Initiating Change
Rich Kramarik Friday, January 04, 2008
Strategic leadership is about looking to the future with the ability to see around corners, look through walls with x-ray vision, find the shine under the tarnish and use this information to chart the course of the company. The CEO does this by making strategic decisions that will ensure a viable future for the business and by constantly tuning the organization to fit the current business environment. The biggest challenge, however, is not in identifying the correct solutions, but in convincing the employees that the changes required to implement these solutions are essential and manageable.
Let’s face it, we all know it. Most people become comfortable in their surroundings and the natural tendency is to resist changing that comfort zone. The interesting challenge is that all of us react differently to change. Among the reasons we resist change are:
- Fear of the unknown: This evokes many emotions and reactions, most commonly anxiety. It is okay to be anxious, but when your employees worry about things they can’t do anything about – that’s called stress.
- Fear of failure: No one wants to be a failure. No one wants to get fired for making a mistake. Most employees just want to do their job and be safe.
- Difference of opinion: Employees often have different points of view. They mostly just want to do their job and go home. Employees are not normally thinking about company survival and changes required to beat the competition.
- Loss of power: All change creates loss for someone or of something. In this sense, some employees may be losing power and influence and therefore resist any change.
- Lack of Trust: If the employees don’t trust the CEO or company management, then there will be tremendous resistance to change.
Knowing human nature, the effective CEO initiates change by addressing the employee resistance to change by using several possible strategies:
- Company and Personal Advantage – Help the employees perceive the change as an improvement. Guide them to see the value by facilitating the identification, organization and interpretation of facts, opinions and or raw data surrounding the change. Have them work on looking at what ways the change improves the business success or the development and delivery of meaningful products and services. Show the employees how their role fits into the new organization and way of doing business.
- Compatibility – Help the employees understand in what ways the change is consistent with past experiences, processes and/or present values. Review the ways the change enhances traditional methods and approaches. Have employees study how they can modify traditional methods to take advantage of new opportunities that will become available because of the change.
- Complexity – Help the employees grasp how they can make the change easy to implement for themselves and for each other. Have employees show how the change will simplify complex work or processes. Have them work to discover how the change will make it easier for your clients to do business with your company.
- Observability – The more visible the change, the more likely the adoption will be, so discover ways for how employees can provide opportunities for others to see how well the change is working.
- Communication – It is necessary to build sufficient knowledge as well as change attitudes toward a new idea to influence the decision to adopt or reject a new idea. Most people are influenced by the opinions of friends and colleagues who have already accepted the changes. Lead, foster and allow communications on the change. Encourage employees to adopt changes into their repertoire of methodologies and make sure that the employees who are ready for change get sufficient support to be successful and then give them the opportunity to model their success for others.
- Time – People need time to understand new ideas, change attitudes and make a decision to accept the change. CEOs must accept that radical change does not happen over night. However, we must also make sure that we don’t put off for tomorrow what we can and must change today.
In his book, “Crossing the Chasm,” on the topic of sales and marketing, Geoffrey Moore talks about the different characteristics of buyers. He starts with the “early adopters” and works his way through to the “late majority.” In a similar way, Everett M. Rogers published his “Diffusion of Innovations” theory which characterized the degree to which a person is open to change. Knowing how a person is open to change can be a big help in initiating and accepting change. Everett Rogers talked about:
- Innovators – Rogers says that innovators are the first 2.5 percent of the population to adopt new ideas. They are intellectual risk takers who are socially connected with other innovators. Innovators are daring and experimental and have the ability to understand and apply complex technical concepts while able to cope with a high degree of uncertainty.
- Early Adopters – Early Adopters make up the next 13.5% of the population. They tend to be a more integrated part of the organization than the innovators. Friendships are often made and they are highly influential in developing similar opinions among their colleagues. They serve as a role model for their friends and colleagues since they are well respected by their peers. They are the embodiment of successful, discrete users of new ideas. They decrease uncertainty about a new idea by adopting it, and then convey subjective evaluation of the innovation to their peers through interpersonal networks.
- The Early Majority – The Early Majority makes up the next 34% of the population and they usually adopt new ideas just before the average members of the organization. They interact frequently with their peers, and although they exercise less influence with peers they do provide interconnectedness in the organization’s interpersonal networks. Members of the early majority take their time adopting new ideas. They follow with deliberate willingness in adopting innovations, but do not generally consider themselves agents of change.
- The Late Majority – The Late Majority represents the next 34 percent of the population to adopt new ideas. They are likely to respond to increasing network pressures from peers, but they approach innovations with a skeptical and cautious air. The late majority does not adopt change until most others in their system have done so because they require the pressure of peers for motivation.
- Resisters – The Resisters make up the last 16% of the population to adopt innovative changes. They influence few opinions and are often somewhat isolated. They usually make decisions based on what has been done previously and are suspicious of both innovations and change agents. Resisters often see themselves as having limited resources and they must be certain that a new idea will not fail before they can adopt it.
Everett Rogers’ work suggests that change becomes self-sustaining when about 15 or 20 percent of an organization accepts it. Early adopters are the most influential agents for change because they have links to both the innovators and the more conservative groups. We might think that acceptance by the majority is an indicator that changes have been fully integrated, but the job isn’t done until the resisters are won over.
In summary, human nature is to avoid change. CEOs and management resist initiating change even when it’s in the best interest of the company. There are several strategies that we can use to ease initiation and acceptance of change. And, finally the CEO can target the innovators and early adopters to drive faster and more successful change.
