Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #14: Practice Changing

Change is hard. Change is constant. Change is Slow. We hear these messages over, and over, and over, again. Hearing the content of this message over, and over, doesn’t take away its punch. Hear it again: Change is hard.

As the founder of Strong Point Strategy and the leader of many business transformations, it’s essential for me to continually remind myself that change is hard, and to ask myself, “How can I, and my Strong Point colleagues, make changing easier for our clients?”

In answering the question” Why is Change so Hard?” consider that many change management experts liken the steps of a business transformation to the steps and stages of grief. Changes, even good ones, involve a loss of the “old comfortable world.” World-renowned expert On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in the 1969 first publication of her book by the same name, outlined five stages of grief that she recognized through the many terminally–ill patients she interviewed and researched. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The identification of these stages was a revolutionary concept at the time but has since become widely accepted. Notice that four out of the five stages of grief are negative.

Strong Point categorizes the change process in this way, and through these five steps or stages. The Strong Point stages of change mirror the stages of grief:


Loss

The first step in any change, for anyone experiencing it or working through it, is a loss. For any of us, Loss comes, with the recognition that:

  • I can no longer do things in the manner I am most familiar
  • I won’t be working with the same people or have the same level of confidence in my abilities as I maintained before
  • I’m going to be measured on new outcomes and results for activities and tasks I’ve not completed or achieved yet
  • Even though I realize these changes are better for the company, they make things harder for me in my daily work

If change means that peers, colleagues, and subordinates are doing something differently, then it also says they are learning something new. Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #12: Study Learning in the Operating Environment reminds us that learning is often slow. The foundation of the premise that “Change is Hard” is built upon the recognition of how hard it is for us to learn something new. Learning something new requires us to literally and physically change our neural networks to the point of patterned behavior.

Fear

Fear sets in when individuals worry that others will dismiss them, criticize them, judge them and evaluate them on their inability to click the right button, understand the new vision, or the new back-end processing, or execute the new process flawlessly, first run-through. Deeper fears of demonstrating incompetence or incongruence with new value-sets and beliefs associated with the change, and inconsistencies in performance, all keep people in a state of panic. These fears are grounded in truth. People are terminated, moved-off key transformation initiatives, and are viewed and reviewed negatively for all of these reasons, and more.

Fog

Fear gives way to fog. Fog is nothing more than prolonged and unresolved fear. If you’ve led or participated in any significant change initiative lately, then you might agree that being in this stage, and remaining in the fog, is the most challenging part of changing. In this middle phase of business transformations, professional patience wears thin, and tempers begin to flair when old systems, processes, and tools are no longer allowed or used, and new systems, processes, and tools are not entirely understood, or operational, and the related and necessary behavioral changes have not quite taken hold. In this stage of transformation, professionals participating in a change initiative begin to backslide and complain and sometimes work hard at convincing peers and company leadership to revert back to old ways of working. Strong Point calls this stage “swirling” as it’s depicted in the above diagram. The visual of a person in a boat is meant to conjure up images of the many highs, lows, and rolling emotions that accompany this stage of change.

Energy

If change stakeholders can make it through the fog and the swirling, then a sense of confidence and positive energy emerges. Feelings and expressions like “We Did It!,” “It’s Working Better,” and “We’ve Received Some Very Positive Feedback!” all accompany this stage. Relief is a common emotion expressed when people working through an important change finally come out of the Fog. Coming through the Fog and realizing important system, process and behavioral changes unleashes natural feelings of excitement, enthusiasm and energy. During this stage, leaders, and peers often notice the “lift under the transformation team’s feet.” Questions like “How did you REALLY do it?” and comments such as: “Wow, it must be great to be part of such an important company effort!” assure leaders and teams that the change effort was worth the current results. Recognition of people’s time, energy, and devotion spent during the change period abounds during this phase. Company news articles and celebrations often announce and affirm the positive results of the transformation effort.

Loss

Yet, as the accolades spring forth during the Energy Stage, so do the reminders of things lost. The pain of conflicts, the removal of former peers from the team, the decisions made that still don’t sit well with others: these are all outcomes that also remain in the operating environment along with the successful results. Even after success, feelings of Loss come back again. There is no “clean change” or change effort that is free from pain. Loss of the old is as much a part of changing as is the gain of “something new.”

Even Elisabeth Kubler-Ross hated the process of her own medical changes and eventual death. If you read this passage from an article written by Don Lattin, a Chronicle Religion Writer, on May 31st, 1997, which captures some of her thoughts as she was suffering and even dying, you can feel Elisabeth’s anger and depression:

“After teaching doctors and nurses for decades, I was in the hospital after my stroke, and it was like my work was nonexistent,” she said. “I had this frozen arm and incredible pain. If you blew on my left arm, I would scream! The nurse told me that I was holding my hand in a funny way – which is typical of stroke patients – and then she sat on my arm!! I slugged her with my good arm and yelled, “That hurts like hell!” She said, “Oh you’re becoming combative, and brought in two nurses who tried to sit on my arm again!” If I had a pistol, I would have shot them.”

Now I know these are sentiments about death and dying, but this kind of deep-felt frustration and anger is often exuded by professionals during a change engagement. Leaders and individuals are not just working through a change of systems or processes, in a transformation initiative, they’re often changing the relationship they have with their work, and indeed sometimes the operational modifications threaten the balance and quality of their relationships in and outside of work and even their very livelihoods. Emotions can get very raw during business transformations! Sentiments such as:

  • “I am not sure I can stay in this job with its new requirements” or
  • “How can I continue to do my day job AND complete all of this extra work necessary to do things differently to help the company move forward?” and
  • “I have a whole different view of the business team since we began this effort.”

Views, relationships, attitudes, and performance abilities also shift and change during business transformations. These changes are not always favorable for everyone.

Another factor that impacts change is our brain’s bias toward the negative. In an article called Our Brain’s Negative Bias, written by Hara Estroff Maranon, published in Psychology Today on June 9th, 2016, the author, a psychiatrist, tells us:

“Your brain is simply built with a greater sensitivity to unpleasant news. The bias is so automatic that it can be detected at the earliest stages of the brain’s information processing.”

Hara Estroff Maranon has been the Editor-at-Large for Psychology Today, is also the author of the book A Nation of Wimps. In her June 9th article of Psychology Today, she explains that it takes FIVE TIMES as much positive energy and emotion to counterbalance the effects of negative emotions! Think about that. Studies have shown that individuals who are better able to maintain a mix of positive and negative emotions will be better able to learn from business and life’s ups and downs. Noted psychologist John Gottman’s exploration of positive-to-negative ratios in adult relationships also supports the “magic ratio” of 5:1 to predict positive workplace performance as well as the success of other relationships.

In an article called The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams, first published in the February 2004 Issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, authors Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy showed that counting the instances of positive and negative feedback and calculating the P/N (P(positive)/N (negative)) ratio can predict the performance of business teams. Losada and Heaphy found that high-performance teams have a P/N ratio of 5.6, medium performance team have a P/N ratio of 1.9 and low-performance teams have a P/N ratio of .36.

So given all this data and science around negativity, and knowing that change comes loaded with 80% negative feelings and emotions…just how does Strong Point help people and teams to remain positive during periods of change? The positive inference here is that change is necessary. In order to manage change effectively, leaders and teams have to work to stay positive through it! One primary strategy that Strong Point uses to help clients manage change is to practice it. We are all human, and just like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, we’re fighting a wave of negative influences during the process of any change.

Strong Point uses the alliteration of Three I’s to practice changing and to make change bearable for professionals literally working through it. The Three I’s alliteration is explained below:

Make Incremental Changes
(Chunk Change into Phases)
Change that allows professionals to work more collaboratively will be most effectively planned and managed in “chunks.” Chunking changes into predictable and finite blocks of learning and doing centered on new tasks and activities will allow professionals to absorb a broad set of changes one function at a time. “Chunking” changes enables people to maintain current work output and productivity while performing and completing work in new ways, learning new behaviors, and achieving new outcomes.
Make Changes Iteratively
(Practice and Repeat Changes Over and Over)
We already know that learning is slow and new behaviors and actions take time and repetition to become new neural patterns. Some studies show that ninety (90!) repetitions of a new task are required before sustained and optimum performance can be achieved. Strong Point helps business transformation teams practice changing during regular daily and weekly working sessions designed to help stakeholders learn, practice and master new skills. These sessions are also facilitated in an informative and fun environment so the positive interactions can outnumber the negative ones!
Make Changes Individually Focused
(Tailor Changes to the Needs of Stakeholders)
In Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #12: Study Learning in the Operating Environment, essential requirements for adult learning were shared. One requirement is that adults like to share personal experiences and need to know how training is correctly applied to their work “on-the-job.” Strong Point schedules regular working sessions (daily or weekly) with specific stakeholder groups to help professionals who are working through changes, design and develop change and learning strategies that work best for them.

Let me share how Strong Point uses the Three I’s to help customers practice changing.

In a year-long engagement with a papermaking company, Strong Point was challenged to help the 60-person, 15 production workers per-shift, paper-making production team reduce the number of daily paper breaks by half. The company was experiencing an average of 6 paper breaks a day, with each break resulting in an average of 60 minutes of downtime. This 6 hours of lost time a day, represented a 25% in daily production and was preventing the company from meeting its production, delivery, revenue and profit goals.

Make Incremental Changes

Papermaking can be “chunked” into five core processes: 1) Forming, 2) Pressing, 3), Drying, 4) Coating, and 5) Finishing. Strong Point first separated the papermaking process by each production team, and then by each component process of the end-to-end papermaking process, before analyzing paper breaks. The Strong Point Solution Team learned that each production team had patterns of breaks in different areas of the end-to-end process as well as varying methods and strengths for recovering from those paper breaks. Strong Point shared analysis insights with each team and across teams. Everyone gained a better understanding of the paper breaks that were occurring and why, when and how they happened.

Make Changes Iteratively

Next, the Strong Point Team used video cameras and focused working sessions on showing each production team how breaks occurred during their shifts and how recovery was executed. This simple self-study helped each team learn and correct errors and inefficiencies in both papermaking and in break-recovery. One unexpected outcome was that each team showed special and unique strengths in each core function of the paper-making process and in break-recovery strategies and tactics. When individual team videos were shared with the other production crews, new skills and ideas improved the company’s overall production capacity. Each team learned from the other and the papermaking process improved. Breaks were also reduced by more than half.

Make Changes Individually Focused

I believe, and Strong Point’s experience has shown, that focusing and practicing changes with individuals and teams helps localize and focus the help on the people who need to make changes. As in this papermaking engagement example, for each stakeholder group (ex: production crews) even though the conceptual changes such as improve papermaking process capability and reduce paper breaks are broad, the actual changes that need to be made are specific to each person and team participating in and making the changes. As this example also shows, improving individual awareness, skills and abilities, works toward improving the capability of the team(s), which in turn enhances and advances the company’s operations as a whole.

Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #14: Practice Changing