Introduce the Need for Change

In the now famous monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross, a successful sales consultant (Alec Baldwin) gets up in front of four struggling real estate salesmen and introduces himself by saying, “The good news is you're fired. The bad news is you've got—all of you got—just one week to regain your jobs, starting with tonight.” The rest of the profanity-laced speech is the consultant telling the salesmen how horrible they are. Needless to say, he doesn't endear himself to the salesmen.

Although change has to start with an introduction, how you do it can make all the difference. Tough sales speeches make great cinema, but they rarely make great teams. It's amazing how many great ideas get lost solely on the poor people skills of the person introducing the change.

It starts by introducing the need for it to your people. Because why would anyone want to change something if he doesn't understand why it needs to be changed?

One of the best ways to introduce change is by motivating the problem. Motivating, in this sense, means exposing the need. Our people need to truly believe something is wrong before we can propose a solution.

Steve Jobs did this famously in a speech detailing everything wrong with current phones before unveiling the iPhone as the solution to the problem in 2007. Communications guru Nancy Duarte calls this a “two-worlds approach”—how the world is and how the world could be (that is, much better).

Introducing the need to be focus-wise in our workplaces begins by motivating the problem. Something's wrong with how work is done. You can flip back to the earliest chapters in this book and identify numerous examples that will resonate with your people and help them recognize the urgency of the problem—and that becoming focus-wise is the solution.

How you frame the problem and solution for your people is everything. Know when to make it about them and when to make it about you.

Make it about them by framing the entire situation around helping them. Make it about you by saying, “I have a problem too.” Remember: You're not the hero fixing everything your team is doing wrong—that's a recipe for resistance. All of you are the heroes, fixing what ails your organization.

Another strategy is to find someone from the outside to introduce it. When you bring in an “expert” to launch the conversation with a great speech, you avoid being the bad guy and you get everyone excited and on the same page.

Framing the problem also means injecting a cool factor. It's called priming. Find apps and connections that your people are already primed to like.

Broccoli is nutritious, but it isn't cool. That's why a training session should never be offered as the remedy for your team's terrible diet. It should be touted as a delicacy that Anthony Bourdain would go halfway around the world to eat:

Guess what we're getting? That amazing new productivity app Inc. magazine and CNET can't stop raving about.

Include Your People in the Decision Making

The psychology is undeniable. It doesn't matter how much they need change. It doesn't matter how much they yearn for it. If they aren't given the chance to shape the process, they'll resist it.

Why?

As Dean Anderson and Linda Ackerman Anderson point out, “Employees frequently receive critical data for course correction long before leaders because employees are closer to the action. They are key to the early warning system for needed adjustments to both the goals of the transformation and the plans for getting there.”²

Your employees most likely know the problems your organization is facing better than you do. And they know that if they don't get a chance to own the solution, the problems will most likely never get solved.

After you introduce the concept, start a discussion and elicit their feedback. What works? What's causing problems? What can be done to fix them? Getting your people involved will give you a lot more leeway down the road.

This is where the Communication Compact we introduced in Chapter 14 becomes even more important. Your team will already have the template for sharing information in a way that makes them feel valued and heard.

Equip Your People with the Tools to Succeed

If you're establishing vault time, give everyone a sign or a pair of headphones. How about a guide to apps that help block out distractions or a link with a quick how-to about turning off push notifications?

It's amazing how often we target a desired behavior without offering the resources critical to making it happen. You can't expect your team to find their own tools.

Also, how you equip them matters. Your employees have limited attention resources. So every hoop you make them jump through to make the change increases the likelihood they won't do it. Rather than sending a four-page document with several steps, create a short video that walks them through setting up filters for who can reach them when.

Reinforce the Culture Again and Again

Although well-intentioned, we are creatures of habit (remember one of the four hidden factors from Chapter 6: experience). You're asking people to take a harder road rather than walking along the same neural paths they've known for years.

If you want them to stop e-mailing every time they have a question, what are some creative ways to reinforce the reminder? Signs posted everywhere. Check-ins during meetings to see how the group is doing.

Brendon Maxwell, founder of Utopian Coffee, reinforced the company's culture of service by posting a huge picture board of the people that his own people had helped. No one walking in the door can miss it.

How you act matters; so does what you say and how you say it. Use focus-wise language, for instance, to create verbal reminders to back up your focus-wise actions.

Finally, choose one thing to reinforce over a sustained period of time. I often see organizations hire people like me to help on an issue, but unfortunately, they don't reinforce the message beyond that day. Even worse, they bring in several totally different messages on the same day. In our desire to cram in content, we forget that the point of good content is to actually act on it. Consider bringing back the same person to speak on the same topic multiple times, or follow the speaker with a webinar, online training, and a check-in call.

Incentivize the Right Behaviors

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's legendary business partner

Incentive is one of the most important tools for a leader. Are you rewarding the right behaviors or the wrong ones?

It continually astonishes me how often organizations say they want one thing then reward the opposite. Don't incentivize e-mail volume by encouraging those who e-mail at all hours of the night. Reward someone for not answering an e-mail on vacation. Make sure your reward system reflects your focus-wise approach.

One of my clients, Eric Maddox, is the most successful interrogator in the history of the U.S. military. He's the person responsible for finding Saddam Hussein. However, when Eric entered the military, he saw that interrogations had an atrocious success rate. He resolved to find out why.

While stationed in Iraq, he accompanied the special ops team on their missions to conduct field research into interrogations. His findings told him that by the time he saw people for interrogations back at the safety of his base, the game was already lost.

So he changed the rules and started traveling with the special ops team regularly. Why would he put himself in such a dangerous situation when he could just wait until they got back? Because he knew if he could interrogate someone in their own home, he had a much better chance of understanding motivation and aligning incentives accordingly.

He could assure them with what amounted to a reward: “If you give me this information, we will leave and you can stay home with your family.”

Military interrogation may seem like a stark analogy for your organization. But what matters is the psychology, which translates to any situation. Incentives reward desired behavior.

That being said, incentives can be pleasurable and fun. Be creative; even include your team in the process. Let the group set the consequences.

If you're on the phone during a meeting, you have to clean the whiteboard in the conference room.

If you send an e-mail after 9 p.m., you have to bring that person breakfast.

Interrupt someone in her vault, and you owe her Starbucks.

But also foster a culture in which the wrong person can be removed from a team. Corporate America fails consistently in this regard, hamstrung by its own policies.

I worked with a prominent tech company that struggled with a person dragging the team down. Removing him wasn't just a matter of taking him to coffee and saying, “We need to talk.” The manager had to repeatedly document the problem, put the employee on probation, and slot him into a coaching program.

The title character in Herman Melville's classic short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” gradually refuses to work, driving his boss mad by repeating, “I would prefer not to.” My client's problem employee could have been Bartleby's cousin. He literally quit working, testing how long the company would keep paying him.

The strategy worked. He drew his salary for a year before being let go—with severance. No one at the company could provide an incentive—or disincentive—more powerful than his own.

Documenting the problem shouldn't be part of a yearlong process, but it is nonetheless vital. So is acting quickly as part of a hire-slow/fire-fast philosophy. As leaders, we need to have the important conversations early.

One of my clients who works for a wholesale foods provider inherited an employee from the former head of the department. Besides failing at his job, the person was caustic and aggressive with everyone in the office.

My client, an exceptional leader, confronted the employee immediately. He detailed the performance and behavior issues that would no longer be tolerated.

What the manager learned in doing so was eye-opening—and instructive: The employee had acted the same way for 5 years and was astonished at how people perceived him. Clearly, his former manager shared some blame here.

To create a focus culture, you must first be clear about what needs to change. Once you've made a true believer of yourself, the basic question gains even more focus and urgency:

Are you rewarding the right behaviors or the wrong ones?

I recently spoke for a financial services organization. Leadership sought to implement a focus-wise culture. The three-day conference was built on this theme. Every speaker and every activity reinforced the message. They didn't stop there. They issued a 30-day mindfulness challenge. Leadership then provided an app to guide the daily exercise, set reminders, and hold participants accountable. The CEO offered to donate $100,000 to charity if they got 100 percent participation. They introduced, equipped, reinforced, and incentivized this new behavior.

It takes work to plan and execute, but change can happen.

Sometimes it's a matter of proper training, as we'll learn in the next chapter.