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Imagine you’re the new CEO of ChocoBot Inc., the world’s largest maker of edible jewelry…
That’s right, edible jewelry, as in candy bracelets, chocolate watches and gummy brooches. And right now you’re in a sticky situation. You’ve got to motivate your middle managers to support a new, and necessary, change initiative. You’re speaking at the quarterly management meeting next week and all 300 middle managers will be in attendance. Neither ChocoBot nor these managers have much experience with change; they’re in a very stable and protected industry.
Which of the following two choices most closely represents how you would direct that speech?
A: Stay away from anything that might scare these managers and instead focus only on the positive aspects. Otherwise you run the risk of terrifying them and chasing away the best ones. This could trigger a negativity virus that spreads to the frontline employees causing a stampede. Not only will that kill off any change efforts, it could destroy your career. Besides, if your pitch is good enough, you won’t have to worry about whether this change effort is seen as necessary because people will already be bought in.
B: You’ve got to explain the risks of doing nothing and how this change effort is as critical to everyone’s continued existence as is breathing. These managers need to understand that if they don’t change; their survival and the organization’s survival could be jeopardized. You believe strongly that they have all the talent and skills to meet these challenges, and you will certainly communicate that message, but there can be no confusion about the seriousness of the challenge. Your fear isn’t that you’ll be seen as too negative, it’s that complacency will destroy the change.
It’s the same kind of hard decision leaders around the globe are faced with every day. The correct answer is B. This is the action 100% Leaders take as it delivers the right level of challenge employees need to make the leap during big, scary change initiatives. Employee buy-in to change is easy when things are dire (like in a turnaround situation where change feels urgent and necessary). But when employees get too comfortable and believe that everything in the organization is good, they get complacent with the status quo. That’s when you hear protests to change that sound like this: “But we’re already doing great, there’s no need to change.” Without a reason “why” the change has to happen, most people view change as a potentially threatening disruption to the status quo (and if the status quo were that bad, people would have left it already).
100% Leaders force people up off their proverbial comfortable chairs and into the scary unknown. But no change initiative can succeed without at least 70% support from the workforce. A pretty big deal considering that a Harvard study found that 70% of change efforts fail and a Leadership IQ study found the #1 reason CEO’s get fired is mismanaging change.
Selling change to gain 70% support is an ongoing process; you can’t just send out a memo and be done with it. Leaders have three options:
Option #1: Start a Fire: Make the current state uncomfortable to create a sense of urgency. (Emotionally difficult to do, most leaders avoid Option #1. Failure to start a fire is the biggest reason why most change initiatives fail).
Option #2: Make a Better Future: Paint a compelling picture of what’s ahead so people want to go there.
Option #3: Build a Bridge: Provide clear transitional details so people overcome the fear that they won’t be able to succeed in the new change environment.
The best results come from a combination of all three options, and that’s what we see evidenced in choice B in the test above. And once 100% Leaders get the 70% support, they make a formal break and close the door on how things were done in the past. This eliminates making the change appear optional and risking damaging the support of the people who made the change.
100% Leaders do things differently; that’s why they’re so successful. They aren’t afraid to stray from “what everyone else is doing.” Anyone can learn to be a 100% Leader, but right now, there are a lot more leaders who are Intimidators, Avoiders and Appeasers than there are 100% Leaders. Attend our webinar Choosing the Right Leadership Style for Every Situation and you’ll not only learn what kind of leader you are right now, but also what you can do to start being a 100% Leader, right away.
Mark Murphy is Founder & CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated research and consulting firm that delivers employee engagement and leadership development to the world’s most successful organizations and their leaders.
Mark leads one of the world’s largest leadership and goal-setting studies, and his work has appeared in such publications as the Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post. Mark has also been a featured guest on programs including CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR.
Mark’s training and surveys have yielded remarkable results for organizations such as Harvard Business School, Aflac, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, MD Anderson Cancer Center, FirstEnergy, Volkswagen and Johns Hopkins.
Mark’s best-selling books are backed by rigorous research and offer leaders clear and actionable solutions. His most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, was featured in Fast Company, The Wall St Journal, and chosen as a top business book by CNBC. Some of his other titles include the international bestseller, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, and HARD Goals: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.
As a former turnaround specialist, Mark’s work has revolutionized how we view the link between leadership and bottom-line results. He was awarded the prestigious Healthcare Financial Management Association’s “Helen Yerger Award for Best Research” for being the first person to discover the link between layoff strategies and patient mortality rates. For his work in saving financially-distressed hospitals, he was a three-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare Award,” joining a list of 300 luminaries including Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. Some of his other groundbreaking research studies include “Are SMART Goals Dumb?,” “Why CEO's Get Fired,” “Why New Hires Fail” and “Don’t Expect Layoff Survivors to Be Grateful.”
