Podcast EP 125 | What to do When Your Team is Resisting Change

Some­times you’re clear about a change that needs to hap­pen, but team mem­bers might resist that change. It does­n’t make sense. You under­stand why and how the change is required, but team mem­bers are fight­ing that change in an illog­i­cal or unrea­son­able way.

In this episode of the pod­cast, Kevin and Brad review what to do when your team is resist­ing change. Using Kot­ter’s Change Mod­el, they dis­cuss how to:

1. Cre­ate Urgency. The first step is to cre­ate a sense of urgency about the need for change.
2. Put A Team Together.
3. Devel­op Vision and Strategies.
4. Com­mu­ni­cate the Change Vision.
5. Remove Obsta­cles.
6. Set Short-Term Goals.
7. Keep the Momentum.
8. Make The Change Stick.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hel­lo, and wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that last com­pa­nies that you’re proud of, and that the team are proud of. My name is Brad Giles. And as always, today I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo. How are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:30

Doing great, Brad. We’re in the mid­dle of our sum­mer and have an amaz­ing time. Life is good. How about down there in Australia?

Brad Giles 00:38

I’m same, com­ing out of win­ter. And life is good. So let’s move on to the thought of the word of the day. What do you have for us today Kev?

Kevin Lawrence 00:49

You know, it’s Green­lights. I lis­tened to this amaz­ing audio book, did a road trip down to Cal­i­for­nia and back had an amaz­ing time, and in some of those many, many hours, lis­ten to a great audio book by Matthew McConaugh­ey, the actor, it was just a freak­ing inspir­ing sto­ry of his life. We cre­ate a lot of philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions for us and thoughts on life and all kinds of awe­some things. But every time he came up against a chal­lenge, and then all of a sud­den there would be a break­through, or almost like an affir­ma­tion from the world. When some­thing went well, he calls green light in his amaz­ing voice, which I don’t have like his, but his green lights with it was all cel­e­brat­ing these moments where doors open to the next lev­el of the game of life. And it just makes me think about, you know, green lights, and all of the freak­ing amaz­ing things that hap­pened in this jour­ney that we have. And the green lights that open up for us and how we should just note them, think about them. Be grate­ful for them. And then enjoy what that door open. So green­lights is just awe­some. Get­ting to the next lev­el. And yeah, and wor­thy of cel­e­bra­tion. That’s it for me. How about you, Brad?

Brad Giles 02:11

Awe­some. Yeah, I haven’t read that book. But I’ve skimmed it, and it looks real­ly good. So for me, it’s been look­ing in the mir­ror, or are you look­ing in the win­dow? So that’s a phrase, I got to see Jim Collins last week. And he’s real­ly talk­ing about respon­si­bil­i­ty. So when some­thing goes wrong, are you look­ing in the mir­ror and say­ing, Well, I did it wrong. It’s on me? Or are you look­ing out the win­dow and say­ing the team? Did it wrong? Or this per­son did it wrong? It’s on them. But equal­ly and oppo­site? When some­thing goes right. Are you look­ing in the mir­ror and say­ing, yeah, it was all me I did it right? Or you’re look­ing out the win­dow humbly? And say yes. Look how good the team did. So yeah, I know that con­cept from before. But Jim was talk­ing about lev­el five lead­er­ship. And it was just a real­ly good reminder of that.

Kevin Lawrence 03:05

Yeah, when we do tal­ent reviews with teams, we use sev­en ques­tions from Jim. And that’s one of them. And real­ly, if they’re more of the win­dow per­son, when things go wrong, that’s almost a fatal flaw for them to be on our teams. If we can’t fix it, we gen­er­al­ly have to exit them. So the con­nec­tion in terms of these two con­cepts is if you’re more like­ly to look into the mir­ror and reflect and learn, I think you’re going end up with more awe­some green lights in your world. Right? Look­ing out the win­dow when things go wrong, leads to red lights, look­ing in the mir­ror leads to green lights. Awe­some. Let’s move on. So today, today, we got a real­ly inter­est­ing top­ic. Now, in our mind most weeks, but today is one that we come across a lot. I had a con­ver­sa­tion with the CEO about this last week. But and this is about change, and what to do when your team resists change. You’ve got a great idea. That’s an improve­ment for the com­pa­ny in some way. But you feel like you’re drag­ging the team almost like when you’re try­ing to take a dog for a walk that does­n’t want to walk and you feel like you’re drag­ging down the side­walk, which we’ve had to do with my kids dog a few times. We’ve got an awe­some dog with Bak­er’s dog. He’s a great dog. But every once in awhile, he decides he does­n’t want to walk and lies down on the side­walk. Yeah. And the many times that hap­pens with our teams is they just lie down. They’re like, we’re not stand­ing for this.

Brad Giles 04:38

And you as the leader, you’re say­ing, but this is a great idea. Like no, I know it’s gonna work. It’s bril­liant. Why are you being so obstruc­tive? I don’t get it. Yes.

Kevin Lawrence 04:48

I’ve been work­ing on this for months and work­ing it out and think­ing it through and val­i­dat­ed. I know it’s an awe­some idea and you don’t. Here’s the key. Yes, you have been think­ing about this for months and work­ing on it for months, and you have had plen­ty of time to get your head around it. They’re, well, they’re at Ground Zero, you’ve talked about it 14 times for four hours or 14 hours. And we for­get. And it’s not that the idea isn’t good. But there’s a process for you to take an idea from being unac­cept­able to. I think there’s some­thing here and you work your way through an idea? Well, there are at the begin­ning, like, they’re like a child learn­ing to ride a bike for the first time, and your axe, ask­ing them to go ride up and down a moun­tain. And they can’t even get the ped­als fig­ured out.

Brad Giles 05:48

So an exam­ple of this might be, if I said to you, Kev, we’re going to switch the pod­cast from week­ly to dai­ly. And we’re gonna record it at 6am Every day, and it’s gonna be awe­some, let’s do it.

Kevin Lawrence 06:03

No mat­ter how good, that could be a bril­liant idea, but I’m gonna ini­tial­ly resist unless it’s some­thing I already want­ed. Yes. And odds are, it’s a new idea that you’re try­ing to get into peo­ple’s heads. So this is the idea of what do you do when your team resists change. And the real­i­ty is, we are change, we’re sup­posed to be change mas­ters in our role. So there’s a num­ber of great books by an author named John Kot­ter. And he has his 8‑step change mod­el. And we’ll talk through that a lit­tle bit today. But the main thing I learned about a decade ago, when I learned his prin­ci­ples, because I don’t know about you, if the team resists, I’m about as per­sis­tent as a bull­doz­er with infi­nite fuel. I’ll just keep going. I’m not going to stop. But it cre­ates a lot of ten­sion and, and destruc­tion way of get­ting to the out­come. So what Kot­ter says, and I think about this, a lot, and we do a lot of this with teams that want to change isn’t work­ing, we can go and run through the eight steps, or before we do it, ide­al­ly, we go and plan based on his eight steps. But the biggest thing is that ini­tial buy in and if you don’t cre­ate the urgency, or don’t get that buy in it, they’re not going to do it. So we’re will­ing to explain it real­ly clear­ly. Is that is that you know, when it comes to change, and you’re try­ing to shift some­one’s per­spec­tive, unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of our deci­sions are emo­tion­al­ly based. And exec­u­tives or lead­ers try to jus­ti­fy things log­i­cal­ly. So you’ve got an emo­tion­al prob­lem. Because peo­ple have emo­tions, like fear, or anx­i­ety, or dis­trust, they have all these emo­tions that are fired up when you want to talk about a change and how it’s going to affect them. And this isn’t right, this is fair, you’re try­ing to take away pow­er, or you’re try­ing to give an unfair amount of work to me, what­ev­er it comes up for them. It’s all emo­tion­al reac­tions gen­er­al­ly. And but we have this emo­tion­al prob­lem then we take a log­i­cal solu­tion. And we won­der why. So first of all, some­times we don’t even know that there’s a prob­lem. And we’re just push­ing ahead won­der­ing why every­one’s falling behind, and not with us to even if we do when we real­ize a prob­lem, we take a log­i­cal approach. And then we’ve dou­bled trouble.

Brad Giles 08:27

It’s like oil and water, you can’t get an emo­tion­al prob­lem solved via log­ic, you’ve got to stop and go to the emo­tions. There’s a phrase that I like to say, the team who build the plan, don’t fight the plan. And so you’ve got to get the team on board in build­ing the plan.

Kevin Lawrence 08:49

So in one of Kot­ter’s exam­ples, and I love this book is this book called, Our ice­berg is melt­ing. It’s a sto­ry about pen­guins. I don’t think I have it in front of me right now. It’s a sto­ry about pen­guins. And it’s a car­toon book. It looks like a kid’s book. Now he has a book called The heart of change and a bunch of oth­er deep­er, you know, intel­lec­tu­al books, but we use the pen­guin book. There’s a book that used to be a great book about change. It’s a bit dat­ed now, but it’s called Who Moved My Cheese? Yeah, but his ice­berg book is way bet­ter than Who Moved My Cheese. In my mind. It’s out­stand­ing. We’ve used it with hun­dreds and hun­dreds of lead­ers in dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. And that’s a sto­ry about a pen­guins whose ice­berg is actu­al­ly melt­ing. But what it actu­al­ly is all the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters which kind of show the dif­fer­ent approach­es that peo­ple take, but it’s about you know, what it actu­al­ly took to mobi­lize the team and get it going and in the sto­ry in the sim­ple essence is, they had the pro­fes­sor they call him in it, who tried to explain to peo­ple what was hap­pen­ing sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly had charts and data and spread­sheets. And there was a You know, and in the end, they got a guy. I believe his name was Fred, who kind of was the ring­leader on a bunch of this stuff. And it was Fred, I think was a dif­fer­ent Fred was the ring­leader who got it going. But the guy that they got to per­suade and get the whole group of pen­guins behind this, the whole com­mu­ni­ty was the guy who was the sales­man all mem­bers name. And while he was the best sales­man in a group, and he got up there and charged up peo­ple and move their emo­tions and got them to buy into it with some, I won’t tell the whole sto­ry. But basi­cal­ly, they used a very smart approach, which fell into quar­ters, eight steps. So there’s a great exam­ple he has one of his books about cen­tral­iz­ing pro­cure­ment. So imag­ine you’re a com­pa­ny with 10 fac­to­ries around the coun­try, whether you’re Brad’s coun­try, Aus­tralia, or North Amer­i­ca where I am. And imag­ine that you all have your inde­pen­dent pieces, and all the pro­cure­ment peo­ple are doing a great job in their mind. But then head office wants to cen­tral­ize it and cen­tral­ize all the buy­ing. So as soon as the pro­cure­ment team hears about cen­tral­iz­ing the buy­ing, what can you expect is going to come up? They’re not going to be excit­ed. You’re going to be tak­en away their pow­er, tak­en away their author­i­ty, so what­ev­er they call cor­po­rate, there’s gonna be all these sto­ries about cen­tral­iz­ing and whether or not they like the per­son, but it takes away their impor­tance, their pow­er, their author­i­ty, all this stuff, which is pre­dictable. It’s not sur­pris­ing, no dif­fer­ent than if you took it from cor­po­rate and decen­tral­ized it, the cor­po­rate peo­ple are going to feel that way. Because you’re tak­ing some­thing away from them. It’s human nature, but not bad. But basi­cal­ly, what they did is that they’re the leader in charge was very smart. And he had all the pro­cure­ment peo­ple in for a meet­ing at head office, and on a board­room table, he had a big pile of gloves. Now the meet­ing was sup­posed to start at 830. But he arti­fi­cial­ly told them the meet­ing start­ed at eight, so they’d be there ear­ly. And on the each pair of gloves had a piece of paper sta­pled to the glove with a loca­tion name and a price. So you will imag­ine that of all these dif­fer­ent pairs, they’d have like San Jose 17 bucks, and then they would have, you know, Par­sip­pa­ny and it would be three bucks. And though they’re iden­ti­cal gloves, because they use the same gloves in their in their man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty. So what hap­pened is the prices range from three to 17 in the sto­ry. And by the time the leader came in some­one’s like, by gosh, we need to cen­tral­ize pro­cure, we need to work togeth­er here, we’re get­ting ripped off by our sup­pli­ers. This isn’t right. We could save 10s of 1000s of dol­lars, but we got to work togeth­er. And don’t let the sup­pli­er screw us any­more. Yeah, because Emo­tion­al­ly, it was embar­rass­ing. For some, it was excit­ing. For oth­ers, it’s embar­rass­ing, but it was a trav­es­ty to the company.

Brad Giles 13:15

And the team built the plan, I get back to the 10 to build a plan, don’t fight the plan, we’ve got to get that emo­tion­al buy in.

Kevin Lawrence 13:23

Exact­ly. So the idea here, and you know, we’ll walk through quar­ters, eight steps. But the essence is, is you’ve got to get peo­ple buy­ing in. And so anoth­er exam­ple is, we were doing an acqui­si­tion. And in the mar­ket we were in we were num­ber one. And we dom­i­nat­ed like to the point where we’re aggres­sive and real­ly hurt com­peti­tors. This com­peti­tor was relieved that we pur­chased them. But we also know that in this bat­tle, we were the bad guys, they were relieved because we were going to kill their busi­ness. But at the same time, we were evil in their mind. So we had to cre­ate an activ­i­ty to get them buy­ing into because they had some amaz­ing tal­ent. Even though we beat them in the mar­ket, they did have some awe­some peo­ple we want­ed to retain. So we cre­at­ed a very spe­cial event. And this was in a very trop­i­cal loca­tion, a very spe­cial event where we brought peo­ple togeth­er. And we engi­neered who sat with each oth­er. And we went through some things, doing some exer­cis­es to basi­cal­ly bond the team cre­ate human con­nec­tions, we of course, we talked about our plan and what we’re doing as a com­pa­ny and how they were a crit­i­cal part. But most of it was emo­tion­al bond­ing, get­ting them to go from being a foe to being a friend and mak­ing sure that peo­ple made deep con­nec­tions. And basi­cal­ly the whole focus of it was to get to know those peo­ple, and we engi­neered a whole bunch of activ­i­ties. So then they became excit­ed about oh, these peo­ple aren’t jerks. We want to be a part of this.

Brad Giles 15:01

Going back to that the CFO, no dis­re­spect to our good CFO friends could have gone out there and explained all of the mer­its of the trans­ac­tion, the CFO, or even the CEO could have gone out there and said, This is why we’re doing it. And you’ve got no choice in it. But this is why it eco­nom­i­cal­ly make sense. And these are all of the facts and all of the data. And it would be just again, like oil in into water, like it just won’t work. It just does­n’t mix exact­ly that with the emo­tions when you need to enact change.

Kevin Lawrence 15:40

Exact­ly. You know, the, the one that we were able to stop because of oth­er ones, but there’s AI in IT sys­tems. It’s a night­mare. Gen­er­al­ly, the stats I’ve heard is most ERP solu­tions, and CRMs would be sim­i­lar. There’s about a 50% fail­ure rate. And these things in large com­pa­nies are 10s of mil­lions of dol­lars. It’s a mas­sive fail­ure rate. You know, what per­cent of time the soft­ware does­n’t work? It’s next to zero. Yeah, it’s a fail­ure rate, because peo­ple are used to doing things one way. And then they’re asked the sys­tem requires them to do a dif­fer­ent way. And they resist the change. Yeah, it’s because they haven’t bought into the change. And they’re often not edu­cat­ed enough on the sys­tem. But I’ll give you a real­ly bad exam­ple is, so we had a com­pa­ny that did a Sales­force imple­men­ta­tion, they were I think they were about $10 mil­lion into it. across the whole plat­form, and Sales­force sales­peo­ple are bril­liant. And you can do this. And you can do that, that all the bells and whis­tles. And the IT guys, I think they were think­ing that they were going to get an the equiv­a­lent of an Acad­e­my Award for their per­for­mance of build­ing the sys­tem. And they were doing all the cool stuff that it guys and gals could do and had all the cool stuff. They you know, the ven­dors gave them an award for it, which is I’ve learned is a dan­ger­ous sign. But the root of it is they built this bril­liant sys­tem with­out the oper­a­tors. Yeah, well, the oper­a­tors are the users are the peo­ple that use it. And they thought they knew best. So you go and design this sys­tem for mil­lions of dol­lars with all this cool, sexy stuff that makes you feel loved by the ven­dors and up for awards for inno­va­tion. But the real­i­ty, the peo­ple who are going to use this sys­tem aren’t involved. And you basi­cal­ly build a com­pli­cat­ed, sexy, but stu­pid sys­tem. That’s inef­fec­tive. So when they rolled out even if it was per­fect, but when they rolled it out with­out any involve­ment, of course, peo­ple are going to resist because it’s your sys­tem, not mine. On top of it, they made a whole bunch of hor­ri­ble choic­es. And again, after $10 mil­lion after try­ing to roll it out. It was a flawed sys­tem. Although tech­ni­cal­ly cool, they put it in the bin and start­ed again, they threw it away. Yeah, $10 mil­lion, and months and months of peo­ple’s time, because they just did­n’t get peo­ple’s buy in, had anoth­er com­pa­ny. I got so many exam­ples of this stuff. But they were just about to roll out a new pay­roll sys­tem. I’m in a meet­ing in the board­room. And they said, and I guess, you know, the watch was that, yeah, yeah, we don’t we got that. Because there are a com­pa­ny with mobile tech­ni­cians that are in the field and the CEOs, super smart guy, but as his head of oper­a­tions was in charge of this, and I hap­pened to be with a bonus, okay, great. So have you bat­tle test­ed, so the basic was a sys­tem on the phone to man­age all of the text time. So it’s real­ly cool and slick and how it goes into the billing sys­tem for the cus­tomers. That’s all amaz­ing. But the so they were excit­ed about the inter­nal effi­cien­cies. So I said, Well, how many texts have you had bat­tle test­ing this? And then the head of oper­a­tions and none? Okay. How many? How much time have you spent edu­cat­ing the techs about the new sys­tem? Oh, they don’t even know what they don’t even know. It’s com­ing. And this is a nation­al com­pa­ny. And I asked about a half a dozen more ques­tions. And I’m like, okay, so I can pret­ty con­fi­dent­ly tell you what’s going to hap­pen. Yeah, you’re going to have an absolute night­mare. They are going to reject it like a virus because they haven’t been con­sult­ed. You’re ask­ing tech­ni­cians who are used to doing things on pen­cil and paper to do every­thing dig­i­tal­ly? Yes, I know. It’s very con­ve­nient for you head office. It from a cor­po­rate per­spec­tive. It’ll be bril­liant. It’s just not going to roll. Yeah, so I said I said and this is rolling out in 10 days, I said to the CEO said hey, you know, it’s your calls, but from my per­spec­tive, this is going to be a cat­a­stro­phe pre­dictably and I pulled out the eight steps a quar­ter and we talked about it because you have no buy in it’s hard enough to in the first place Any­ways, long sto­ry short, they hauled off three months and went through us quar­ters, eight steps and then it rolled out just fine. So it’s although it’s Not rock­et sci­ence, it’s just that they had been work­ing on it. They were so they’ve been work­ing on it for six months, they were so con­vinced that it was so good that they for­get that the oth­er peo­ple haven’t even heard of it and are at zero.

Brad Giles 20:12

And it’s an unmit­i­gat­ed dis­as­ter if you don’t fol­low this log­i­cal frame­work. So I want to bring us back to first of all, rel­a­tive pod­cast episode that we’ve done, which is #114, CEOs must become meet­ing mas­ters. Yep. So the CEO only has one tool. That’s episode 114. So let’s maybe step through these eight steps, no pun intend­ed there. In Kot­ter’s change mod­el. So first up, we’ve got cre­at­ing urgency. So the first step is cre­at­ing a sense of urgency about the need for change, going back to the exam­ple that you just pro­vid­ed, the end users did­n’t even know that it was com­ing. So there was def­i­nite­ly no sense of urgency. So we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got that the peo­ple under­stand there’s a prob­lem. We’ll go back to the gloves. Exam­ple. Those exec­u­tives walked into that room, they saw all the gloves with the dif­fer­ent prices, they under­stood the prob­lem, and that cre­at­ed the urgency.

Kevin Lawrence 21:19

Yes. So again, easy to do, but it’s usu­al­ly the step where peo­ple fail. Yeah, because the exec­u­tives are so far down the road, or the team leader, and they for­get to bring the team with them and warm them up again. The sec­ond is put togeth­er a team. Once you get we get the orga­ni­za­tion ready and feel­ing the need to make a change, pull togeth­er, a team of peo­ple are going to start to work on it. And often, like in that com­pa­ny with tech­ni­cians, I said, Who is your most senior and or influ­en­tial, influ­en­tial tech­ni­cian? Get him or her? Right? Who is your biggest naysay­er, get him or her. Because if you got your most influ­en­tial, and your biggest resis­tor, involve them in it upfront, and you will end up with a bet­ter plan because their ideas, even the resis­tors ideas can often be valuable.

Brad Giles 22:10

Yeah, peo­ple who build a plan I fought it.

Kevin Lawrence 22:13

Exact­ly. And then and then devel­op the vision and strat­e­gy. Okay, what’s the vision of what we’re going to do and the strat­e­gy to get there? Once peo­ple are on this path, that’s fair­ly nor­mal, but they com­mu­ni­cate that vision.

Brad Giles 22:26

So that’s just for the points kept sor­ry. So we’ve just gone through a few there, I just for the lis­ten­ers want to make sure. So num­ber one is cre­ate urgency. Num­ber two is put the team togeth­er get the per­son who’s most and least influ­en­tial, or the biggest crit­ic. Num­ber three, you said there was devel­oped a vision and strat­e­gy, like what will be the com­pelling thing that we’re work­ing towards? Num­ber four, com­mu­ni­cate, com­mu­ni­cate the change vision. I love this one, because there’s anoth­er arti­cle from HBR, I for­get the title, but what they basi­cal­ly say there is that lead­ers often under com­mu­ni­cate by a fac­tor of 10. And so I always say over com­mu­ni­cate, like you’ve got to over com­mu­ni­cate, so peo­ple real­ly under­stand. So com­mu­ni­cate, the change in vision is num­ber four here.

Kevin Lawrence 23:22

Yeah, and just share that and ral­ly the team. Often peo­ple will come up with a project name, you know, or a theme around it to kind of get peo­ple to grab onto that now, you got to make sure num­ber ones in place they’re bought in oth­er­wise, just hav­ing a theme isn’t that effec­tive. But if it gives peo­ple focus and gets peo­ple excit­ed about what we’re try­ing to achieve. Num­ber five is just remove obsta­cles, there will be all kinds of issues. And one of the big things with­in remov­ing obsta­cles, is to get every­one a job to do. Like try and get as many peo­ple as you can hav­ing jobs and it so goes wide through­out the orga­ni­za­tion, if it’s an orga­ni­za­tion wide ini­tia­tive, have have strong short term goals that you con­tin­ue to have them and are able to cel­e­brate them and be able to get peo­ple excit­ed about what hap­pens like you, you need to pre engi­neer the wins. As in, you need to say okay, because we’re in the mid­dle of it, you’re in the heat of the bat­tle and you for­get, and so pos­i­tive things in this world get a lot of cel­e­bra­tion and acco­lades. So you’ve got to pre engi­neer it and plan for all the lit­tle cel­e­bra­tions, all the lit­tle points of con­fi­dence and affir­ma­tion that we’re doing the right thing.

Brad Giles 24:42

That’s num­ber six set short term goals. We’ve got to make sure that there are these mile­stones along the way. So we know we’re pro­gress­ing and be like you said, we can kind of cel­e­brate those goals as they occur. Num­ber sev­en is keep the momen­tum. We’re going to make sure we’re work­ing toward that goal.

Kevin Lawrence 25:00

Yeah, and there’s gonna be, there’s gonna be issues and fric­tions that hap­pen in the orga­ni­za­tion. And you just got to be will­ing, and this is where you might use a lit­tle bit of a bull­doz­er to push through, you still have to be able to push through. And then final­ly, num­ber eight, make the change stick is to try and then build it into your cul­ture that you con­tin­ue to change, because cul­tures get stag­nant were noth­ing changes. So always try­ing to keep a lit­tle bit of change hap­pen­ing. So peo­ple are also used to change and becom­ing an orga­ni­za­tion that’s effec­tive with change. Again, not too much, not too lit­tle, just the right amount.

Brad Giles 25:35

I love that coach­es get stag­nant when noth­ing changes. That’s awe­some. Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 25:41

So the essence of this is we’ve all had the expe­ri­ence where we feel like we’re drag­ging peo­ple. And gen­er­al­ly, it’s our fault, not theirs. There’s noth­ing ini­tial­ly, there’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly any­thing wrong with them. And even your biggest crit­ics ini­tial­ly, they’ll pro­vide good feed­back to improve your think­ing. Now, once the deci­sion is made, and we’re push­ing ahead, those peo­ple need to get in line and sup­port. But it’s our job to make it easy for them to get in line. And if you fol­low these steps, you’ve got a dra­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter chance of doing well, it does­n’t mean that the change dis­ap­pears. It just means you under­stand what’s going on. And you know what you need to do to get there. And last sto­ry I’ll share with you over 10 years ago, my part­ner and I, I was think­ing about mov­ing prob­a­bly 14 years ago, I real­ly want­ed to move. And I final­ly moved but the 14 I start­ed, but I could­n’t get them con­vinced to move. Like there was no I was like I was the only younger in my career. I want­ed the big house and the big prop­er­ty and all those kinds of things. But they did­n’t want to leave the place that we’re in. And one day, and it took me a long time. I did­n’t under­stand this stuff. I would do it much faster next time. But one day, they made a com­ment about how the kitchen we had friends over the kitchen just had some core issues with the kitchen. And then it hit me. And then I was like, yeah, that’s hor­ri­ble. That’s right, we must change that we deserve bet­ter. But they had dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the kitchen, which opened up, there was now a rea­son to move. Where before every­thing was fine, there was no rea­son to move. And that’s what cre­at­ing urgency or get­ting buy in, you’ve got to find that lit­tle thing. That that real­ly ral­lies peo­ple and touch­es on a chord that either whether it’s fear or anx­i­ety or dis­sat­is­fac­tion or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, then you can start to make the change, which is cre­ate urgency.

Brad Giles 27:46

Yeah, exact­ly. All right. So let’s, let’s go back to the begin­ning, what do you do when your team resists change so peo­ple can often lead­ers make changes in a busi­ness or in an orga­ni­za­tion with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly the buy­ing of oth­ers. And that can lead to inef­fec­tive exe­cu­tion or resis­tance. So as I’ve said, sev­er­al times the team, we build the plan, don’t fight the plan. We’ve got anoth­er Pod­cast, episode 114, which is CEO has only one tool – meet­ings, that is rel­e­vant to this. So let’s go through those eight steps of change quick­ly. I’ll go through the first four Kev, and then I’ll ask you to close it out from there. So step num­ber one, in Kot­ter’s change mod­el, cre­ate urgency, the first step is to cre­ate a sense of urgency about the need for change, we’ve got to appeal to the emo­tions and not the facts. Num­ber two is to put a team togeth­er, make sure that team encap­su­lates the influ­en­tial peo­ple. And it also encap­su­lates or it cap­tures the crit­ics. So every­one has a stake in the out­come. Num­ber three, devel­op the vision and strat­e­gy. If we do this, where are we going to be? What’s going to be bet­ter? What what will be dif­fer­ent? How will we improve our sit­u­a­tion? Then num­ber four, com­mu­ni­cate the change vision broad­ly to the peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion. Kev? Do you want to walk us through the back end of the eight?

Kevin Lawrence 29:15

Yeah, then remove any obsta­cles that come up because they will set shirt to short term goals to achieve so that you can have lots of cel­e­bra­tions of accom­plish­ment. And when you do hit resis­tance, find a way to keep going push for­ward because there will always be a bit of that but just do it smart­ly. Going back to the the buy in upfront. And then make the change stick and try to make it part of your cul­ture. And as Brad kind of high­light­ed, you know, when not a lot of changes in the busi­ness, the busi­ness gets stag­nant and you want to keep the change and con­stant improve­ment. Peace alive. was awe­some. Great con­ver­sa­tion. It’s such a pas­sion­ate top­ic. I just you know, it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know when you don’t under­stand this is what’s going on. You think peo­ple are crazy, when in real­i­ty, you just haven’t done your job well, you just did­n’t know. So thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast with myself Kevin Lawrence in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da actu­al­ly today in peach­land British Colum­bia where I am when not in Van­cou­ver and Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia. If you haven’t yet hit sub­scribe but­ton and you’re wel­come to give us a great rat­ing if you’re thrilled with what we’re doing. For the video ver­sion, go to youtube​.com and just search the growth whis­pers. Brad has an awe­some newslet­ter that he puts a lot of work into. And you can get that at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And you can also find out more about what he does. And our firm as well has a newslet­ter goes out every week. Lots of great ideas, con­tent and things that we like to share. And that’s Lawrence and co​.com. Have an awe­some week and good luck being more suc­cess­ful get­ting peo­ple to fol­low you when it comes to change. Have a good one.