Speaker 1: Most of the problems leading change initiatives aren't about the change itself. They're about the emotions behind the change. And if you can address those, you can address the real resistance to change. Hey leader, David Berkus here, organizational psychologist and author of five best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. And sometimes doing that best work ever involves having to lead the organization through a change. In my work as a speaker and an advisor to companies of all sizes, I consistently see this, that employee resistance to change is one of the most baffling things that leaders face. Because you spend so much time thinking about the need for the change, mapping out how it's going to work, what changes need to be made, you sell yourself on the change as a leader. And then you have to figure out how to sell, not based on logic, but based on emotion. You were convinced based on logic, but selling the change to the rest of the organization is actually an emotional conversation. And if you don't make that sale, then you're going to see people dragging their feet on the change, decreasing their effort. You're going to see increases in turnover. You're going to see much lower engagement scores. And all of it again, comes not from the fact that you didn't make the case logically on why the change needs to happen. It comes from the fact that you didn't deal with all of the emotions behind that change. And this is not a new phenomenon. You know, in the 1990s, Michigan State Business School, Professor Carl Frost, in his seminal work on leading change outlined four questions that every employee, every team member asks when being asked to make a change. And those four questions are often referred to as like the change quiz, the resistance quiz, because they hint at not only what's behind the resistance to change, but the fact that if you can give people a solid answer to each of those four questions, then you're going to overcome that resistance to change. And you're going to actually get them excited about the change. So in this episode, we're going to dive into those four questions and offer some advice to what you as a leader, no matter what level of the organization you're in, can do to answer those questions and get people excited about the changes that are ahead. Let's get started. So the first question that needs to be answered when overcoming resistance to change is, do we know where we're going? Right? Is there a clear and compelling vision about what the future of the organization looks like? You know, it's not enough to just talk about the current situation that we're in. It's not enough to talk about just the liabilities that staying in that situation creates or the environmental changes that are forcing us to change. You need to be able to paint a clear picture of what it's going to look like on the other side, in particular, what I'm going to look like, what my life is going to look like on that other side. You want to paint a picture of the organization that includes me as the individual being asked to make the change. Otherwise, why would I be bought into the change? And that vision needs to be sort of uniform. You can't leave people with the impression that you know where we're going and I just have to trust you. Guess what? I'm not. You have to tell me exactly what you see so that we share that vision. And you have to make sure if you're leading a larger organization that that same vision happens at every single level. Now, this is somewhat a logical question to answer. You've mapped out the need for the change. You've decided to engage in this change in the organization. So you should have some idea of where you're going and why you're going there, right? But you may by chance have passed on a few things, a few little details about what it'll look like exactly. Let's just get started and then we'll pick up the rest on the fly. And that's not really going to work because that's not going to inspire people to pick up from where they are and get excited about where we're going. So you need to have a clear, a shared, a concise, and a compelling vision on where we're going. And that leads naturally to the second question, one you might have already answered in your own mind, which is do we know why we're going there? Why do we have to do this? Sometimes this is obvious. Changes in regulation, changes in the competitive environment, changes in the economy sort of force us into this moment where we have to do something. But other times it's not. And you'll know if you're not answering this question about why we're going there if people still talk fondly about the old times that forced us into that situation. Now, there's nothing wrong with nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with pining for a time before the situation changed and we need to change to keep up. The problem is if people are pining for the situation that happened in the change. So you've started down this process of making change and people are pining for just before you started, that situation they were in that necessitated the change. I mean, not to get biblical here, but I think about the story of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible and Moses leading people out of slavery into the wilderness and then people started pining for slavery, right? A story from human history that I think a lot of us can relate to in our own leadership journey. We took people out of a situation where our viability as an organization was threatened and are moving them towards a better situation and yet they're still pining for that example. That is your indicator that you haven't done a good enough job selling people on why we need to go where we're going. The third question to help overcome resistance to change, the third question people are asking themselves before they decide whether or not to commit to the change, is do we know we can get there? Okay, think about where we are in people's logical and emotional brains. They're emotional? I don't know what we're going to call that word, but where we are is we've mapped out where we're going and why we're going there, but now what we need is a little shot of confidence, a little shot of efficacy, in trust in that we can actually attain that. You know, you can tell people we're going somewhere grandiose. You could paint this incredibly compelling amazing vision and actually overdo it and make people think there's no way we can become that type of an organization and that's why we need to answer this question. Do we have that belief that we can actually do it? Does the current people with their current skills and the current organization with its current resources have the capacity to get to this new compelling future and if they don't, what's the plan to get those things? You'll know you're not doing a good enough job answering this question if people on your team are, you know, saying those anecdotal things about teaching old dogs new tricks or about how they're struggling to learn all of this because this isn't what they signed up for, etc. That doesn't mean they can't do it. It means we haven't done a good enough job selling them on the fact that we really can. It means they don't actually believe in themselves or they don't believe in you and your ability to actually get us there. So it's not enough to just say, here's where we're going and here's why we're going to go there. We have to believe it's possible to actually get there. And the fourth and final question and overcoming resistance to change, the fourth question people ask themselves, this is really more of a personal question, is do we know that there is better than here? Do I believe that it will be better for me personally? This is partly why right in the beginning we have to sell them on where we're going in a way that they can clearly see includes them but then we also have to let them know that this will be better, that where we're headed will be better for them in the following ways because we're going to be asking people to do a variety of different things. We're going to be asking them to make sacrifices, to put in some extra time, to learn some new skills and in order to get their commitment to that, they have to believe that that will result in something better for them, not just better for you or shareholders or something like that. The way we do that is not by talking about some generic kind of there where what the whole organization looks like when we get there and what have you. We've already done that. Now we're talking about that person specifically, what their new role looks like, the new ways it's going to benefit them. We're painting a compelling picture about the change we're asking them specifically to make in themselves and in their role and how that will be better and automatically you can kind of see why resistance to change is so prevalent and why it's so difficult to overcome it because when you're leading a change, you're not just asking people to take an organization or a team in a new direction, you're asking them to take themselves in a new direction, to adopt a new identity, to learn new skills, to take on a new role and if they don't believe they can do that and they don't believe it'd be better in themselves to do that, then they're not with you. And by the way, that's okay. It's okay if some people, even after all of these questions have been answered, still don't see themselves in that new organization and want to opt out. However, you're still going to want to answer all of these questions for the people who do buy into it so they don't take that departure personally and they don't see those departures as evidence of a failing change. So you still need to answer all four questions at the organizational and the personal level. You need to paint a picture of where we're going and why we need to go there. You need to paint a belief that we can get there and that when we do, it's going to be individually better for everyone that's willing to work toward that. And when you do, you're going to increase their, not only their excitement about the change, their self-efficacy, their confidence in their ability to change. You're going to convince them that this new organizational form, this new initiative, this new change in any capacity, whatever it is, is not only better for you, for the whole organization, but it's better for them and will help them do their best work ever. Oh, and one more thing. Overcoming resistance to change and really selling people on why we need to make the change happens even better when it's tied into why we do what we do and that sense of purpose. So if that's one of the issues plaguing your change efforts, that lack of feeling of meaning or purpose behind it, you're going to want to check out this video here on how to create a sense of purpose on a team.