Chapter 16: Change is good

Change is Good

About three and a half months ago, I began this series of articles with the simple assertion that change is a verb. It can, of course, be a noun, but that’s when it’s happening to you. When you’re taking the reins of change – when you’re leading progressive improvements and evolution in your company, in your relationships and in your life – it is most definitely a verb.

Throughout this series, we’ve defined change in lots of ways – always hard, a process, terrifically slow, painful, powerful, stressful, difficult, taxing, necessary.

But we didn’t come around to the ultimate, potent truth of the matter, and that is that change is good.

That’s right. Change is good. If it weren’t for change, we wouldn’t have things like democracy, safe drinking water or chocolate chip cookies.

This series has talked about models for change, tools for change and making change last. Refer back to it whenever you’re going through – or leading – a significant change, whether it’s at work, at home or in your community. And in the end, there are two key things you must remember:
1. You can lead the change, if only for yourself
2. Most change efforts are for the better

The first point – that you can lead change – is absolutely critical. Whether you’re the CEO or the lowest individual contributor on the totem pole, you hold the keys to successful change. By taking your own innate wisdom – along with what you’ve learned from this series of articles – and the belief that, at a minimum, you’re totally in charge of your own experience, you can also take the lead. Help folks create a shared need, shape a vision, mobilize commitment, change systems and structures, and make change last and you’ll be a leader.

The second point – that change is usually for the better – is the mindset you need to succeed. If, like most of your peers, you see the status quo as safety and the status quo futurus as a threat, you’ll have a sad, scary existence – especially in this industry. It’s not a good success strategy – or even a survival strategy. Preserving that status quo will squelch innovation, lower the ceiling of achievement and ensure stagnation. Realize and embrace the fact that most change is for the better and you’re headed toward a happier and less fearful career.

All good things come from change. The key is to adapt quickly, lead the change (even when it feels like it’s leading you) and master it. Bend it to your will.

Change is good.

Eryc Eyl
Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 15: Looking back on leading change

Looking back on leading change
By Eryc Eyl

Well, dear friends and readers, the time has come to begin winding down our weekly conversations about change leadership. If you take even one tiny morsel of a new idea away from this series of articles – something that makes you more effective, more resilient and happier – than our time together has been well spent. If you’re not sure what that morsel might be, let’s take a quick look back.

Our journey began with a choice. We could see change as a noun that victimizes us and leaves us powerless, or we could see it as a verb, an action that we do. To help us see it that way, we looked to General Electric’s seven-part Change Acceleration Process, John Kotter’s eight-step change model and John M. Fisher’s Kübler-Ross-inspired view of the eight emotional stages of transition to guide us. We were reminded that there are always two primary sides to any change – technical and human – and the latter is the crux of everything. Pay attention to it and our change is likely to be the kind of success that people write epic poems about. Neglect it and we might as well arrange for our own Viking funeral.

We faced the fact that – despite the fact that our change is the most awesome idea ever – we must be able to articulate a compelling need for change – something strong enough to overcome our natural human desire for things to always stay the same – before we do anything else. We were reminded, repeatedly that Q times A equals E, i.e. the Quality of our change multiplied by its Acceptance yields its Effectiveness. Using tools like “more of/less of” and the 15-word flip chart, we can shape a banner-worthy vision that our team is willing to march behind, and then march that banner around to the people we need to support, embrace, enact or submit to our change effort. We let data, demonstration and demands help shore up the Acceptance part of the effective change equation.

Of course, real, lasting change doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch. That’s actually the point at which many change efforts fail. After our change goes live, we still need the discipline to make it last. We have to work that change into our culture. We have to change the systems and structures – the behaviors we measure and reward, the training we give our staff, the technology they use – to support the new world and hold our ground against the powerful pull of “the way we used to do it.”

When all is said and done, though, our most powerful ally, our best friend and our secret weapon in leading change is communication. We must put as much energy into planning the communication approach that supports our change effort as we put into planning the technical change itself. By making sure the right message is truly received by the right people in the right format at the right time, with a clear indication of what those people should do with that message, we have the power to transform change from something scary to something safe, something sane, and possibly even something sexy.

Chapter 14: Talk to me, listen to me

Talk to Me, Listen to Me

The critical role of communication in successful change

If you’ve started to notice that leading and managing change is kind of like managing a relationship, you’re on to something. Creating and maintaining a satisfying relationship requires foresight, planning, shared goals, a supportive community, commitment and changing some pretty fundamental systems and structures.

Above all else, though, a good relationship requires good communication, and so does a successful change initiative. And though there’s more to successful change than just communication (otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the 13 other articles in this series), all things being equal, the most effective change leader is an effective communicator.

To make change happen and make it last, you have to make sure the right people have the right information in the right format at the right time so that they can do the right things. In fact, those are the five pillars of effective communication to support healthy change: audience, message, medium, timing and purpose.

Before we go any further, though, let’s get really clear on what we mean by “communication.” It might help to say what it isn’t.

Communication isn’t an email you send. It isn’t an article in the company newsletter. It isn’t a one-hour lunch meeting you have with the CEO. Communication might happen as a result of any of these things, but these things, in themselves, are not communication.

So what is communication? It is a message received. It makes no difference what’s said in that email, that article or that meeting if that isn’t what is heard and understood by the listener or recipient. The effective communicator’s job – and therefore, the effective change leader’s job – is to make sure the intended message is received. This means listening, checking for understanding and reiterating the message. If you wonder why people don’t seem to know what you’ve already told them, and you catch yourself saying, “But I communicated that,” you’re wrong. You haven’t communicated until the message is received. Like the FedEx delivery driver, your job isn’t just to ensure delivery, but to ensure receipt as well.

Effective communication begins, like all effective behaviors, with a plan. If you want to make sure you hit all the bases (audience, message, medium, timing, purpose), you can’t do better than a simple communication plan like the one below.

As you can see, the change initiative in question has to do with replacing all the junk food in our company’s vending machine with fresh fruits and vegetables. We’ve gone back to the stakeholder analysis we did ages ago to make sure we’ve capture everyone (the illustration is abridged), and then we’ve worked with our project team to determine what each person needs to know, who should tell them, how we should tell them, when we should tell them and what we’d like them to do after we tell them.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be painful. It just has to be intentional. In that way, it’s a lot like creating and maintaining a relationship. If you want your change initiative to be that romance you’ve always dreamed of, you’ve got to communicate.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 13: Destroy the lighter and throw out the cigarettes

Destroy the Lighter and Throw Out the Cigarettes

What else needs to change to make change happen?

If you want to quit smoking, you have to get the cigarettes out of your house, your car and your desk. You have to crush the lighter under your boot heel. You have to stop putting yourself in the situations that make you want to smoke. You have to replace the pleasure of the cigarette with some other kind of reward or stress reliever – like yoga or starlight mints. These are the systems and structures that can help you quit smoking or hinder your path to health.

When you’re dealing with organizational change, the same rules apply. As we discussed last time, how you staff, communicate, reward, organize, allocate resources, measure success and use technology all have an impact on your current state and your desired future state. In other words, in order to make your change successful and lasting, some of these things are going to have to change too.

Figuring out what else needs to change can be overwhelming, especially when you look at that all-encompassing laundry list above. But it’s helpful to narrow down to the things that are having the greatest impact, and we have two simple tools to do that.

The first tool is a simple prioritization matrix. The X axis contains all the categories we listed above, and the Y axis is simply the impact of each of those categories, from low to high. Pull your project team together. If you don’t have some subject matter experts on the team, bring them in too.

Once the team is assembled, have them determine the level of impact that each category has – positive or negative – on maintaining the status quo or on promoting the status quo futurus. This doesn’t need to be an exhaustive analytical exercise. Gut feel is good enough. The goal is to simply get a picture of which areas you’ll need to focus on.

In the example below, you can see that communication has the greatest impact, followed by measures and information systems, tied for second, followed closely in turn by rewards. This doesn’t mean that the other areas aren’t important. It just means that these four areas are going to make the biggest bang.




Knowing which areas have the greatest impact is only half the struggle though. You also need to know which way those areas are leaning, i.e. are they leaning toward the past and present state, or are they leaning toward the future state? Are they helping you move change forward, or are they hindering? Once again, a simple tool helps.

The helping/hindering table below is a simple way to look at all the moving parts, figure out which ones are on your side and which ones are your enemies, and then think about how you might tip them in your favor.



As you can see, it doesn’t have to be difficult to get a grip on the systems and structures that need to change in order for your primary change initiative to be successful. Like everything else we’ve discussed in this series, it just takes a little planning, a little discipline and a little structure.

One of those categories above, communication, almost always has a high impact on change. Next time we run into each other, let’s talk about the critical role that communication plays, shall we?

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 12: Change enablers and change derailers

Change Enablers and Change Derailers

When last we met, I told you a sad story. I told you that most change efforts fail, and that a bunch fail even after the initial change has been implemented. Old habits die hard and people slip back into old behaviors. The momentum and good intentions that brought the change to fruition gives way to day-to-day realities and busy-ness as usual.

If you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably already broken your New Year’s resolutions. In doing so, you learned that willpower and self-control are not the keys to ditching old behaviors and ingraining new ones. Don’t feel bad. Studies have shown that our ability to control our own behaviors and resist old habits is limited. We have to line up a bunch of other factors to support our goals. And the same is true with organizational change. If we want it to stick, we have to set the organization up for success.

As you think about change, look around your organization at all of the things that support the status quo. The allocation of resources – human and otherwise – to the work that needs to get done has an extremely powerful influence on the way your organization operates today, as do your IT systems, the structure of your organization, how performance is measured and rewarded, and how people are hired, trained and developed.

Depending on the kind of change you’re leading, these factors might have varying degrees of influence. Obviously, if you’re implementing a new sales compensation plan, the measurements and rewards are going to leap to the top of the list. But you’ll also have to keep an eye on whether you have the right people in place to do the measuring and calculate the rewards, and you’ll have to make sure that your IT system’s limitations don’t stand in the way.

Similarly, if you’re altering the structure of your organization, simply changing job descriptions and rolling them out won’t be enough. To turn those customer service reps into quality assurance technicians, you’ll have to make sure they have the training they need to do the new job, that their measures of success are adjusted from customer satisfaction to accuracy and that their raises, bonuses and other rewards are tied to those new metrics.

But while changing systems and structures that support the status quo so that they support the status quo futurus is absolutely necessary, you don’t want to do it haphazardly. In order to ensure optimal results, you’ll need to be careful about what you change and what you don’t. Next time, we’ll talk about two simple tools to help you determine what you need to tackle and what you can ignore.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 11: How do you make change last?

How Do You Make Change Last?

I’m going to tell you a sad story. Most change efforts fail. In fact, in spite of our best efforts to create a shared need, shape a compelling vision, counter resistance and mobilize the right levels of commitment, many change efforts fail after they’ve been implemented.

That last statement might raise some questions. How can a project fail if it has been implemented? Isn’t that the end goal of an initiative, to implement some kind of change?

Well, no. A change initiative – like any project – is only successful if it lasts. You wouldn’t say you were successful at building a house if it fell down the first time you opened the front door. You wouldn’t say you were successful at learning to speak Portuguese if everything you’d learned left your head when class was over. And you can’t call a change effort successful if things go back to the way they were 30, 60 or 90 days later.

In the hurried and harried world of corporate business and busyness, the two categories of behavior that are most often rewarded are strategy (essentially, having good ideas) and execution (essentially, acting on those ideas). And while those two categories are really important, rewarding only those can lead to a world where we feel we should always be coming up with new ideas and acting on them – a world where change for change’s sake becomes the order of the day, destabilizing the organization and making everything feel uncertain.

The fact of the matter is that constant change isn’t really change at all. It’s chaos. It isn’t really change unless it sticks, unless it is institutionalized, unless it simply becomes the way people work. The most effective leaders of change know that every initiative competes for mental energy, time and money, and that the real skill lies in acquiring the necessary resources (of all sorts) to embed new behaviors in the organization and ensure that they don’t slip back into old habits.

To make change last, you must make sure that the change is reinforced– consistently, tangibly and with great visibility. Influential voices in your organization need to reiterate that the world is different now and that new behaviors are expected. You must make sure that attention is paid to making your change the new status quo.

Of course, there’s more to making change last than simply lip service. The systems you use, the design of your organization, your rewards and compensation, the way you measure performance and many other factors need to be aligned in a way that supports, embeds and ingrains the change into the way people work. We’ll dig into all of that next time we meet.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant