Month: May 2021

Authority makes it easier.  It’s easier to get things done when you can just tell others to do it.  Of course, few people can do that.  Few people can really order others to do anything without their eventual rebellion.  If you can’t order people to change, you’ll be like most of the rest of us as we try to influence others – with or without authority.

Influence Without Authority

My first highlight in the book Influence Without Authority is, “Nobody has ever had enough authority – they never have and they never will.”  In short, all of us work without sufficient authority.  That means that we must find other ways of accomplishing our goals.

Gandhi was a powerful man to be sure, but his power didn’t rest in his authority.  It rested in his determination and his ability to organize non-violent protests, which led to real and lasting change – freedom from British rule.  It was Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  You don’t need authority to accomplish change, you need determination.  You need what Jim Collins calls the Stockdale Paradox in Good to Great – unwavering faith and the ability to continue to listen.

If you’re in an environment where you have no authority and you believe that you can’t accomplish change, you have the ability to look for influence instead of authority.  With influence, you have the opportunity to develop a small, committed group that can indeed change the world – or at least change your organization.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in 1970 speaking about how consumers could respond to deteriorating quality in the goods they were purchasing.  Later, he commented that these options – and a fourth – could be used in any situation.  You can exit the situation (leave your job), voice your concerns (complain), or remain loyal (persist).  The fourth option is neglect.  You could neglect your duties or your passions.  If you neglect your duties, you may be fired; if you neglect your passions, you may find yourself depressed.

Deciding which strategy you should employ is a personal decision based on your beliefs and experiences.  Great leaders often place the first three options on the table.  They exercise their voice, offer to exit, and remain loyal to the cause if not the situation.  Nelson Mandela could have expressed his anger for his previous imprisonment, but he chose to close his remarks at his next trial with, “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Hopefully, you won’t have to offer to die.  There are, however, times when there are no-win situations at organizations, where your only option is to exit.  Before you go there, try your voice and see if there’s a way that you can still affect change without authority.

We’re taught to fight resistance.  If the nut won’t turn, apply more energy.  Don’t ask it why it’s resisting or join it in its resistance.  That won’t get you what you want.  However, applying more energy can be the worst thing you can do when you encounter resistance.  It can be the right thing is to stop and listen – and sometimes that means fighting from inside the resistance.

Stubborn Reinforcement

In my post Why People Don’t Resist Change, I explained what causes resistance to raise its ugly head and what to do if you wanted to prevent it from getting started in the first place.  However, what if you’ve already got stubborn users who are resisting your change?  What do you do now?  The answer comes in the form of motivational interviewing.  Instead of pushing people to change, you offer to join them in their space.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing is a book that is often used in addiction recovery.  It teaches an approach that suspends judgement and treats everyone with Carl Rogers’ “unconditional positive regard.”  Rather than confronting addicts with their bad behavior, the counselor works on building rapport.  They’re allowed to share their own perspectives on what has brought them to this point in their life.  The approach is like The Ethnographic Interview, where you’re just trying to learn their perspectives, their language, and their solutions.  Counselors are coached to focus people on a tangible change that can make things better, evoking the passion for the change, and finally planning for success.

The step that most people skip is the part where you enter the world of the person who is resisting to really understand their situation, their values, and their perspectives.  If you skip this step, then nothing else that you can do will be effective.  Too many people are afraid to question their beliefs, values, and perspectives.  They’re afraid that if they visit the resistance, they’ll get stuck in it.

Joining the Resistance

Cultural immersion programs are designed to help people engage with the real life of other cultures.  Rather than visiting the sites, they visit the lives of the people as they go about their daily business.  When it comes to the resistance, the best way of understanding is to join the resistance and experience it from the inside.  That isn’t to say that you must take your place in a protest, but you’ve got to be able to hear the concerns in a way that makes you feel like one of them.

It is only as a member of the resistance that you can ask the questions that provoke thought rather than fear, frustration, and anger.  Instead of questioning the very bedrock of their values and perspectives, you can unravel an edge that allows visibility for different perspectives.

Teachable Moments

If you’re not willing to stand with someone where they are, you’ll not be with them when they arrive at a moment when they can learn.  We’ve all had conversations with others where it seemed like they would never listen or learn.  However, that same person, when caught at the right time and in the right environment, can learn instantly.  Those moments can immeasurably change the future, but you cannot predict when or how they’ll come.

If you want to eliminate what you feel is resistance, the best way to do that is to join them and fight in the resistance instead of from the outside.

We say we want change, but why can’t we achieve it?  Sometimes, what we want and what we believe are in conflict.  Even if we can’t articulate what we believe, it can stop us from achieving the change we desire.

Deserts and Scales

Each year, there are many New Year’s resolutions made, and many of those have to do with losing weight.  Whether we want to look better or we feel like we need to weigh less for our health, we commit to making a change.  Six weeks later, there will be gym memberships that go unused and trips to the store for the super-premium ice cream.  In short, in six weeks, over two-thirds of us will have given up on the idea that we’ll lose weight and resign ourselves to another year of wishing rather than doing.

The problem at the heart of the failure is a conflict in what we want.  Sure, we want intellectually to be skinnier or healthier, but emotionally we’d rather not have to do the work to exercise and instead be able to reach for the ice cream scoop when we’ve had a bad day or a difficult conversation.

The conflict between our stated desire of weight loss and our unstated desire for comfort prevents us from making the change that we say that we want.  Instead of shedding pounds, we scratch our head as we stare at the scale wishing it would show us smaller numbers.  Alas, we’ve lost the battle of the bulge for another day and get started with our workday.

Self-Sabotage

It’s a common refrain as business leaders shuffle into the room.  They were hitting it big, making more money than they ever believed possible.  Before they knew it, they believed they were making more than they should.  The believed that they were making more than they were worth, but now they’d give anything to get back there.

We’ve stumbled into an industry association meeting and everyone there is intelligent and hard working.  Many of them come from companies their grandfather started, and they feel like they’re losing the legacy as the business languishes.  They long for the glory days without realizing that they themselves brought them to an end.

When their brain flipped the switch that said they were making too much money – more money than they deserved to make – they started silently self-sabotaging.  It wasn’t big things.  It was small changes that led them, from one decision to the next, to make slightly poorer decisions and reduce the trajectory of the organization to what was more comfortable.  However, what they didn’t realize is that these compound decisions would cause an over-correction and, in some cases, ruin.

The hidden belief was about how much they should make.  What they’re worth.  In many cases, they could see their hard-working father and grandfather slaving over the business every day and never really being able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Why, then, should a grandson inherit something that he barely has to work at?  It’s subtle.  It’s also self-sabotage to bring the income down into a range that feels comfortable, and it’s something that many small business leaders have faced at one time or another.

Lightening Up

The key to overcoming immunity to change is shining a light on those things that are holding you back.  When you see the factors that lead to poor or conflicting decisions, they lose much of their power.  Knowing that you’re using food to comfort yourself allows you to reframe your goal as comforting.  Knowing that you’re sabotaging yourself and your change initiative allows you to be conscious about the decisions you’re making – and to consciously change your choices so that you can have change success.

Innovation may be the thing that we need to move forward.  It may be the thing that every organization wants most, but it’s also the most misunderstood concept in all of business.  We believe innovation to be ideas – but it’s not the birth of an idea, it’s the adolescence.

Ideas

Everyone has ideas.  You’ll have hundreds of them while reading this post.  Some will be mundane.  Some will be gentle nudges to yourself not to forget to pick up milk today or call about that appointment you keep meaning to reschedule.  Some may be profound, like the way to end world hunger.  It’s these profound ideas that can change the world – but only if they can be catapulted out of our consciousness into the cold hard world.

It’s ideas that people seek to capture in knowledge management and suggestion boxes.  Organization sets rewards and bounties for the behaviors that lead to new ideas being captured in paper or electronic form.  However, these initiatives are a waste of time.  They allow you to collect a quite massive pile of rubbish.  It’s the kind of thing that innovation is designed to address.

Innovation

Innovation is the successful implementation of an idea.  It’s testing and refining it until it’s ready to be adopted by the masses and change the world.  Edward Catmull of Pixar explains that all of their movies suck at first.  (See Creativity, Inc.)  They make some of the best animated movies in the business – and all of their movies suck.  They start out as ideas, and the development process that movies go through at Pixar gradually refines them into the story that we see.

It’s not the idea that’s great.  It’s not the selection process.  It’s the refinement process that distils the idea to its essence.  It removes the impurities that will prevent it from being adopted.  To get to the innovation, an idea must be forged by challenges and questions.

Innovation Adoption

Once the idea has been refined, it must be adopted.  Innovations are the adoption of an idea, so without adoption, it’s really not an innovation.  It’s simply an idea.  However, adoption isn’t as simple as it first seems.  Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations explains that we’ll get knowledge from anyone and attitudes from our peers, but we need to make a personal decision to change.  (See Knowledge-Attitudes-Practices for more.)

Getting to adoption of an idea must first pass the hurdle of refinement and move on to the second state where people become aware of it.  It’s with awareness that it’s possible for people to adopt an idea and convert it to an innovation.  But it takes changing attitudes, and that’s where it becomes an opportunity for the change leader.

Change

Persuading people to change their attitudes and behavior is the heart of what the change manager does.  They enable organizations to reap the benefit of those ideas that have been refined by helping people first change their attitudes towards the idea and ultimately change their behaviors in order to make the change.

Without change leaders, there will be little change.  Like a reaction without a catalyst, it may get there eventually, but over a much longer and inefficient process.  Change leaders are the catalyst that makes innovations happen from the raw materials of ideas and refinement.