#57: Change from the Inside Out

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. I'm Laird MacLean, one of Erika's partners at Proteus, and I'll be guest hosting today. Our guest is none other than Erika herself. Erika has a new book coming out called Change from the Inside Out: Making You, Your Team, and Your Organization Change Capable. We'd like to learn more about her book, and so we thought we'd change spots. I'll be asking the questions. Welcome, Erika.

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be answering questions instead of asking them. It's fun to be on the other side of the, of the desk, if you will.

Well, I'll do my best to fill your very capable shoes as co-host here. I'm really curious to learn more about your book. You know, um, as you're writing it, I got the pleasure of previewing it, of course, But tell us why you decided to write a book about change.

A number of reasons. The first one, I suppose, when I first started thinking about it, was shortly after my last book came out, Be Bad First, in 2016. And the reason I wrote that book was because I had come to believe that the most important skill for all of us to have in the 21st century is the ability to learn quickly, learn new, new things, new skills, new ways of operating. quickly and well. And then the more I thought about it after the book came out, it's like, well, why is that now the most important skill? And it's because everything's changing so quickly. And, you know, you know better than anyone since you're the head of our change practice that we've been doing change work for a decade. And we were seeing it just ramp up and ramp up and ramp up. And I decided that you know, and you know this very well, when I write a book, I always try and crack the core codes. I feel like my main impetus for writing a book is to take a complex leadership, generally, topic and really find the simplicity at the heart of it. And so once I had sort of landed on change as something I needed to write about, I felt like, okay, I really want to get clear, hopefully in a new way that will be helpful to people, about how it is that each of us, that individual human beings, go through change. What, what happens when people either make a change or don't make a change? And my hope was if we got clearer about that, we could not only help individual humans go through change better, quicker, more painlessly, but then in our change work with our change model, that we could cascade that shift Throughout a whole organization more effectively.

Yeah, and change in organizations can be a very complex phenomenon. What are some of the concepts that you address in your book, Change from the Inside Out, that people really find valuable to help one navigate through change, but also as leaders lead through change?

Well, I think the first one is this one that we've just started talking about. So let me explain a little bit more that What I understood about how individuals go through change, and whether that individual is a person just new to their career and new to an organization, or the CEO and everything in between, that individuals are— humans are very much the same in this. We call it the change arc. And so what I came to understand is that almost without exception, when a change comes at us especially, The first thing that we do, we call this stage proposed change. We want to know some core things about that change, and the first 3 things that almost everyone wants to know about a change that's coming at them is, what is this? And especially, what is it for me? And then why is it happening? So we can kind of load it into our brains that way. And then almost most important, What will it look like when it's changed? What will that post-change future look like? Because we do have this deeply held fear of the unknown. So when somebody tells us something's going to change, but not what it will look like after it's changed, that's pretty scary to us. So we want to take in that information. Then the next stage— and this is really the heart of it. I was so excited when I figured this out. And I could have a whole— we could have a whole other conversation about this. But because of our kind of deeply wired-in historical belief that change is basically dangerous and that it's better to just stay with the known, that our mindset when change comes at us tends to be that the change is going to be difficult, costly, and weird, as you know, and difficult means I don't know how to do it and things are going to get in the way of me doing it. There are going to be impediments to me doing it. Costly means it will take away things I value. So that could be time or money, but it's just as likely, perhaps more likely, to be identity, reputation, relationships, power. And weird just means strange and unnatural.

Right.

So what I noticed is that when people's— when a person's mindset about a change starts to shift from it's going to be difficult, costly, and weird to Well, maybe it could be easy, rewarding, and normal, then that's when their whole momentum shifts and they start to be open to considering and then doing the new behaviors, the different ways of operating that the change requires, and the change can occur. So when, when I realized this and writing down the book, it's so helpful because You know, there's so much data that shows that when change doesn't work, and sadly it doesn't more often than it does, it's not because of lack of due diligence or planning usually, or it's generally, the research shows, because of lack of human buy-in, management support and employee buy-in.

Right.

So by understanding this simple but powerful shift, mindset-based shift that people have to go through before they'll make a change, Then what we've done, I think, and I then further go through this in the book, is our very simple but very helpful 5-step change model integrates the nuts and bolts things that need to be done in order to make a practical change with this human imperative to help as more and more people find out about the change and get drawn in, the focus is on helping them through their change arc so that by the time you actually make the change, it really is so much more likely to be a adopted and to actually make the difference that you're hoping for.

You know what I love about the change arc, Erika, is as a leader of change, you can now have a framework in your mind about how people are experiencing the change and what questions they're asking themselves. And so as a leader of change, you can really then answer those implicit questions or sometimes unspoken questions about the change proactively. And therefore just be in a better position to have success.

Wow, I completely agree with that. Once you understand that people have to get that information and make that mindset shift, then you can really dig down into, okay, what is, what is this particular group of people likely to see as being difficult, costly, and weird? You get very specific about it. The other— I completely agree with you. And the other thing I love about it is it gives leaders a way it gives us a way to help leaders and then leaders a way to understand why people don't immediately get excited about change. You know, so imagine there's a leader who finds out about a change and he or she then goes through their own change arc. They get the information they need, they make that mindset shift, they're ready to behave in these new ways, do these new things. And then they turn to their folks.

Right.

And they tell them about the change for the first time. And they somehow magically expect them to have gone through their change arc already and to be the same place where the leader is after 3 months of thinking about it. So it's a great way. And I do think that, that I'm sure you've experienced this a lot too, that that's one of the big impediments to change is leaders just have unrealistic expectations about their folks. Right.

Well, I was just going to say, if you understand that change is a process, both at a personal level with the change arc and then the cascade, you know, you can expect it and therefore not become frustrated or even exasperated by the lack of progress. And just knowing that each person, each group has to go through that process just like they did. So yeah, it really provides a helpful framework.

I love that way of talking about it, that you have an alternative to frustration and exasperation and also to making unnecessary and unwarranted limiting assumptions about people. So many leaders, you know, they bring a change to their people, and their people just start going through their change arc like we do. And the leader characterizes that as they're change resistant, or they don't have a sense of— they're not future thinking, right? No, they're just going through their change arc. Help them through it, you know.

Exactly. Well, you know, Erika, as we've talked about the book, as you were writing it, you also talked a little bit about how really integrating the human side of change with the organizational realities of change. How do you see that reality coming to life in the book and some of the examples that you share in the book?

Well, I talked— there's a kind of frame story. And those of you who have read other books of mine, you know that I almost always have a core story because I think stories are such a great way to understand and teach and learn. And the one in this book is about a family jewelry company that's The father is the CEO and he's handing it over to his daughter and they need to make a number of other changes, and so much of what they go through in the book is, oh, how do we help our people through this change? What are they going to need? What are they going to have to understand? What do they need to do differently? And I feel like, as we have evolved our approach to change, we've seen that the real power comes from that integration. from at this very same time that you're saying, okay, what are the practical things we need to do? And using a lot of, you know, and this is a lot due to you, using a lot of project management and program management tools that help make sure that the practical organizational structural systemic part of the change is happening well, while at the same time helping people understand what the change is, why it's happening, what it'll look like, and what they're going to need to do differently, and how to help them change. change their minds, you know, change their thinking about it. And that when you do those 2 things simultaneously, it— the likelihood of success is just so much higher.

Yeah, I think that's right on. I can say from my point of view, particularly as the change practice leader here at Proteus, I can't wait to get my hands on the book to share it with our clients. And so, Erika, thank you for taking the time today to talk to us about your book. When can we expect it to be available?

Um, it is— the launch date is October 26th, and I just heard from my wonderful publisher Barrett Kohler that the audiobook should be available on the 8th of October. So it's available on Amazon, uh, audio, Kindle, hard copy, and I hope that everyone listening buys it, enjoys it, finds it valuable.

Great.

Well, Erika, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, and I'll look forward to switching seats with you again next time.

Thanks, Laird. This has been great.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at proudestleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.