Ideas Are Easy, Commitment Is Not: How To Lead Change With Buy-In - Forbes

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The world is full of possibilities. Senior leaders, more than most people, can see those possibilities as opportunities due to their experience and the breadth of visibility inherent in their roles.

You may be tempted to grab one of those opportunities and decide that you and your organization should go for it.

If so, you enthusiastically tell your team about it and task them with creating project plans to accomplish it.

Then you might see a little activity, such as scheduled meetings or emails on the topic. But somehow, the idea never entirely comes to fruition.

Why not?

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It’s often not the merit of the idea itself, or even the capability of the team.

Instead, the idea isn’t implemented because a step was missing in the run-up to the execution.

That step? You need to create awareness about the need to change.

Your team needs to not only acquire awareness about the idea, but awareness about the necessity of the change. 

“Our research has shown that 70% of all organizational change efforts fail,” said John Kotter, Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author, “and one reason for this is executives simply don’t get enough buy-in, from enough people, for their initiatives and ideas.”

Buy-in doesn’t mean they’ll do it; it means that they are committed to making it happen.

But how can you get a commitment to a new idea?

New ideas, new projects, new initiatives, these all require new behaviors. So, first, recognize that it’s hard to change behavior in any case.  Also, that it’s beyond hard, it’s almost impossible if your employees don’t embrace two concepts about the change.

•      They must understand both that things can be different – the possibility - and this understanding occurs when your vision becomes their vision of what’s possible.

•      They must also understand, beyond just an intriguing possibility, that the future needs to different. Put another way, that it’s in their (perceived) best self-interest to make it different. Although we can act against our self-interest (e.g., unhealthy habits such as smoking), if we perceive something is good for us, we’ll work hard to make it happen. If there’s a benefit for our community (our team, our company), there’s extra motivation to achieve it.

As author and teacher Mark Murphy said in a recent article, “One of the biggest obstacles in getting folks to move with the change into the future state (where you want them to be) is that the present state is usually fairly comfortable. This comfort is why, ironically, it’s often easier to lead a change management effort in a failing company than in a successful one. In successful companies, employees will often say, "Why do we need to change if we’ve been so successful thus far?"

As a leader, your role is to help your organization understand that there is no such thing as a steady-state, that there is only growth or decline. That being successful today does not equate to success tomorrow. That things change over time - even if (however unlikely) nothing at your organization changes - your customers and your competition are changing. And you’ll need to change as well to avoid decline or, better yet, to grow.

“What does this mean to me?” is the question that humans ask whenever confronted with change. Successful change leaders will help the people in their organizations answer this question before moving into the execution of a new opportunity.

You can help by exploring two ideas with your staff. First, examine the impacts of not changing. And then discuss, transparently, how the new initiative will impact them – both in positive ways and potentially in negative ones. Help them uncover any hidden fears that are often present in people who’ve been negatively impacted before by new projects. Then, you can address those concerns and strengthen the expected positive impacts.

Yes, this takes time. It’s quicker to move into execution. But if you take the time to create awareness about the necessity to change, you’ll increase your odds of success. And if you want to move up and to the right, you need more than a team executing your ideas. You need a team executing theirs.

The Link Lonk


August 31, 2020 at 01:19AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenwalker/2020/08/30/ideas-are-easy-commitment-is-not-how-to-lead-change-with-buy-in/

Ideas Are Easy, Commitment Is Not: How To Lead Change With Buy-In - Forbes

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