3 Catalysts For Change

Years ago, I believed that driving change within organizations required charisma and motivational speeches.

Nowadays, after having worked with many managers who have repeatedly fought inertia and achieved long-lasting results, I have changed my mind.

Fighting inertia mostly consists of overcoming three key obstacles:

1. The doubt that efforts will go to waste. Most employees have witnessed change initiatives that created much disruption but did not achieve any concrete improvement. They must be convinced that this time it’s different, and words won’t suffice.

2. The lack of closeness. People will not change their ways just because their CEO asked them in a corporate-wide email. They also need to see that their direct supervisor is actively committed, too.

3. Contradictions. People will not change their ways if they see others still being allowed to behave the old way. This includes the manager being inconsistent with his actions and standards.

Here, I give you three catalyzers for change that overcome these obstacles and allow managers to create long-lasting change within their organizations.

The first catalyzer

Have you ever wondered why most toothpaste brands have a strong mint flavor?

Rory Sutherland pointed out in his book "Alchemy" that the mint flavor does nothing towards killing bacteria, but does everything towards keeping you hooked on brushing your teeth. Imagine if there were no mint flavor. You would brush your teeth once, feel no particular change, think that your efforts went to waste, and quit the idea of brushing your teeth after every meal. It is not worth it. Conversely, if you brush your teeth once and your mouth feels fresher thanks to the mint flavor, you are more likely to trust that brushing your teeth is an effective and beneficial habit. You would keep brushing your teeth because every day, you get immediate feedback that your efforts are not going to waste.

The same applies to organizations. People require early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste. As long as they get it, they stay motivated. And as soon as they do not get it anymore, they lose motivation and disengage.

For example, if you ask your people to follow a new procedure at work, and they do it but feel no difference, no better outcome, they will learn the lesson that their efforts are going to waste. The rational decision is to disengage and abandon doing the new thing.

Conversely, if the procedure has some kind of early feedback (like the “mint” in the toothpaste) showing that efforts are not going to waste, then people will be more willing and motivated to use the procedure and will be more engaged in general. This is the first of three catalysts for change: give early feedback that efforts are not going to waste.

One way to implement the first catalyzer

There are three common ways to give early feedback that efforts are not going to waste. The first one is to catch your people doing something good and thank them for it. For example, if you ask your people to follow a new procedure, then spend some time at their workplace, and when you see them do the new procedure, thank them for it. It will give them a clue that their efforts are noticed and matter.

A common mistake

When I advise my clients to do the above, a common mistake is waiting too long. If you ask your people to follow a new procedure on Monday, you should have already acknowledged their good work on Monday. If you are waiting for Friday, by Tuesday, they will have learned that their efforts are not valued. Feedback must be early; ideally, immediate.

A second way to implement the first catalyzer

The second common way to give clues that efforts aren’t going to waste is to get positive customer feedback in front of those whose work caused it. If your product changed the life of a customer, everyone needs to know about it, from the janitor to the accountant – not just the product design team. Go get customer feedback, interview your best customers, and show the relevant bits to your employees who need to see it. And do it fast – before the doubt that efforts are going to waste creeps in.

A second common mistake

When I advise my clients to do the above, a common mistake is only getting feedback from customers. However, in a company, every employee is each other's customer. Everyone benefits from the janitor’s work, for example. And yet, how many provide the janitor with clues that their work is improving their lives? Get feedback from all departments, and show it to the workers who worked hard for them.

A third common mistake

Another common mistake is to approach the above too mechanistically. For example, if you ask all your employees to make a video thanking someone else in the company, people might doubt the sincerity of these videos. Instead, hire a freelancer for a couple of days, provide them with a list of roles in your company, and ask them to find someone who benefits from each role and record a 30-second video interviewing them. Then, distribute the videos as appropriate. Similarly, such videos should not be too effusive; simply explaining why people’s work matters is sufficient. People do not need to feel loved at their workplace, but they do need to feel like their efforts are not going to waste. Aiming for the former will lead to a lot of insincerity and other counterproductive outcomes. Aiming for the latter is easier and more effective.

Of course, the above won’t work for all companies, but for many, it could be a turning point in the engagement of their workers.

A fourth common mistake

Some managers understand the need to give people early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste. However, they immediately start thinking about ways to provide it in a scalable way – for example, a dashboard or a monthly report. Don’t. People need personal and early feedback, whereas scalable feedback tends to be impersonal (the dashboard) or late (the monthly report).

Or, more accurately: you can also use dashboards and reports, but they should always complement personal and early feedback, not substitute it.

Summarizing the first catalyst for change

Just as toothpaste uses a mint flavor to provide immediate feedback that our efforts to brush our teeth are not going to waste, workers need similar early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste; otherwise, they will disengage.

Managers should constantly ask themselves, "Am I providing that immediate feedback?" – or, more precisely, "Are my people receiving early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste?"

It is a manager's job to consistently provide early feedback and, where appropriate, to collect personal and meaningful feedback from customers or other departments and share it with their people promptly.

Common mistakes include waiting too long, only collecting external feedback, and making the feedback collection process too mechanical. Instead, strive for feedback that is early, personal, and meaningful.

The second catalyst

Have you ever wondered why our arteries divide into capillaries?

That’s because our blood cells can only exchange oxygen with tissue cells that are close by.

The same happens in organizations: people do not change when asked by someone from afar. CEOs are the pumping heart of companies, but they require a capillary structure that can drive change from close by: middle management.

Yes, I know middle management gets a bad rap as an unproductive layer of the company. But that is true only for bad middle managers. Good ones are invaluable and indispensable for driving change.

Put yourself in the shoes of a line worker. You receive a corporate-wide email from the CEO saying that there is a new way of doing things. You do not know the CEO, so you might not trust him: does he know what he’s doing? Does he have your best interests at heart? Or perhaps you trust him but do not trust that he knows how to do your job. Or you do not trust the full repercussions of the change he proposed. Long story short, workers are rationally suspicious of any change coming from someone they do not have a close working relationship with.

Instead, a direct supervisor is uniquely positioned to explain the change to his team, listen to their questions, and answer them personally. And he can do so in a way that is impossible to reproduce at scale. Moreover, as we saw with the first catalyst, change requires early feedback that efforts are not going to waste, and that can only be given by someone close enough and trusted – reports take too long, and dashboards are too impersonal.

Change requires trust, and trust does not scale, hence the need to drive change through a capillary structure made of middle and lower management.

This does not mean that communication from the top is useless; on the contrary, it is fundamental. It just means that it is not sufficient.

How to implement the second catalyst

There are four steps to implement the principle of driving change through a capillary structure.

First, involve middle and lower-level management. Cascade down the goal of driving change through supervisors, explain the rationale, and clarify that supervisors need their own supervisors to drive change. Hence the need for a capillary structure (CEO → middle management → supervisors → workers) rather than a flat one (CEO → supervisors → workers).

Second, train middle and lower-level management. You cannot expect that your managers know how to communicate change. Train them on what to communicate and how to communicate it. Train them to listen for questions and to answer them without dismissing them. Train them to provide early feedback that efforts are not going to waste.

Third, explicitly demand middle and lower-level management to be agents of change. Be clear and use visual examples. Describe three managers: one doing their job of driving change, one doing too little, and one doing too much – this will clarify expectations better than anything else. Set high standards: communication does not happen when you can be understood but when you cannot be misunderstood, and change happens not when it is communicated but when it is followed up with consistent action.

Fourth, sustain the change initiative. Constantly demonstrate the behaviors you are demanding in others, and keep them accountable to the high standards you asked of them. The moment you stop is the moment doubt will arise that the change you requested yesterday is not relevant anymore (and therefore, any further effort would go to waste).

To summarize

Change requires trust, and trust doesn’t scale – hence, the need to drive change through a capillary structure made of middle and lower management. To achieve this, involve middle and lower management, train them, and explicitly expect them to be agents of change; then, constantly sustain the change initiative by taking action that demonstrates it is still a priority. Never allow fertile ground for doubts that efforts are going to waste.

The third catalyst

Years ago, I consulted an operations manager about a warehouse problem. Employees were constantly leaving mechanical parts and components scattered on the floor—a safety hazard and an efficiency drain. Despite repeated instructions to store components properly on shelves, his workers never complied.

The root problem was that the manager was too busy and the warehouse too large for him to consistently enforce the standards he set for his employees.

Therefore, we decided to narrow the scope of change to a single point in the warehouse, small enough for him to consistently provide feedback on. He chose the area next to a safety exit. He held a stand-up meeting with the warehouse employees and told them that the area next to the exit had to be kept clear of components at all times. He asked them to clear it immediately, and he did not leave the warehouse until it was done.

Then, the hard part began. For the next month, he had to visit the warehouse multiple times a day. First thing upon arrival, he would check the floor next to that safety exit to see if it was clear. If not, he was to immediately stop whatever he was doing, walk to the nearest employee, remind them that the area had to be clear, and stay there until it was.

Here is what happened.

After a week, the warehouse employees learned that the safety exit area was to be kept clear.

After two weeks, the employees began noticing that the area next to the machine was easier to walk in, and parts stored there were easier to find.

After three weeks, the magic happened. The employees began to clear the other areas of the floor on their own initiative.

You see, habits require consistency, but once learned, they can easily be expanded to other areas. The bottleneck was achieving a critical mass of consistent repetitions of the desired habit within a few weeks. However, that requires time and effort from both workers and their managers. They are both busy and have limited bandwidth. The solution was to shrink the area of change from the whole warehouse to the few square meters next to the safety exit—an area small enough for busy people to focus on it frequently enough for habits to become ingrained.

This is the third catalyst for change: to avoid compromising consistency, compromise on the scope of change. Do not attempt to change too many habits or too many people at once. Instead, focus on a single habit at a time, with a single team, in a single area of their work—and then be obsessive about it for the next three to four weeks.

By focusing change on a small area, obsessing over it, and allowing others to see the benefits of the change, you will achieve what you couldn’t before. This is the magic of obsessive consistency. Once the workers understand that they can change faster than their manager, they will. Once they understand that good things happen when they change, they will. Good managers embrace the effectiveness of obsessive consistency, and so should you.

To summarize

Achieving consistency requires reducing the scope of change so you can focus on it intensely for a few weeks.