“I really can’t believe the change that has come over him.”
I was speaking with a friend recently who was telling me about a remarkable transformation he had seen in his teenager over the last 6 months. It’s a story that has enormous implications for every business to help make change work for you and improve the performance of your business. And who knows it may work with your teenagers too!
“He has an entirely different work ethic than before. He comes home after school and practice and disappears into his room. Every time I go in to see how he’s doing, he’s studying something. He never did that before, we always had to prod him to get his homework done.”
His son had gone from being a typical mildly interested student getting B’s and C’s to almost straight A’s. He had done this while choosing, for himself, to take a much heavier workload in more challenging classes. I also learned that the young man had worked all summer to try to increase one of his SAT scores. When his latest score came back it was up by 1/3 (an amazing improvement if you don’t know much about those tests)!
Having two teenagers of my own and a third child on the cusp, I was naturally very excited to learn how this incredible transformation had occurred. Getting teenagers to make even the smallest of changes can sometimes feel impossible. So this was a golden opportunity for me to learn something important. I was dying to know how this miracle happened.
Surprisingly, my friend told me he hadn’t done anything, that his son had done himself. Over the years they had tried many things, with little impact. They were many of the same kinds of rules, structures, disciplines and veiled threats (some not so veiled!) that have been used by parents everywhere for time immemorial. “My son decided he wanted to change, and it happened almost overnight, with no effort or involvement from my wife and me.”
The old adage about changed leaped into my mind:
“People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.”
When someone wants to change there is very little resistance. Even if they struggle to get results, it’s not due to resistance. Yet almost when we turn it around and try to compel people to change—with things like rules, disciplines and threats that we often use in companies, or with our kids—more often than not we get resistance. At best these methods get ‘compliance’. But compliance is far from embracing change, from pouring your heart into it, like my friend’s son was doing. And the results don’t even compare.
My friend’s son had taken ownership and responsibility, not only for the change, but for something more important—the results. He was fully vested and investing in getting the results he wanted. In his case he had decided he badly wanted to go to a certain college. He did the research and realized his current grades and scores probably weren’t good enough to get him in. It was as if everything suddenly became clear to him and he started taking actions above and beyond anyone else’s expectations.
The level of engagement that occurs when someone decides they want to make a change is wholly unlike what happens when change is forced upon us. Forcing change can, course, lead to some results, but you can’t force people to care, to put their heart into it, or to get creative about solving problems. And once a company commits to “pushing” as the primary method for causing change, you have to keep pushing. As soon as you let up things will most likely slide right back to where they were and any results will evaporate. In organizations leaders simply can’t be everywhere, watching everything all of the time.
The Urge to Push Change
Finding solutions to business challenges is difficult enough, so when we get there and shift to implementing them, there is a natural tendency to want to “just do it”. It’s easy to think that all we need to do is tell people to change and it will happen. But that rarely gets results. Though I don’t have any data on it, I suspect that most companies struggle more with implementing change, than with deciding what to change.
I wondered how many hours, days and weeks I spent trying to push change. What if I had spent that time trying to find ways to help the other person want to change?
No it’s not easy, but I came to the conclusion very quickly it would probably take much less total effort, get better results and make everyone feel better along the way.
Shifting our perspective
The first step in any change is always in how we think about something. If we think about change as something we have to push through, to overcome resistance, it will lead to one set of actions. But if we think about change in a new way—how do we get people to want to change—entirely different questions come to mind.
Immediately it forces us to think about how the other side looks at the issue, to seek the “whats-in-it-for-them” part of the equation—things we are probably not considering when we push change or try to get people to “buy-in” to our way of doing things. It also focuses us more on the outcome we want, the purpose of the change we are seeking to bring about. This invites people to be part of figuring out the solution, engaging them in finding the answers, which not only leads to better solutions, but creates ownership as well.
Make Change Work for You
Re-thinking the change process as an exercise in how to get people to want to change is not an easy thing to do. But then again trying to push change probably isn’t much easier. It requires continuous attention to sustain and it rarely generates the kind of engagement my friend’s son exhibited. Creating a desire in people to change feels like unfamiliar territory to most of us; probably because it is. But if you want to make change work for you and get better results, some different thinking is necessary. Starting with better questions, even if the answers are not obvious, is always better than having the right answers to the wrong questions.
In the case of my friend’s son, his ownership of the changes made all the difference. He wasn’t just spending time studying because that was the rule. And he wasn’t just getting good grades, he was impacting his future in a new way, taking responsibility for overcoming obstacles and directing his life toward a goal that mattered.
That sounds like the kind of change any parent, or leader, would love to facilitate.
Find more solutions to grow profits, accelerate your career and get more satisfaction out of your career in Aligned & Engaged Hidden Keys for Turning Teamwork into Profit by Kevin Fox.