How to Inspire and Lead Change

Change is not easy.  We know it from personal experience.  However, we also know it’s possible.  The challenge is figuring out what separates the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones.  Change in business is made even more difficult because it may involve customers, employees, and the organization as a whole.  If changing a personal habit is difficult, imagine a larger group.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

According to psychologists, Chip and Dan Heath, change has traditionally been considered from two perspectives, emotional and rational thinking.  The classic metaphor to distinguish between the two has been the rider  (rational) and the elephant (emotional).  If you can imagine that metaphor, you have a rider that considers all facts and plans his or her moves.  Then you have the elephant that the rider is attempting to steer.  If steered correctly, the elephant will follow.  However, when the elephant decides to run in a certain direction, the rider is almost helpless.  Let’s consider this on a personal level.  If we attempt to stop drinking soda as part of a low sugar diet, a rational appeal may be made by dieticians, nutritionists, and doctors to convince our rational mind (rider) that we need to stop consuming so much sugar.  They may even attempt to appeal to our emotional mind (elephant) by showing us disturbing pictures of obese people and the terrible consequences of diabetes.  You decide that it is time for you to stop consuming so much sugar. All of your intentions are to stop drinking soda, eating candy, and other sugary treats.  Then you go home later that day and you see a tasty can of Coke in your refrigerator.  All of a sudden, your elephant is all fired up, thirsty, and has forgotten every disturbing image it saw earlier that day.  Your rider is trying furiously to close the refrigerator door and walk away.  However, let’s face it, the elephant is running and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.  So you have a sip.  Then you refill your cup a little.  Before you know it, the can is empty.  And once again we are faced with the difficulty of change.

All hope is not lost though. Chip and Dan Heath suggest there is a third perspective from which we can view change that unlocks a more successful scenario – the environment.  If we simply stop buying soda and/or destroy all existing inventory, our rider would not have to have a daily or hourly battle with the elephant.  If there are no cans of soda in the refrigerator, there are no temptations for the elephant.  That is, tweak your environment and you make your rider’s challenge significantly easier.

Applied to business, this suggests before we simply tell people to do something differently, why not consider tweaking the environment so that it supports that desired behavior.  Changing habits is much easier when you are not faced with a daily or hourly temptation to do otherwise.  In fact, you may even save yourself the effort of establishing unnecessary policies that a simple tweak to the environment could have accomplished.  For instance, if you want your employees to recycle, don’t waste time with a strict policy, simply place more receptacles for recycled products throughout the office so employees don’t have to walk far to recycle.  That simple tweak to the environment can help you change the habits of your team and save yourself the time and effort of establishing policies and enforcing them.

What are some changes you are trying to implement in your organization?  How might you be able to tweak your environment to successfully support these changes?

4 Ways Leaders Can Improve Their Team’s Performance

I’m currently reading a great book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University that has done a great deal of work in social psychology.  In the book she discusses two mindsets – growth and fixed.  A person with a fixed mindset tends to believe that talents, skills, and abilities are fixed and typically cannot develop or improve with intervention.  Someone with the growth mindset believes that talents, skills, and abilities can be developed and improved over time with effort.  She goes on to describe several case studies that portray the two mindsets in a variety of contexts.

Leaders can leverage the growth mindset in order to realize the potential of their organization in a few ways:

1.  Adopt the Growth Mindset.  Start believing that people, including you, can grow and develop existing and new talents.  Stop believing that talent is innate and that people either have it or they don’t.  Start believing that people CAN get it if they don’t currently have it.  Start believing that people may have OTHER talents and skills that you can begin unleashing on your organization today!

2.  Get to Know Your Team…Again.  If you have not already done so, ask each of your team members about their passion, interests, aspirations, goals, ambitions, strengths, ideas, and input on business decisions.  Getting to know your team in this way will help you understand what everyone really brings to the organization and highlight opportunities for facilitating better performance.

3.  Align Projects and Tasks with Team Member Needs.  When a project comes up, consider going another route.  Rather than assigning projects based strictly on titles and pre-defined job descriptions, assign projects and tasks based on individuals’ needs and interests.  After getting to know your team better, aligning the organizations’ needs (i.e. projects, tasks) with your team members’ needs (i.e. aspirations, goals, etc.) will be feasible.  A great bonus is the motivation this new alignment will inspire.

4.  Inspire and Encourage a Learning Culture.  Once you know your team members better and start aligning organizational needs with team members’ needs it is important to establish a culture that encourages people to accept and embrace the challenge of learning and developing new skills.  This is a tremendous win-win for the organization and its people because this is an investment in both the individual and the organization.  While the individual develops new skills and achieves their goals, the organization enjoys the reward of an ever-improving team.  Consider the ROI as people become more productive and valuable.  And I am not only referring to climbing the corporate ladder, I am talking about a true increase in ability, skills, and talents.

Carol Dweck highlights some incredible stories of companies that embraced the fixed versus growth mindsets and the significant differences in their performance.  Consider IBM pre-Gerstner versus Gerstner-era.  Consider GE pre-Welch versus Welch-era.  Both of these organizations were of the fixed mindset and suffering until the arrival of those leaders.

Which mindset do you tend to subscribe to?  Growth or Fixed?  Use these steps to embrace and leverage the growth mindset in your organization and begin getting the best out of your existing organization.  Let’s face it, firing and hiring is expensive, distracting, and lowers the remaining team’s moral.

5 Steps to Successfully Starting a Leadership Role

The opportunity to be a leader in your organization is an awesome one, but as Voltaire once said – “with great power comes great responsibility.”  Now that you are a leader, you are responsible for successfully guiding your team to success.  Whether your team is small or includes the entire organization, the steps are the same.  The only difference is that the scope may be a more or less broad and/or some of the elements may or may not be pre-defined.

So, let’s get to it!  Here’s 5 “responsible” steps for successfully starting a leadership role:

1.  Create a Vision – A successful leader must have a vision of what the future holds for his or her team.  This is where a leader paints a picture of what the organization’s landscape will look like 1, 2, 5 years down the road – whatever timeframe most applies.  Your vision will give your team a clear picture of what the landscape will look like and how your organization will succeed and deliver value in the future landscape.  Sit down, write this and just let your fingers type away.  One paragraph, one page, 5 pages, doesn’t matter, get it down on paper and you can refine it from there.

2.  Find your Mission – Given your prediction for the future landscape and organization will succeed and deliver value within it, identify the critical, high-level steps needed to make that vision a reality.  What essential things will your organization have to do to support and realize your vision?  This isn’t a list of everything your organization does, instead this is the high-level list of you are committing to doing to realize your vision.  For example, listing all of your products and services would be a “no-no” here.  But describing the value you are committed to delivering through your products and services would be a “yes-yes.”

3.  Come up with a Theme – in order to successfully communicate visions, missions, strategies, etc. people need an easy and concise way of summing it all up.  This is where a theme can be very effective.  A theme gives people a “framework” to wrap up everything your organization is set out to accomplish.  With a theme, you can be consistent and concise in your internal and external communications.

4.  Find a tag line or short statement that sums up your vision, mission, and strategy – in order to help people in your organization make decisions that are consistent with your vision, mission, and strategy it is critical to have a simple way of reminding them what is or isn’t aligned with organizational goals.  For example, your team will always be faced with decisions that you cannot be a part of, however, you want them to always consider your vision and mission.  A short tag line or statement gives them a quick filter to run their decision through prior to finalizing it.  Case in point – when I worked for MBNA, they had a tag line that read – “think of yourself as the customer.”  It was short, sweet, and to the point.  Anytime I was faced with a decision, big or small, I thought about the tag line which lead me to ask myself – “if I was the customer of this project (or email, letter, phone call, etc.) would I find this valuable?”  If the answer was no, then I would work on it some more to make sure it passed through the filter.  If the answer was yes, then I knew I could proceed.  It was as if the leader who created that tagline was sitting next to me helping me decide if what I was going to do was right for the company or not.

5.  Meet and get to know each and every one of your team members – If you are the CEO, this may be easier said than done, but not impossible.  When I worked at Merrill Lynch, I was told by the older guys that one of the former CEO’s (Bill Schreyer) used to walk around regional offices and shake everyone’s hand.  He remembered details like your son playing in an important soccer game and asked you how it went.  Point is that even if it’s hard, it’s not impossible.  The reason it is important to take time to meet with -at the very least your most direct – team members is because in order for them to pursue your vision, they have to be aligned with it.  In order for that to happen, you need to understand what their personal vision, goals, and desires are.  When you have a good understanding of that, you can begin to help them align their vision, goals, and desires with those you have for the organization as a whole.  When there is alignment in these critical areas, everyone begins to run in the same direction.  The only way to do this is through personal conversations – not surveys, big meetings, etc.  Ask team members out for a cup of coffee, have lunch, or simply get together in their respective offices.

These five steps will help you get off to a strong and successful start as a leader.  When you accomplish these five steps you then unlock a bonus sixth step, which will help you take your organization to the next level.

Bonus Step #6

6. Identify your Value Proposition – Your value proposition is defined as the elements of your organization that set you apart from the rest.  It’s that way you do things that cannot be so easily copied.  It’s not a single product, it’s not a single service.  It’s the over arching value you provide to your customers that your competitors do not and cannot not easily copy.  For example, when you think of a company like Apple, their value proposition has to do with simplicity, ease of integration, and style.  This is the fabric the lines the company.  It isn’t one product, it’s the entire company.  Everything they do.  That is a value proposition.  There are many computer companies out there, but they all struggle to copy this.  At Apple, I would not be surprised if their value proposition is integrated into their culture as well.  Essentially, they live and breath their value proposition.  In order to identify your value proposition, you need to have a VERY STRONG understanding of what your organization does, how it does it, and why it does it.  Furthermore, what are the overlapping strengths of the people in your organization?  Put all this together and your value proposition will emerge.

How to Motivate Your Team?

This week has me thinking back to some of my experiences back at Penn State when I had the privilege to serve the Penn State Marketing Association as President.  I remember one of the first challenges I had was finding a way to motivate my executive board to work towards a common vision.  Giving it some serious thought and consideration I realized that the “Golden Rule” would be a great start – treat others as you would want others to treat you.  And then it hit me – any time I was part of an organization, I found myself wishing that the leader and/or leaders would ask me what I thought I could bring to the table and what I wanted to accomplish.  I wanted them to want and need my input.

So the summer before my first semester as president, I did my best to meet with all of my executive board members. I have to say that I was fortunate to have had such a talented and diverse group of student leaders that were 110% dedicated to the organization.  I set up individual meetings with each of them so that we could discuss the upcoming year.  In each meeting we discussed the following: