#82 Help Your Team Be Open to Change

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading and 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.

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Edith Andrick-Harvey. She's managing partner at NextBridge Consulting, an organizational change and leadership development consulting firm focused on helping clients stay ahead of the curve. She is a widely recognized consultant, speaker, and author who has helped clients embrace change for over 25 years. Edith is the author of the Marshall Goldsmith-endorsed book Getting Real: Strategies for Leadership in Today's Innovation-Hungry, Time-Strapped, Multitasking World of Work. So welcome to the show, Edith.

Hi, Erika. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm really happy to have you. So as you know, you and I connected because we both have articles featured in Harvard Business Review's forthcoming book, which is called HBR Guide to Leading Through Change.

Yeah.

When I read the title of your article, I got very excited because I think what you talked about in the article, which is how leaders can help their teams be open to change, so essential. I mean, that really runs through a lot of our work with change. And then when I dug into it and read your article, I thought it was so human-centered and so practical, I thought, oh, we can have a great conversation.

Great.

Great.

I'm looking forward to it.

All right. So let's do it. So the first question I want to ask is, can you help us understand both why building openness to change is so important and what you've seen as the key elements of doing that?

Absolutely. So I think it's so important because if you're going to win, you know, in today's world of business, Change is what's going to set you apart, how well you do change, how well you adapt to change, how well you integrate change into the way that you do business. And I know that it sounds really, really cliché now that, oh, the pace of change is increasing. We've been hearing that for forever. But we all know that it is.

Yes.

And how well you embrace that is really going to make you more competitive, the better you are at that. And I'm not talking about sort of the traditional way that people look at change with being these initiatives that are identified and pushed down from the top, you know, because with the pace that things are going, you have people in your organization who are far closer to the technology, to the customers, to the operations, to what's going on out there. And so you want to have everyone be a potential, what I call, changemaker in the organization.

Yes.

And the good news behind all of this, from my perspective, is that Human beings are built for change. If you want to call it growth, if you want to call it learning, whatever it is, we experience that sort of positive disruption through our entire life. From the time we're a baby, we go from crawling to walking and walking to running and running to riding a bike. And this continual sort of push to do something new, to do something different. And back, you know, in the industrial age, which I know sounds like eons ago, but there's still so many remnants of it still in our businesses.

Yeah.

You know, it was all about standardizing and consistency.

Yeah.

Now, you wanted to make everything exactly the same. You wanted people to just follow the rules, stay within, you know, the standards, and make things happen that way. And that's what people were rewarded for. That's why people succeeded at work. And there's always going to be rules that are going to be essential within work, especially if you're in a highly regulated industry. But you really have to build that agility, that change agility into your organization, into— and open up that desire for positive disruption in people. So when you think about changing some of that leftover industrial age behaviors and mindsets— and there's plenty of them in the way that we still structure work these days— Yeah, I think there's probably 5 things that leaders can do that are pretty simple, that are things they can do on a regular basis that happen really within those interactions with your team. And that's how you begin sort of some of this shifting. And so one of the things I think you have to do is you have to show people that this is a good thing and this is what you want. So sharing those stories, those success stories of people who pushed against the status quo, who did something different, who changed, who moved something along in a different way.

To normalize that, to make it—

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, to normalize it and to celebrate that. And not just the successes, right? Because everybody's going to go, oh, that's great, their successes. But also to think about the mistakes too, right? And talking about, hey, it's better that we try to do something differently and learn that it doesn't work or make mistakes along the way until we get to the eventual place. Than to not.

Especially when those— to show how mistakes do lead ultimately often to success, a different way of doing it, or you learn something that's essential for the next effort, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it's so essential. I think it was Thomas Edison maybe who said, I didn't fail at making a light bulb. I learned 99 ways not to make a light bulb. You know, so it's that kind of mentality that it's expected and it's part of it and it's okay. It's not going to end your career or limit your career or make me look at you as someone, oh, could I promote this person or could I give this person a good performance review rating or things like that? I think the other thing is to build these— I call them listening posts, these meetings that you have that are really focused on creating dialogue, letting people ask questions, letting people talk about how they're feeling about change, eventually getting around to some action planning around it, but gaining their experience, their insights, that kind of thing. And in these times too is when you're able to reinforce that message to people that, hey, this is part of what we want you to be doing. This is part of your job. It's not just follow whatever the job description is unless the job description has a line in it about, hey, identifying opportunities for doing things differently.

Yeah.

To do that and really make that an ongoing part of the conversation. We all know, again, talk about an old saying about what gets managed gets done. And, you know, if we're talking about it, people are going to say, oh, this must be important. You know, this must be something that, that, you know, we want to be part of.

I really love that, especially the just, you know, listening is such a key thing in change. And when you said, listen, you know, hear their concerns, because a lot of times managers make the mistake, I think, of trying to talk people out of their concerns.

Yeah.

Just take them in. Let me understand. Let me understand. Okay. Did I get it? Yes. Okay. Would you like to talk about how to address that rather than just Dismiss them.

Yeah, people, they want to hold the hand up to it. It's like, oh, no, we're going to push all the concerns aside because we have to make this change happen. We have to make this change work. And it really, by hearing those concerns, A, people are going to feel more part of it, just like you're saying. Do we want to action around this and do something to change this? They're going to feel heard, which is incredibly important. And also, you know what? They probably have some good insights into why this is a concern and why there's a problem here. We all have our blind spots. We all have those things that we don't always do well or perfectly or see. And they can be really great sets of eyes for us to be able to do that, for us to be able to do that.

Right.

And then I think another thing, again, that's pretty simple to do is those what-if questions and questions like that. You know, what if we could start from scratch and do this all over again? What would it look like? What if somebody from a completely different industry looked at this? And, you know, what would they do with it? You know, those kind of questions that allow people to sort of push against the guardrails or the boxes that they've put around things and be able to say, hey, you know, if we— there are opportunities here, if we start to kind of push against the box we've put ourselves in.

You know, unstick them from Their current reality.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That that and I love that that phrase that unsticking, you know, kind of kind of pulling them apart from that. You know, and we talked about mistakes a minute ago. You know, expecting and sharing mistakes. You know, before we got on today, you were talking about your experience with with moving to Spain and learning Spanish. You know, we're not going to be perfect at it. You know, and nobody's going to be perfect at it. You know, part of change is about experimenting and trying things out, and. It's not always going to be perfect. And we have to let people know, it's okay to make a mistake. You know, it's okay that we can move forward from this and we can learn from this. You know, if I go back to my analogy of, you know, going from crawling and walking to riding a bike, when we were all learning how to ride a bike, we all fell off our bike, right? But it didn't cause us to say, oh, I'm never going to ride a bike again, right? Done. I can't— nope, can't do this. I'm going back. I'm going to walk the rest of my life. And then I think the last thing too is, you know, and again, if we kind of go back to that stickiness or us all being in our boxes or our silos, just giving everybody, you know, people the opportunity to see and hear different perspectives on a regular basis, you know, go reaching across the silo, creating cross-functional teams, even if there's not an opportunity for a cross-functional team, you know, bring somebody from another part of the business or the organization in to have a conversation with your team and share their perspective. You know, if we're in operations, you know, what's it like to be out there selling? Or, you know, if I'm in a field function and you're in a staff function, you know, what's it like to be at one or the other of those, you know, to get that perspective and get those different ideas? And that, you know, I think when you take those 4 or 5 things and you start doing them on a regular basis, it changes the conversation from just being about what's the project today? What are we working on? What are the issues? What do you need to do to get things moving forward? And let's just focus on what's right here and now and what we're trying to achieve there. Not that those things aren't important. We've got to do that. But we've got to broaden the conversation.

Broaden the conversation, unstick, open. I love that. All right, let's go to the dark side for a minute. So what are the critical things for leaders to avoid? Like, what really gets in the way of people being open to change?

Yeah, so I think a couple of things. One, we talked about it, this shutting out the concerns. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear about why you don't like this. Just go do it, right? Because that feels very forced upon. On people. I think even before that, I think a huge landmine, and people don't even realize they're doing it, is simply the way we talk about change in a really negative way. And that's not to say that we should be namby-pamby about it and think everything's going to be unicorns and roses. It's not. But at the same time, the more we can set it up as there's opportunity here, yes, there's going to be mistakes along the way, everything's not going to be perfect, but you know what? We're going to work together to get through those, to get over those. It just sets a different tenor when people are thinking about that. Right.

I mean, if somebody comes to you and says, this is going to be hard and painful, you don't want to dismiss that.

No, absolutely.

And also then say, okay, yeah, so it could be difficult. How can we make it easier? What can we do to make it more possible? So just trying to turn their brains a little bit.

Yeah, that reframing it of saying, yeah, there are going to be parts of this that are going to be hard. And yes, there's going to be parts that are going to feel uncomfortable. And just as you're saying, let's talk about what we might do to minimize that. Are we going to get rid of it totally? No, probably not. But, you know, how can we work through that? What can we do to help make that okay? You know, as we go through that, you know, I think the second thing that is a big landmine is what I call doing change to people.

Yeah.

You know, the initiative, the change, whatever it is, gets identified at the top of the house. We plan out how it's going to happen, what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, et cetera. We push it on down through the organization. And that's the recipe for resistance because people feel like it's being done to them versus being done with them. And yeah, some change is going to originate at the top. But the more you open up your organization to change, the more that people are going to see that they can also influence it.

Yeah.

That me as the frontline person dealing with our operations can identify something that I'm seeing that needs to change, a technology that I'm hearing about as I talk to colleagues of mine and things like that that we might want to think about. And so change will come from different parts of the organization. And when they do start at the top, when we do have those enterprise-wide initiatives that come down, I always coach and counsel my clients to decide the what at the senior levels in the organization. And then engage as deeply as reasonable as you can in the organization around the how. Those are the people who really know what's going on. Those are the people who really know what, as you were talking about before, what the landmines and possible unintended consequences are.

People get their fingerprints on it in that way. That's when they start to own it and feel like, oh, this is our change. We're doing this together.

Yeah, that it's together. It's not, ugh, I'm going to do it to you. Just go do this. These are the marching orders. Just follow this. And it just completely is going to change the tenor of your conversation and most likely the degree to which your change actually succeeds too.

Totally. So, you know, so much of your— all of your advice has been so practical. I always, I always encourage guests to do practical takeaways, but you've already done that. So then what's the first step? Like, if, if listeners are now listening to this and going, wow, we're going through a lot of changes. What's the thing I can do to help my team be more open to it?

So I always say that the first thing, openness to change starts with your mindset and behavior follows. So I think part of it is taking a pause yourself, especially when you're a leader, and especially leaders who are sort of in that middle layer in an organization because they've got the toughest job. They're being told when those things come down from the top, hey, you have to help us implement this at the same time that they're trying to wrap their arms around it and understand it and those kinds of things as Whereas now we're saying, hey, be kind of leading change in your own corner of the world and opening your people up for it and identifying things that can change and be done differently. And so just taking a beat and even being self-aware and taking a look internally to say, how am I thinking and feeling about this?

Exactly.

I oftentimes do an activity with groups when I'm talking about self-awareness where I'll say, how often in any given day do you actually check in with yourself about how you're doing, how you're feeling? And almost a person, it's never too much going on. And I'll say, okay, we're going to stop right now for just 30 seconds. And I want you to just sit there and I just want you to check in with yourself. What are you feeling right now? What are you experiencing right now? And let's do that. And I'm just quiet for 30 seconds.

That's fantastic.

And people, you know, I'll say, all right, so how was that? How did that feel? Right? And some people are like, oh, it felt really kind of uncomfortable and weird. You know, other people are saying, That actually felt really good, you know, for me to. I said, guys, that was thirty seconds. Like thirty seconds can be you walking to get a cup of coffee. You know, thirty seconds can be you, you know, logging onto your computer. Whatever it is, take those moments to check in with yourself, and then that allows you to think about: Am I engaging in that negative self-talk? Right? Am I engaging in the oh God, here we go again. You know, this is going to be so hard. I can't believe these people think this is actually going to work. My people have so much on their plate. You're asking me to help them open up and be changemakers? Like, really?

Yeah.

You know, and think about how are you thinking about it, you know, and then change the narrative for yourself. You know, hey, change can be opportunity. Change can mean success. Change can mean things get easy. Change could be more revenue.

The phrase that comes to mind is, you know, when you're in an airplane and they say, put on your own mask before attempting to help others.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Yeah, thinking about it in a useful way.

You know, the old, you know, the other saying, you know, that one dead battery can't jumpstart another. You know, if you're thinking really negatively about it, if this is the last thing you want to do, how in the world are you going to get your people to be open about this? You know, how are you going to do that?

Thank you so much. We could talk about this for hours, but everything you're saying is so needed right now. I think everybody, as you said, everybody, needs to become more change capable. So listeners, if you'd like to learn more about Edith's work, just go to nextbridgeconsulting.com where you can also order her book, Getting Real. And to find out about how Proteus helps leaders drive needed change in a way that supports everybody involved, you can go to proteusleader.com, click on topics, and choose Change from the Inside Out. So thank you so much, Edith. Thank you.

Thank you, Erika. It was terrific.

This has been great. So thank you all for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

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 theprodigiousleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.