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THE POWER AND POSSIBILITIES OF LEVERAGE CHANGE

Leverage Change (n.). A flexible approach that applies eight ways for individuals, teams, and organizations to change that achieves faster, easier, and better results than believed possible.

How do you accelerate the pace of change, lighten your load, and improve your odds of success, all at the same time?

Leverage Change.

Remember from Archimedes that leverage is the compounding force gained by the use of a lever rotating on a fulcrum. It provides an alternative to raw manpower. Translate the Archimedes story to the world of organization change and you’re working inside the Leverage Change paradigm, a world of 8 Levers, each tried and tested successfully in addressing a different common problem with change work.

Gaining Great Leverage

This book has been written to give you guidance about how to achieve faster, easier, better results. It’s not focused on helping you decide what results will lead to your success. Is innovation going to be the key to winning in your industry in the future? What about expanding your footprint? Maybe there are technology solutions that will make the difference for you and your organization. These are the kinds of decisions on your plate.

At the same time, this topic of what results to achieve is too important to ignore. Faster, easier, better versions of poor, confusing results are a bad answer. The rest of this chapter outlines key points to consider so that you define clear and correct results needed by your organization.

Benefits of Getting Your Results Right

There are five benefits you’ll enjoy when you get your desired results right for your organization. Do the work, know where you’re headed, and enjoy the products of your work.

1. Most important, the results you’re aiming for enable you to achieve success based on measures that matter to you. How you define success is up to you. Maybe it’s better teamwork, reduced time to market, or more innovative product design. You decide. Begin where you are now. Understand what’s happening around you. Know what you do well. Own what you need to do better. Then set your targets based on what you learn.

2. Your results provide a rallying point around which to align. Clear results put a stake in the ground. They’re the center point around which everything else organizes. It’s hard to get excited about a fuzzy future. Maybe it looks like this. Maybe a little like that. Good luck trying to gain momentum aiming at an uncertain future. Make your results crystal clear, and people will coordinate their efforts and move into the future together.

3. Right results will tell you when you’re on course and off, and what corrections are needed. The first question to ask is, Are you doing what you said you’d do? Are you following your plans? A second question, sometimes ignored, is, By following the plan, are you achieving the results you desire? If yes, why? If no, why not? Change isn’t about moving in a straight line from point A to point B. Assess the impact of actions you’re taking. Use what you learn to determine your next best steps.

4. You’re clear about when you have achieved success. This is not to be underestimated. Some people keep toiling away long after victory should have been declared. Know when you’re done. Without this knowledge, people feel as though they are constantly on a hamster wheel, with no hope of ever getting off. Make a point of finishing—at least with this effort, or a phase of it. Highlight progress made. Set time aside for lessons learned. Then agree on your next goals.

5. You’ll be smarter about how to allocate resources. Every organization has limited resources. Time, money, energy, and talent invested in change aren’t available for other work. When your results are spot-on, conversations about which resources to allocate where become clearer. Have these dialogues, and you can confidently make these decisions knowing you’ll be getting the right returns for investments made.

How to Know You’ve Identified the Right Results

How do you know you’ve done a good job in defining your desired results? Think of the five questions here as a quality-control check on your work. You should be able to answer yes to all five of these questions. Are you …

1. Better positioned to achieve your mission and vision? These elements are not high-minded concepts that only see the light of day on special occasions. They’re not reserved solely for the landing page of your company’s website. Use them on a daily basis. Test them against work you’re doing on issues large and small. Change must be consistent with the foundation of your organization. If you’re making changes, are they aligned with your organization’s ultimate aims? If yes, move forward. If no, revisit the foundations of your organization and your change work. One of them is off base.

2. Clearer about the beliefs and values that guide your daily decisions? The changes you desire and how you go about achieving them should be in line with the beliefs and values of your organization. Give them a careful review. Be able to make a case for how they are guiding your change decisions. If people disagree about decisions that affect changes to be made, spend the time needed to iron out these differences. Every action you take ought to be in line with your core beliefs and values, or you shouldn’t be taking it.

3. An organization where people want to belong? Change efforts, and the way they are conducted, ought to serve as recruitment and retention strategies. Changes undertaken should be making the organization more appealing to people who could or already do belong to it. If talent is leaving your organization because of the changes you’re making, rethink the work you’re doing. Good changes for the future should motivate people to want to stick around for that future.

4. Able to better satisfy the needs of your stakeholders? If the changes you’re making are not better at meeting the needs of your stakeholders, you have a problem. A big one. Self-serving organizations don’t succeed. You need to take care of the members of your organization. They’re one set of your stakeholders, but far from the only one. Think bigger and broader when deciding what needs to change to achieve the results you desire. Some stakeholder needs may be in conflict. It’s your job to work through these—on your own and with these stakeholders. Sometimes you can’t get everybody on the exact same page. Set yourself up for future success and communicate to stakeholders whose needs may not be fully met. Bring them into the tent and share with them the decisions you’ve made, and why and how you can still best serve them.

5. More capable of making additional changes needed in the future? Change is not a one-time deal. You’ve been making them since your organization began. And you’re going to be making more until your organization ceases to exist. Ensure that while you’re changing, you’re learning how to change. Change-able organizations enjoy a competitive advantage over others. Next time you need to change course, you’ll be able to do it faster, more easily, and better than other players in your markets.

Understanding Faster, Easier, Better Results through a Leverage Change Lens

The goals of Leverage Change are faster, easier, better results. No need to settle for only one or two of these advantages. You get all three from working with this new approach. Don’t be seduced by quick fixes that seem to meet these goals sooner but won’t serve you well later. Here’s how these three benefits are defined the Leverage Change way.

Faster Results

Common sense says that if you want faster results, work on things you can finish the soonest. Want to improve your teamwork? Clarify roles and goals. Need a new strategy? Get the top team to define a path forward for the organization. But proceed with caution. In the world of Leverage Change, soonest may not always be fastest. How can that be? Think in terms of sustained change.

Your team’s effectiveness might benefit immediately from a half-day session dedicated to understanding different work styles and how you can collaborate more effectively. Things get a little better for a short time, but what if your team’s issues are deeper? Maybe your path to higher performance appears to be a slower one. Say your team really needs more vulnerability and to have some difficult conversations. What appears to be fastest in the near term ends up being disappointing over the longer haul. Leverage Change invites you to achieve faster results that yield positive impact immediately and over time.

Let’s return to that strategy-setting scenario. You save time in setting strategy by having a small group of executives do the up-front work. This seemingly quicker way will leave you paying for these time savings many times over. How? With slower implementation, less commitment, and more resistance. What’s the payoff from going slow to go fast by involving more people?

• Better understanding of the strategy because people have been engaged in shaping it

• More ready acceptance of needed changes

• Appreciation of why these shifts are required

• Smarter, more strategic decisions made every day by everyone

• Work done across the entire organization that supports the direction you want to be heading

• Increased commitment to making changes work

Faster results in the world of Leverage Change include both results achieved right away and those achieved over time. The bar for success is much higher in this new paradigm. Faster doesn’t mean sooner. It means accomplishing sustained results that occur more rapidly than you would believe. Sometimes what appears faster in the near term turns out to be slower in the long term.

STORY

We were once working with a technology products company where this “go slow to go fast” approach paid big dividends. Even after partnering with a Japanese company to supplement its competencies, the business needed to make more changes. The senior executives decided to “clean sheet” the company’s strategy going forward. That meant bringing questions, not answers, to the rest of the organization. It was an opportunity for people to develop a future they wanted to call their own. We organized a series of three 500-person meetings to work the strategy. The entire business was involved. It took four months to arrive at a set of decisions.

Investments seemed to pay off immediately. Production and quality numbers improved in the plant while we were still holding the sessions. Further benefits came when it was time for implementation. Although it took four months to develop the strategy, the organization was six months ahead of schedule when it came time to implementing it because of the high-involvement approach used. Changes were made in the organization’s structure, core work processes, and culture. Two new products moved from design to manufacturing in the same time frame. The leadership team estimated that they could have developed a strategy in about a month. Their guess at implementation timing? Two years or more.

With Leverage Change, “faster” means right here and now and over time. Sustainability is the ultimate goal of all change work. Too often organizations achieve “rubber-band change”: things appear better for a month or two, maybe even six, and then inevitably snap back to the way they have always been. Short-term results that fizzle over time aren’t worth achieving in the first place. Invest early. Play the short and the long game. Adopt the Leverage Change definition of faster results.

Easier Results

Common wisdom in the world of change is to go after “low-hanging fruit” and “quick wins” early in an effort. It’s the easiest work. Likely faster, too. But is it always better? The Leverage Change approach says you need to achieve all three objectives of faster, easier, and better, none at the cost of another.

As I’ve stated before, don’t confuse easy results with achieving needed results in easier ways. Once you identify results that matter—both those to accomplish immediately and over time—move on to how to achieve these results more easily than you otherwise would have imagined. The question you need to ask is, “How can I make it easier to achieve results with maximum impact?” That’s a strategic question. That’s where the levers come into play.

Think outside the box of quick wins. These may be easy to achieve, but don’t be seduced into thinking that this list of results is also better. Look beyond the obvious. Would progress in one area earn more points with the organization than a completed quick win? Convince more people you’re serious? Get the organization rallying around work that matters more? Going against the grain of common wisdom may be your best bet. Give some thought to leaving the low-hanging fruit for someone else to pick. Focus on impact. Then we’ll find ways by applying the 8 Levers to make it easier to bank these and other wins in your change work.

STORY

A packaged foods manufacturer was undertaking a substantial change effort. The CEO had been sending a not-so-subtle hint to his team for quite a while that emotions were not to be tolerated. Business was a rational enterprise. Numbers ruled the day. How people felt wasn’t a second-class issue—it wasn’t an issue at all. The CEO never acknowledged his feelings and shut conversations down when his team talked about their people’s experience of the pending changes. When there was conflict in the team, the CEO avoided the issues.

The easiest work would have been to stay where the team had learned to operate: analyzing and making decisions regarding market share, product development cycle times, and retention numbers. They were well practiced and good at these things. In this situation, this work seemed to be the lowest-hanging fruit. However, the team had already been there and done these tasks.

But doing the easiest work—work that would have little impact beyond business as usual—wouldn’t be worth doing at all. There were bigger issues for the team to resolve. We decided to use the Start with Impact, Follow the Energy lever. The CEO benefited from some good one-on-one coaching about the results of insisting that emotions be off-limits for the team. Some truth telling from a couple of brave direct reports helped too. They shared how they felt shut down in team meetings, how they couldn’t bring the senior team fully up to speed regarding their parts of the operation without including how people felt about the pending changes.

The greatest breakthrough for the team, and ultimately for the company, would come when the CEO learned to be more vulnerable. This lesson didn’t come easily to him. The Leverage Change challenge became how to make this work easier than it otherwise would have been. More information proved helpful to the CEO. He came to understand what he was giving up by priding himself on being a “numbers guy”—to the exclusion of the rest of the reality people were experiencing.

The CEO decided to take a leap of faith. There was a big backstory in his life that no one had ever heard before. Supported by some strong facilitation, he talked with the team about his past and why emotions were difficult for him to express. It got very personal. Long-ago stories of his relationship with his dad explained his behavior today. This difficult work led to much more honest and productive conversations about team dynamics than had previously been undiscussable. The CEO began to appreciate the fears that people in the organization had about planned changes. The coaching and conversations with his direct reports made addressing this issue easier. So did active facilitation in the team meeting when the issue was raised. Change can be hard. Making it easier is the value added by a Leverage Change approach.

Better Results

You may be most effective making changes in a particular part of your organization. Odds are, the smaller the change you’re trying to make, the more successful you’ll be in making it. Start with a pilot program where you test a change out on a small scale. Involve a small part of the organization. Resource it well. Put your best people on it. Get regular progress reports to the senior team. Shine a spotlight on the process. You’ll likely succeed. But are you achieving a better result than if you had started where the work was harder?

With a pilot, you stack the deck in your favor. So much so that the scenario can sometimes bear little resemblance to how these changes will be implemented in the rest of your organization. Try to take this change work to the larger enterprise, and you won’t have these same advantages. Succeeding on a small test case (read: one not tied to the scope, scale, or complexities of the day-to-day operations of the organization) will not always lead you to a better result.

Is the pilot approach the right change to be making for maximum impact? That’s the Leverage Change question. Maybe you need to focus where you’ll make the biggest difference even if you fall short of achieving all your objectives. It could be smarter to go where your chances of a win are lower but your payoff for victory higher.

This is not a flat-out argument against pilots. Leverage Change contends that you need to consider your options carefully. What are the trade-offs between a near-certain win on a small scale versus a tougher challenge—but a probably more high-impact effort—on a large scale? What appears obvious on the surface may not be as clear with a closer look. The best results for an organization most often come in the form of doing the most important work.

STORY

Jennifer Brown, a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant, and her colleagues once worked with a company that licensed its software on a subscription basis, hosting the platform centrally on the web. The CEO had made it his personal mission to fix the gender pay gap at the business after an internal assessment uncovered a marked disparity between men and women.

Brown worked with him as he considered the trade-offs between piloting a program on a small scale and making sweeping changes across the entire organization all at once. On the basis of his own deep commitment, the difference it would make for his female employees, and the message it would send to the rest of the organization, he decided that the change needed to be made company-wide from the start.

By investing millions of dollars and taking decisive action, the CEO guaranteed fair treatment for all female employees, immediately and into the future. He also ensured that his equal-pay initiative wouldn’t be a quick fix. It would remain both a challenge and an opportunity that required revisiting every year. The commitment to equal pay for equal work was going to stay solid, regardless of the company’s performance or market fluctuations. That’s how he defined better results and maximum impact on this important issue—for him and the organization.

Some Final Tips and Advice in Defining Desired Results

We’ve covered a lot of ground regarding results so far. Here are a few final thoughts to consider:

1. Know your reality. Start where you are. Take honest stock of your current circumstances. This activity can be quite comprehensive, such as an organization-wide assessment of key functions’ performance against plan. For example, in what areas are you succeeding, and why are you’re winning in these areas? Where are you falling short, and what reasons can explain these shortfalls?

Depending on your situation, it can be just as valuable to take a more straightforward approach. I’ve worked with clients to list operating core processes underlying how work gets done (e.g., communications, decision-making, rewards, etc.). Once you define these core elements, you can create simple but powerful lists of what’s been working and what hasn’t in the business.

You decide how formal and involved this assessment needs to be. Either path can get you where you want to go. Which feels most appropriate for the work you’re undertaking? Bottom line, you can’t set good results for your future if you don’t know the position from which you’re beginning.

2. Consider defining results in different ways. Most people doing change work pay mind to only one of four kinds of potential results: the numbers. We’re obsessed with needing to count things to measure success. Defects per thousand items. Return on fixed assets. Percentage of market share. All important and valid measures—just not the only kind that count. Here are three others to consider when defining desired results:

• What you see. How are different parts of the organization working together? Can you see greater collaboration in problem-solving activities between functions that used to be at odds? Are new skills that were learned in development programs being applied on the job? Are people showing up for meetings that they used to avoid like the plague because the meetings are now more positive and productive?

• What you hear. Customer feedback, both through formal surveys and informal talks, counts. Add to this list the kinds of questions people ask in town hall meetings. What kind of quality and depth of conversations are you hearing when teams get together? Are interactions between bosses and subordinates filled with offers of support that help people keep their commitments?

• What you feel. Do you personally feel that there is trust and vulnerability on your team? (Yes, our own feelings count too.) How confident are people feeling about the path being crafted to reach their collective future? How much alignment do we feel that we have among the executive team around our new strategy?

Too often these three types of results get forgotten when organizations define success. All four types are valid. Get a complete picture by not forgetting any of them.

3. Create as clear, as comprehensive, and as compelling a picture of your future as possible. Get real about your future. As real as possible. Make the picture of your future so detailed and realistic that you can imagine stepping into and living it. It accounts for your markets, competitors, issues, and opportunities. Don’t forget to take a look inside your organization at your people, processes, and practices.

• How is work getting done?

• What products and services are you providing?

• Who is in this future with you?

• How are you and they behaving?

• What decisions do you see yourself making and why?

Be clear about where you’re headed. Define as much detail as you can muster. Fill out the entire canvas on which you’re painting. Leave no corner untouched.

4. Engage as many of the interested and affected parties as you can. It will always feel easier to close ranks and keep things “under control.” But engagement, not manageability, is the goal. Think beyond the usual suspects. Invite someone from the frontlines to join you in defining the best results for your change work. Don’t shy away from partnering with customers who will benefit from changes you make. Think about inviting people two or three levels above or below you in the organization’s hierarchy to get involved. Videoconference folks in from the other side of the world. Assign everyone involved in the change work the task of talking to stakeholders and finding out what matters to them. What do they care about most? What are their greatest concerns? hopes? fears? Let go a little so that others can gain a better grip on the work.

5. Don’t undersell yourself. Now is the time for bold moves. Go big or stay home. Most of the work in organizations on results makes this harder. SMART goals have a huge following in the world of individual, team, and organization change. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

There’s only one problem with this approach.

It puts you on a path of achieving nothing more than incremental improvements—they’re achievable and realistic. Don’t get carried away with anything too brash! SMART goals almost shout from the mountaintops to stay in your box. Here’s a different way to look at defining results. Thanks to work by Mark Murphy, we can expand the possibilities of desired results.20 He calls them HARD goals. HARD stands for

• Heartfelt. You deeply care about the goal you are working on. It has profound meaning and power for you.

• Animated. Your goal brings you energy. No matter how big an ask it may be, it energizes you to take a major step forward.

• Required. These are nonnegotiable results. Other people are counting on you to deliver, to make good on your promises to them. Much more than action plans, these are agreements entered into with real commitment.

• Difficult. Your goals should be a reach, an honest stretch for you and your organization. Don’t settle for small improvements. Challenge yourself to bring your best and more to the table.

You’re going to be investing in any change work you’re doing. Make sure that at the end of the day, you’re delighted with what you’ve accomplished. That feeling of a big win starts with how you define the goals or results you’re aiming to achieve.

Don’t try to bring about change the way that those who lost to Archimedes did. Working harder without leverage is no way to go through life. Approaching change this way is more difficult, will take more time, and is less effective. Consider your situation. Get crystal clear on the results you need to achieve. Make sure they’re the right results for you to achieve. Learn which of the 8 Levers will make the biggest difference first. Start with those. Learn the others. Get good at using all eight, any place and at any time.

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