This post is part 3 of a 5 Part Series sharing the powerful reasons to Let Go of Change Management. If you missed the first post - go there first. We welcome your comments, feedback and insights as we explore the topic of transforming culture and business.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #5: Death by Fiction
In our last post we dealt with the destructive power of rumor. And when rumor goes unquenched, it soon aggregates into the accepted narrative of the change. Change management not only doesn’t deal with how it spawns rumors, it also provides the exact ecosystem within which rumor will soon become the accepted truth.
Take this standard practice: don’t let on that we don’t know what the *bleep* the next steps in the change are.
Staff now enter one of the inescapable cycles that are part and parcel of most every change management process, an unofficial but rousing competition to see whose rumor becomes the accepted TRUTH of what is actually happening. Bordia’s three life stages of a rumor are: Construction, Confirmation, and Transmission. This is an inevitable survival response, and it degrades and sometimes destroys a company’s culture.
Stage 1 is rumor Construction in which people faced with change compare and contrast all the scenarios they can think up to explain what’s going to happen. And they do so while trying to rationalize the mutually exclusive management statements of “this is going to be big” and “it won’t really impact you in the trenches, so don’t worry.” Meanwhile, additional messages from leadership that “we’re working on it”, “it’s still high level”, and “it’s complicated” merely confirm staff suspicions that they are not important enough to be involved in their own world being changed underneath them. Authentic and clear communication at this point, including “here’s what we don’t know”, can and usually will make a significant difference. And it rarely arrives in time.
Stage 2, confirmation, is when a “winner”, rising from all the available and depressing imagined futures, emerges as a group consensus. At this point, rational communication on the order of, “that might not be true” and “let’s give this time” fall to one-tenth of what they were in Stage 1. Future statements from leadership are now greatly outweighed by the strength of the group think as they gather evidence supporting their emerging view. Executive communication that could have made a difference in the early stage has almost no shot now and is “too little, too late.” In addition, senior executives now have half the credibility and trust from staff as what is afforded to local managers. Positive messages from senior leadership at this point, ironically, become further “proof” of how inauthentic leadership is, has been, and will continue to be.
Stage 3, the final and viral stage, is transmission. In one week, a single employee will tell the “confirmed and accepted” rumor to about 30 other employees. This narrative of aggregate rumors (the org chart, the comp plan, the new bosses, the branding, the offices and equipment…) pick up steam and turn into accepted reality. And, all management now loses credibility because everyone “knows what’s going on” and leadership STILL doesn’t have the respect to “tell us to our face”. This is the predictable recipe for disaster where lack of information becomes rumor, becomes assumption, becomes truth, becomes viral, becomes reality, becomes another failed change initiative.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #6: What motivates you - definitely does NOT motivate them.
Leaders have been told to create a burning platform, a compelling case to motivate employees for change. But 99% of all change has to do with money, as in “we need to make more money”. But that’s not the message that’s delivered. Everyone already knows it’s about the money, but instead of telling the truth we tell one of two predictable stories.
Story one is “We can do better”. It’s an attempt to portray a “good to great” pathway. The protagonist in this story is “the Company” and it’s a plucky youth who’s going to make it big one day.
Story two is “We must do better”. It’s an attempt to rally the troops for one last great effort. The protagonist in the story is (spoiler alert!) “the Company” and it’s a wily veteran with a few more surprising wins in it, if only we can enact the right training montage.
In either case “the Company” is an abstraction that most people are not connected to. And, given that employees aren’t personally connected they’re not nearly as loyal as executives think. Why would they be, when they can’t see what’s in it for them?
According to research by Rousseau, Zohar, Cowen, Beck, Carnegie, Barrett, Kohn and a host of other social science thinkers, an employee’s motivation is least connected to money and most connected to the purpose, challenge, and net benefit of their job.
Change management has done such a poor job of dealing with this basic truth of human nature that we simply don’t talk about employee motivation anymore. We actually changed it’s name to employee engagement so that we can pretend it’s “new”.
Regardless of what you call it, you probably haven't gotten, and won’t get, much mileage out of the burning platform strategy because it does not answer the real question people have. What’s in it for me?
Most employees, the vast majority, want to make a difference in their own lives and in the lives of others. They rarely, if ever, hear how this basic need will be furthered in the predictable, self-important, vague, and pedantic company-centered messaging of change management. And leaders are surprised, somehow, that what’s important to them is not what’s important to everyone else in the company.
By Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel - Co-founders of Unstoppable Conversations
We encourage your thoughts and welcome all: nay, yay or hmmmm.
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Watch for Part 4 in this series next week. Get notice of these and other paradigm-shifting insights, Join Unstoppable Conversations on Facebook or Twitter to keep in the know for your business' future and culture transformation.
Unstoppable Conversations and the team of Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, are a unique consulting firm which produces radical shifts in the capacity of an organization’s leaders to realize extra-ordinary results within a surprisingly short time. Their work demystifies the world of change and simplifies everything to ONE key driver. Leaders discover that their organization’s culture shapes and limits all of their well laid plans and they discover how to practically address their culture with real-time actions that produce immediately obvious benefits.
