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Talent Management Perspectives

Published June 2010

A Better Way to Lead Change Initiatives

  Bill Seidman

Think about one of your most recent corporate change initiatives. It could be something as simple as encouraging employees to check the company intranet for news or something that requires a bit more hand-holding, such as introducing a new organizational structure. Whatever the program, how long was it before everyone in the organization was functioning completely and effectively in the desired new way? If you are like most human resource and talent management leaders, your answer is probably either "a year or more" or perhaps even "never."

The good news is that recent scientific breakthroughs about human behavior and the importance of modeling best practices after star employees are changing this scenario for big and small companies alike. Instead of implementing new programs only to find very few employees adopting the desired behavior, now organizations can leverage their best team players to lead change efforts from a grass-roots perspective. Using this approach, talent development and related performance improvements can be extremely fast, predictable and effective.

This grass-roots approach has four distinct stages.

Stage 1: Set the bar — identify your stars. Use your organization's top-performing employees to define the desired attitude and behavior. Star team players are often the most influential leaders of the organization because they are highly respected for their history of success and positive attitudes. A critical element of their performance is a commitment to achieving a greater social good that invariably aligns with the objective of any given change.

Stage 2: Motivate change. Utilize a concise, high-energy statement of the positive deviant's greater social good as the catalyst to engage others in the change process. When presented in a particular way, this statement can cause employees to feel honored to be part of the change effort and see themselves as extraordinarily successful contributors to the change. In turn, by generating and writing down personalized, positive images of the statement, learners are more open to new ideas and learn them more quickly while their natural resistance to change is suppressed. People feel that the change is their idea, which generates a perception that the change is coming from the grass roots of an organization.

Stage 3: Sustain the change. Being able to motivate employees is a huge success, but sustaining this motivation is key because human tendency is almost always to quickly resume past attitudes and behaviors.

Intense practice of new attitudes and behaviors — particularly when it includes frequent application to real situations — causes pathways in the brain to rewire and the desired functions to rapidly and fully internalize. Because the new capabilities are so completely a part of normal work, everyone quickly comes to perceive that the new way is actually the norm and the change looks and feels grass roots.

Stage 4: Scale the change. How does this work in a large organization? Leaders must engage enough people in the shortest amount of time to generate a buzz and ensure others accept the new program.

An emerging technology called persuasive technology — which is defined as technology designed to change what people believe and do — enables rapid scaling. The best persuasive technologies create the perception for every user that they have a caring personal mentor, even though it is done with many people at once. This sense of caring makes people feel that the change is uniquely theirs, that the change is grass roots.

This is a departure from traditional HR practices in that neither executive support nor assessments are a part of this approach. These steps require minimum executive support since their very premise is to create change from within the organization.      

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