Leadership and change – why change is so hard and what to do about it

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to explore change extensively at the personal level.  Going through the home buying and selling process pushes many change buttons – and not only with the human part of the family (our hunkered-down cats really aren’t happy about prospective buyers viewing their house – Sally has a very malevolent stare)!

What we’re experiencing at home is a microcosm of what happens in organisations every day…

75% of change efforts fail

Much of the change management advice and literature talks about managing change and using a series of steps to successfully deliver this change.  However, surveys of senior executives (see Pierre Mourier & Martin Smith, Ph.D., Conquering Organizational Change, 2001) tell us that more than 75% of change management efforts fail to deliver what stakeholders expect.  This means that only 25% succeed!

If you cast your mind back a few weeks/months/years, I’m sure you’ve been part of failed or stuttering change efforts – new structures, new IT systems, new policies, new innovations (and personally: new resolutions, diets, exercise and learning strategies).

So what’s going wrong……?

Change hurts

Cognitive neuroscience is telling us that trying to identify how a change will affect us into the future is almost impossible, particularly where we haven’t experienced the world the change could create.  So we’re far more likely to focus on the problem rather than the solution.

Also, we can only focus on one major cognitive shift at a time.  So if there are multiple problems facing us, we run out of processing capacity fast.

See David Rock’s books Your brain at work and Quiet Leadership for more details http://neuroleadership.org/.

Change exhausts us

Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch talk about the results of an experiment with students who were asked to either restrain from or to eat cookies.

Those who had to restrain (mentally supervise) themselves to stop eating the cookies were much less able to perform a further task than those who were not required to use the same level of restraint.

For more details go to Fast Company

We need praise to go the extra mile required for change

Jonah Lehrer in his book The decisive moment: how the brain makes up its mind (pages 54-58) outlines a set of experiments by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University who was studying learning in children.

Children who were praised for their intelligence were more easily discouraged and less likely to take risks in learning.

However, when children in the classroom were praised for effort and therefore able to make mistakes to support learning, they were much more likely to choose to take on more challenging tasks.

4 ways leaders can make change work

1. Focus on one major change. Organisations often embark on multiple change initiatives at once, delivered by different parts of the organisation which don’t connect the dots for the person being affected by the change.
2. Create links or package the changes up so that they make connected sense to the people involved – visuals are very helpful
3. Let people eat the cookies, that is: ensure the change processes use positive patterns of behaviour that are already embedded.
4. Praise people for their effort– and as a leader, even if you’re not running a change effort this is helpful as a leadership strategy!

Amanda