Culture Change: What's In It For Me?

There's one phrase that you could use to eliminate resistance from team members getting on board. One activity you would do to get rid of resistance or reduce it as much as possible, what would that be?

This is the million dollar question, right?

The, the main thing I would say you always have to keep coming back to what's in it for them. You have to have them see how they get the win. And that might be different for each different team members. Maybe you have an exercise to get them to think about what's important for them. Maybe you let them see a system evolve and how it impacts them and then gets a greater result. Maybe you need to communicate with them. It always comes back to the individual and how. If I was to pick one thing, obviously there are team members that also want to see the greater good for the business and they understand, look, if the business is unhealthy, then we're all in trouble because our jobs are now at risk. But that's also a little bit more of a bigger stretch. It's a smaller jump to just think about, you know, me, what's in it for me and how does this make things better for me?

I think one of my favorite cliches or sayings around leadership, and this really relates to opening up the conversation about what's in it for me, is the fastest way to get someone on your team is to get on theirs, right? It's a sort of military saying. And when you think about trying to put yourself in the shoes of your team, thinking about their circumstances in life, you know, why they work for you, why they work maybe in the industry, why they work for you, is it by happenstance that they end up working for you and it's just okay for the moment and if it is, that's fine. But understanding where they're at or are they really career driven or is it just stability and they need to focus their time at home because they've got other things going on in their life. Understanding where they're at and knowing that it's actually dynamic, it will change over time based on what's happening in their life. Understanding that and leaning into that to explain. You see how you just want to be able to dust your hands off at 5pm and go home. This will help with that. You're not going to get messages after hours from people or when you have a sick day because we've got it like we've got this stuff sorted out and it's only going to be extreme situation that we need to lean on you. So really understanding the why for people is very important and something I'll probably in terms of the integrate side of things to make this easy on you, to make sure this can scale over time without having to be all about you. As the business owner, you've really got to set that systems champion of yours up to better keep this type of agenda going. Like in Systemology, we call this topic Buy in. Right? Your team has to be bought into the idea of oh, it does actually make it easier for me and setting your systems champion up so they're skilled at having these type of conversations. If you remember the session we did, the little demos about explaining why systemizing to a grumpy old man or a perky teenager that's been with you for three months and is like carefree and whatever, having those type of conversations and upskilling Systems Champion so they can keep their finger on the pulse will really help you set up.

Just a heads up, that clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champion Certification Program, which is the world's first and only program for systems champions to help you build a systems culture and and develop an AI first approach and roll it out inside your organization. To find out more, head over to systemology.com systemschamp and I'll see you in.