3 to repeat these options.”)Once he found it he unplugged it. “When a customer calls, that means they need our help, and we’ve got to answer the telephone,” Weston said. What happened? The support reps started answering the phones, of course! By changing the environment, Weston changed his team’s behavior. How can you change your team’s environment to make it easier for them to change? Get behavioral. One of the main mistakes leaders make is that they articulate a new vision but don’t translate it into terms that people on the frontlines can execute. We talked recently with an entrepreneur who wanted his employees to have a “mindset of customer service.” If you’re an employee, when you hear that, all you hear is “buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, jargon, jargon, jargon.” What are you supposed to do?A big-picture vision is great for building morale, but successful change demands specificity, so show people exactly what’s expected of them at the behavioral level. Don’t ask people to adopt the “customer service mindset,” instead, say, “If a customer asks you where a product is, don’t just point in its direction–take the time to walk them to it location.” Conserve self-control. There’s some fascinating research in psychology that demonstrates that self-control is exhaustible–like a muscle. We’ve all [...]
