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Pumping
I highly recommend John Kotter’s new book,
The
Heart of Change, for three reasons:
1. The premise that people change when they feel
differently is one that’s rarely covered in business books
2. The book is short (185 pages) and can be read
quickly, and understood easily by any employee
3. Unlike the popular fable genre of business books,
the stories in this book come from real people and are more memorable as a
result.
A previous Kotter book, Leading Change,
described an eight-step path to success in achieving large scale change. Here
are the steps:
1. Increase Urgency
2. Build the Guiding Team
3. Get the Vision Right
4. Communicate for Buy-in
5. Empower Action
6. Create Short-Term Wins
7. Don’t Let Up
8. Make Change Stick
The Heart
of Change uses short stories from real people to illustrate how people
accomplish each of these steps, presenting if not a roadmap, a point of
comparison to managers trying to achieve large scale change. Here’s an
excerpt from the beginning of the chapter on step 5, Empower Action:
“In highly
successful change efforts, when people begin to understand and act on a
change vision, you remove barriers in their paths. You take away the tattered
sails and give them better ones. You take a wind in their faces and create a
wind at their backs. You take away a pessimistic skipper and give the crew
and optimistic boss.
The word empowerment comes with so much baggage, you might be tempted
to abandon it. We won’t. as we use the term, empowerment is not about giving
people new authority and new responsibilities and then walking away. It is
all about removing barriers.
Removing the ‘Boss’ Barrier
Often the single biggest obstacle is a boss – an immediate manager or someone
higher in the hierarchy, a first-line supervisor or an executive vice
president. Subordinates see the vision and want to help, but are effectively
shut down. The supervisor’s words, actions, or even subtle vibrations say ‘This
change is stupid.’ The underlings, not being fools, either give up or spend
an inordinate amount of time trying to maneuver around the barrier.
The ‘boss barrier’ is typically handled in one of three ways. We ignore the
issue, we send the obstacle to a short training course, or (rarely) we try to
fire, demote, or transfer the person. None of these are great solutions, the
first for obvious reasons, the second because it usually has little effect,
and the third because, if not handled well, fear will escalate and become a
disempowering force itself.
In cases of highly successful change, people begin by confronting the issue. In
order to be fair, they explain the situation to the individual creating the problem.
When explaining fails, as it often does, then try more creative solutions.
Retooling the Boss
From Tim Wallace
There was one superintendent in our company, Joe, who was considered so ‘old
school’ that people had warned me he would never change his ways. He had been
with the company for over twenty years and he was very proud of our products.
Whenever a customer would want a change in the product or how we made it,
this man would get bent out of shape. He felt we were giving people a great
product and that they were too picky. When someone would suggest something,
he would respond in one of two ways: We tried it and it didn’t work, or we
thought about it and decided not to try it. It seemed to me he was basically
a good man, a talented man, and a man with a lot of valuable experience who
was stuck in an old paradigm. He just couldn’t see anything from the customer’s
point of view.
Once, it became so tense that one of our best customers said that we needed
to replace Joe. I didn’t like the idea of terminating an employee who
probably thought he was protecting the company. So I thought about it and
then said to the customer, ‘Let’s do something different which might help both
of us.”
We asked them if Joe could go to work for their company for six months at our
expense. He would work at a different place and have a different boss. To
help make this happen, we agreed to keep paying his salary. We further said
that after six months we would bring him back into our company as a customer
representative, inspecting our products specifically for that customer. This would
be a different job than he had before, but an important job. The idea was to
convert the guy from being an obstacle for others into someone who would
actively help us.
Joe’s boss thought the plan wouldn’t work – may have even thought it was nuts
– but he agreed to go along with it. Joe was at first also very reluctant to
accept the idea. ‘I have my own job to do and I don’t want to do something
else.’ I told him we really needed his expertise so that he could tell us
what was going on when our tankers arrived at the customer’s facility. But he
was a real hard rock. He didn’t want any part of this plan. So we had his
boss tell him that he couldn’t have his existing job anymore, that he could
take our offer or leave.
Off he went into a different world. His new job was to be a quality inspector
at the customer’s plant. I don’t know how difficult it was on him at first,
but he had to change to survive. He had to learn a new job, a new company,
and how to look at our products from that customer’s point of view. If he
didn’t, he failed.
Well, he didn’t want to fail, so he tried to do the new job. And when he
started really looking, he found that an old product of ours, which he
thought was very good, didn’t meet the customer’s needs. He found that they
bought his product because they didn’t have an alternative and switching
would be costly. He found that another product, which he also thought was
very high-quality, was not seen by the customer that way because of how they
needed to use it. And he found that out delivery on another product created
additional problems.
So then he came back to us saying, ‘This is no good. You don’t understand
that by doing this, you are hurting the customer. We’ve got to change or we
risk losing their business.’
Joe ended up being the best inspector the customer had ever had. They loved
him. When he came back to us he was a new man. The ‘old school’ barrier, the
change resistor, became one of our best managers.
I suppose there are many people that you can’t do much with, or people that
you can’t afford the expense of doing much with. But I think you need to be
very careful when you hear people saying that so-and-so is hopeless. It might
be true, or it might not.”
The interplay of text and stories makes
the reading go fast, and Kotter includes perspectives on “seeing, feeling,
and changing” in each chapter. Every chapter ends with a recap of what works,
what doesn’t and the names of stories to remember. The Heart
of Change falls short of expectations in two ways: there’s a lack of data
on which the ideas are based, and the stories are so brief, that they can be
hard to understand in context and leave readers unable to apply the ideas in
practice. Otherwise, The Heart
of Change is an excellent book in helping managers and workers understand
what it takes to achieve real change.
Steve Hopkins, September 4, 2002
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