Change (the) Management: Why We as Leaders Must Change for the Change to Last

]>

]>

Copyright © 2020 Al Comeaux

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0914-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906370

]>

To my greatest teachers: Harold, Adele, Katie, Charlotte and Courtney

]>

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part One: We Are the Enemies of Change

1. This Is Not a They Problem

2. Enemy #1: Our Own Cognitive Dissonance

3. Enemy #2: Our Outdated Ideas About Communications

4. Enemy #3: We Let Inertia Get in the Way

5. Enemy #4: Our Belief in Change by Decree

6. Enemy #5: We Live in the Weeds

7. Enemy #6: How We View People

Part Two: How We Become the Allies of Change

8. Reorientation: We Pull. We Don’t Push

9. We Align on the Problem

10. We Listen

11. We Model the Change

Conclusion: We All Have Choices

Acknowledgments

References

About the Author

]>

Foreword

By Terry Jones

I was wrapping up a consulting assignment a few years ago and having a final discussion with the CEO. We’d been working to help his organization change and adapt itself to this new all-digital world.

He and his division leaders seemed bought in and were actually leading the changes in their divisions. They weren’t just giving speeches; they were doing it.

As I was leaving the meeting, the CEO said, There’s something that puzzles me. The changes and steps you helped us implement aren’t new. They are the same ideas I had last year, but change didn’t happen.

Well, I replied, how did you communicate the change you wanted?

By email, he said, softly.

As you will learn in this book, that is the crux of what is wrong with most efforts to change. Leaders think it can be accomplished with the push of a button and without actually having to change themselves.

In this insightful book, Al Comeaux gives numerous examples of how and why this happens, and more importantly, he explains what to do about it.

Al’s thinking is influenced not only from being change-managed himself (like all of us inside organizations in the past three decades) but also from being an internal change agent and change leader all through his varied career. He’s learned from successes and failures alike, and not many who opine on change management carry this kind of insider insight.

Al learned firsthand during the beginnings of Travelocity as we grew from a team of 12 to a 3,000-person public company with a $1 billion market cap.

As Travelocity was a startup growing up inside American Airlines and its subsidiary, Sabre, I knew we’d have to totally change the way we operated to succeed. But I had no idea how much.

Overcoming resistance from elsewhere in the company, we moved out of the corporate headquarters and brought disparate teams together to begin to build our own culture. And we brought in people from the outside who opened up new ways of thinking for existing employees.

Just as importantly, I realized I had to change if we were going to create a different way of thinking. The team needed a model, so I had to pull them through the change. Gone were the formal ways of communicating; our town halls consisted of me standing on someone’s desk and talking about the latest achievement. It was communicating via action.

As Al says so insightfully, For successful, enduring change…we have to pull.

He’s right. We can’t push change. We have to inspire it through our own actions. In short, we have to pull.

I’ve served on seventeen public and private boards, and led two public companies. I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of people around the world on innovation and change and written two books about it. Along the way, I’ve seen dozens of established firms fall by the wayside and only a few succeed in the wrenching and difficult process of change.

If you read Al’s book and truly apply his lessons, perhaps you can actually lead the change your organization so badly needs in this period of extreme business disruption.

Terry Jones

Founder of Travelocity

Founding Chairman of Kayak

Author of ON Innovation and Disruption OFF

]>

Introduction

Imagine for a minute a change management consultant pitching her services to an organization threatened by a competitor or new technology. She tells her audience that the changes they want are indeed achievable and that she has the best tools, training, and technology for the job. She shows an outstanding track record of ushering in successful, enduring change. She has a team of smart people who can come in and take names; they have all the technical, financial, and analytical models; and they can help paint the picture of the change in language that people will swoon for. People will want to change.

She has these executives eating out of her hand. They’re impressed with her and gobsmacked by her results. Everyone in the room knows change initiatives are hard. Why not go with someone successful like this?

Then she leans on the conference room table to the rapt attention of the team and says, "You know, the one ingredient I don’t have—but which I need—is a commitment from each of you to change. I need you to model the behaviors you’re trying to drive throughout the organization. You want to drive a nimbler, more cost-efficient business, and this will only happen if you model nimbler and more cost-efficient behaviors yourselves. So you’ll give up your assistants, and your people will see that you’re keeping your own calendars and making your own copies and coffee. You’ll give up your company cars and dedicated parking spaces; this will drive a shared ‘we’re in this together’ attitude.

You’ll also need to approach the change differently from those you’ve done before—the ones that failed. Instead of deciding the change and foisting it on your people, you’ll listen to your people to find out the best way to meet your goals. And you won’t tell people to change; you’ll ask them to come with you on the change journey. And before doing that, you’ll work on your active listening skills and your meeting management skills. You guys keep scoring horribly in these areas on your engagement surveys.

People are frozen in place.

Only with this kind of behavior from you—as leaders—can these other initiatives work, she continues. Because most change management initiatives don’t fail because the processes, training, and technology aren’t right; they fail because people like you think you can change your organizations without the hard work of modeling the behavior you’re calling for, leading the change and asking people to follow you. I will not work with you if you aren’t willing to change your behaviors and attitudes. And before I’ll even take this assignment, I want to interview each of you separately to understand if you’re each capable of changing and whether the group dynamic can serve this change.

Everyone sits in stunned silence for a moment. Then they shift in discomfort. When the team starts to breathe normally again, they give the consultant a warm Thank you and send her on her way.

We have to find someone just as successful who’ll focus on the changes we actually need, someone says. That jerk seemed to get distracted on nonessential things.

Everyone agrees.

A Huge Challenge

A massive change management industry has sprung up during the past three decades, and it sells managers on the idea that disciplined efforts to change the processes, technologies, and behaviors of frontline employees can be done with measurable management techniques that plan for and execute the change at hand.

I don’t want to sell short what this industry does. Given that change is now constant—with some organizations having one or more firmwide changes per year—this is important work. Properly planning a technology cutover, moving to the cloud, prioritizing for the customer journey, changing the way we market and distribute our products, implementing new governance or safety policies, planning for a new work space, or merging organizations…these things can’t be done without significant work, including assessing current capabilities, proper planning for how technology will be used, aligning project activities, understanding clearly how processes will be changed, analyzing cost and revenue and financial planning, and understanding how the necessary training will be delivered.

And, clearly, a fuller cultural renewal—a transformation with a brand-new way of thinking about the direction of the organization and the industry and even thinking about realigning the organization’s values and mission—has to be a deliberate effort with consensus about what the future will look like, proven techniques, the right tools, and a roadmap to get there.

But according to a McKinsey & Company study, two-thirds of these efforts fail or fall far short of their goals. Something’s amiss. If surgeons failed two-thirds of the time, there would be no confidence in the medical establishment. If a lawyer admitted to losing two-thirds of his trials, no one would hire him. But as perfectly adept leaders—often knowing full well that most change management efforts fail—we still sign up for these change efforts.

Given how much money and work goes into these efforts, that’s a shame. Resources are wasted, the organization can lose focus, people’s lives are upended, often with little to show for it. And with failure, the organization falls further behind the change curve.

So why do we keep trying? Are we masochists? Or are we optimists who simply believe we won’t fail?

Usually, we don’t have a choice in the matter. Globalization, changes in the marketplace, competitive pressures, changing customer expectations, threats like automation, and technologies like the internet, blockchain, and artificial intelligence all put tremendous pressure on organizations. As managers, we can’t sit idly without trying to change how we do business. We have to try. But the efforts fail and fail again.

Why is this? Well, most of the literature on change management and most of the change management work and research has been done by academics and consultants—people who’ve had a front-row seat to observe change efforts at many organizations. They’ve done great work and research—some of which I’ve used in this book—but it’s largely missing a giant dimension of what’s needed for full success.

In my thirty-plus-year career, I’ve spent four years in consulting and the rest mostly in leadership positions inside companies. In addition to my years leading communications and championing change at Travelocity, which was itself disrupting multiple industries at once, I’ve been on leadership teams at companies large and small, young and old, including American Airlines, GE, and Sabre. I can say beyond debate that there’s a monumental difference between being inside and outside a company. I’ve been change-managed; consultants and tenured academics largely have not. I’ve gone to bed wondering if my company would exist the next day, thinking with my peers about how to flip our business model overnight. Consultants and academics aren’t in the boat, paddling, taking on water. Their knowledge and observations are very useful to all of us, but I’m adding a needed dimension to it because—like you—I’ve been on the inside of this kind of change.

Take SMART, Add Heart

To further defend these consultants, though, we need to realize that our organizations demand that their change work be measurable. Management consultants have developed a strong framework for this, saying goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART). We’ve all heard it: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

And the results must be measurable. The inputs, however, can’t always be measured. If you’ve never been in the boat, been change-managed, you’ve never felt with all of your heart the unmeasurable power of certain things—certain inputs—that have actually changed your vigor and behavior as a worker. Without this insight, our focus is mostly on aspects of the intellect, not those of the heart.

But there is a way to succeed at change. As I’ve discovered and will share with you in this book, behavioral change—the very thing we need if changes are to last—requires emotional buy-in from those being asked to change their behaviors. Given the growing body of science pointing to the importance of emotion in decision-making—even in rational business decision-making—it’s become clear that all the intellectual arguments and SMART work in the world will only drive so much change, and only for so long. For change management to work and last—for the energy to be there among those going through the change—we must focus on both the intellectual dimension and the emotional dimension: SMART and heart.

This is especially true when we address behavioral change. The reality is if we want successful, lasting change, we should not try to get people to change their behaviors. Trying to get people to change their behaviors is actually counterproductive. Instead, what we must do is to get people to want to change their behaviors. The former yields mere compliance; it’ll last a while but usually not for long. The latter is contagious, energy-inducing, and lasting. And the difference is monumental.

The best way to drive a desire for behavior change—the best way to drive an emotional and intellectual connection during a change initiative—is for employees to understand the what and why of the change (rational connection) and to see examples of the change itself—how to change—from certain behaviors by leaders: modeling, listening, asking people to join, pulling people to the change (emotional connection). We leaders must have skin in the change.

It’s a realization that’s taken me twenty years to crystallize, and as you’ll see throughout this book, it’s something that will make change efforts richer and more successful.

My Epiphany

How did I come to this certainty? Well, it started four companies ago. Actually, twenty years, four companies, eight jobs, eight CEOs, three CEO transitions, and countless other executive transitions, numerous corporate-wide and divisional change efforts (including an IPO, a hostile takeover, a take-private/leveraged buyout, two startups inside large corporations,