As a motivational tool, catching people doing things right is effective.  But it doesn’t work long term if all you is praise their results.

I led the winning team on a bid worth $85 M in Hong-Kong.  It was complex, with months of technical, commercial and legal negotiations. The team gave all it could, and then some.

Coming off the plane, I went to the office and attended the celebration party. Executives, heads of department and the entire team drinking champagne (yes, they allow this in France). Speeches.  How happy the executives are. Proud of the team who worked so hard.

It was nice.  The bonus was nice too.  But it did not change much. Business as usual the next day.

But not for me. I had been debriefed, the “Encouragement” way.

Pierre-Louis Bertina – my VP of Sales at Alstom Signaling Group (then GEC-Alsthom), went beyond congratulating me for doings things right.  He commented on “WHAT” I did right.  He took the time to observe my work.  He noticed what I was doing right, and re-enforced it by focusing on it. This is “Encouragement”.

He never said “you did well” and stopped there.

After an intense negotiation session, which he attended, he told me:

“You did great. We got what we wanted, because you always knew, almost before they did, what part of the spec affected the discussion. You’d turn to the right page faster than they – who wrote the spec.  That’s a great skill you should cultivate. I wonder what we’ll do after we win this and you move on to something else.”

Another time, he learned the fellow in charge of installation had moved his vacation (rare in France), to finalize his part of the bid.

“You know, why they do this don’t you?” (I didn’t’ – but said nothing) “You make them feel that what they do is important to winning the bid.  You should keep that up.”

Let’s face it. We all like our boss to tell us he’s proud of our good results. It’s nice. But it does not make a huge difference in our work.

Pierre-Louis went beyond congratulations.  He notice how I did my work.  He connected it to the results.

• It gave me confidence. A manager with his experience confirmed what I did was the cause of my results – I was emboldened to continue.
• It felt like he really cared about the team’s success, since he took the time to notice.
• It opened the door to discussion. I’d feel comfortable discussing my plans with him, because we focused on the how-to, the process, instead of only the results.

I spoke to Pierre-Louis before writing this to get his permission to quote him. I learned that three people in his latest team have now become Directors.  I am not surprised.

It’s called encouragement.  It uses words that notice.  It works equally well with successes and failures.  Notice the process – what works or does not work.  Encourage what works, coach what does not. It sets up improvement. It sets up growth.

All you need is to take the time, start noticing what the team does right, and tell them about it.

Blanchard and Johnson were right.  It really works.  But I disagree with them on one point:

It does take more than one minute.  But it’s a great investment of your time.

A new Lead Engineer will transfer the techniques that worked in managing her own work, into managing the team.  Most often, this does not work as planned.

If Lead Engineers managed their team exactly as they did their own work, it might actually work.  But they don’t.  They assign tasks, but keep the thinking behind them, in their own heads.

From the coaching file: Coach speaks with Sophia (S), a team leader:

As soon as you‘re told to integrate the database in the product (the task), your experience helps you picture the objective in your mind. You do not speak it, or write it down.  You may not even realize you’re doing this.

• (S):”That’s right – I know what I want to accomplish.

Next you define the steps (sub-tasks) to integrate the database. You visualize it: first I do this, than I do this. In your mind each sub-task has an objective – but you don’t spend time spelling it out.  You’ve done this for many years, and you were good at it.

One day, they said: “Now you’re a Team Leader”. Manage the work of these people.  On that day, what did you know about managing people?

• (S): “Not much”

True, but you did know how to manage engineering work. It’s just bigger tasks. So what’s your natural tendency?  You still picture the objective in your mind and define the steps.  Then you call a meeting, and assign the tasks to your team members.

• (S): “That’s right.”

But get this: when you start out as a Team Lead, you think they will do the tasks as you would do them.  Unconsciously you think you’re leading multiple Sophias to get this large task done. But of course, they are not all Sophias.  Even though you give out the task clearly, team members execute somewhat differently then you would.  They focus on different things.

So you say “why did you not do what I asked?”  But their answer is always:   “I did what you said!” Then it dawns on you:  they did not understand what you meant.

• (S) “That exactly what they say – every time:”   “I did what you said, why are you on my case?”

So what do you do, the next time?

• (S) “I try to define the task better. Also, I check on them more often.  If they are going in the wrong direction, I can let them know quickly, and they can fix it before the review.”

Isn’t it time consuming and tiring?

• (S) yeah, but what can you do?

Actually, you could give them what’s been missing.  You gave them the task, but not the picture in your mind of what you wanted to accomplish.  They understand the task – but they don’t have your vision of the objective.

To my point – Don’t leave out the objectives:

Engineers can’t read their Team Leader’s mind. When they receive a task, they do what you used to do: They define their own “picture in the mind” objective.  It will not be exactly like yours – unless you took the time to discuss your own vision of the objective.

A final point:

Handing out detailed tasks and checking often can work, sort of, if you have a small team and you don’t mind micro-managing.  But it won’t work when you get promoted to lead 30, 60 or 100+ people.  You will have to share your vision of the objectives and step back.  If you haven’t perfected a method to share objectives when you led 10 people, it may be a bit of a learning curve to do it with 100.  So why not start now? You’ll work less and achieve faster results.

I propose a definition of objectives here.  I also discuss how to share them here. I offer it as a starting point you can transform it into your own method.

People are capable of doing great things. Whether they do great things is up to you, the Leader.

As leader, you must believe that the team can achieve great results.  In fact, believe more than the team itself is willing to believe. You can’t fake it though.  It must be genuine because people can always tell.

From the coaching file (in a seminar I gave):
“Norm, this is all fine and good, but how do you use your methods when some engineers can’t even be trusted to get a can of soda from the corner store?”

What is the likelihood that these engineers will actually go the extra mile for this manager?

I am not saying that all you need is to believe that a person will do great things and it will happen.  There is actually work involved.  However, if you believe that a person will NOT do great things, then it will be almost impossible for them to do great things.

The Leader is the enabler. Enabler of success, or enabler of failure.

Here’s how it works.  We “unconsciously” act to get what we believe will happen.

Picture a Leader who believes that a certain team member can do even less then the Leader asks for.  Not much trust there is it?  Leaders who don’t trust their team members try to “fix” them.  They check on them.  They second guess them.  They tell them what to do and correct them often.  And they always show their disappointment – even when they try to hide it.

How does that make the team member feel?  Getting great results is hard work – for anybody.  If you were treated this way, would you want to work hard – for that Leader?  Lack of hard work leads to poor results.  The Leader gets what the leader believed.

Now, picture yourself as a Leader who believes in a team member’s ability to succeed.  You want it to be true.  So you look for clues of it happening.  As you check with the team member, you focus on what is done well – and you notice that.  You congratulate the team member.  You encourage.  You remove obstacles.  You are motivating the team member to get the results you believe will occur.

Form the coaching file:
The team was discussing a complicated task.  The meeting was turning sour.  The Team leader’s questions felt more like an inquisition than a discussion.

The Team leader asked me to run the meeting for a while. I redirected the discussion: people started contributing ideas, and even cracked jokes. An objective and a plan were agreed to.

After the meeting the Team leader and I discussed this turn-around.  I said: “I started with the belief that each person was capable of overachieving the task.  Then I asked questions that were aimed at proving this to be true.  I did not judge their answers – but encouraged what was good.”

He did not believe me.

“It’s not that simple”, he said, “it’s obvious you don’t know these people.  If you had, you would never have been able to get that much out of them!”

I’m not kidding.

* * * * * *

If you feel like commenting, please share examples of when somebody really believed in you – or you in somebody else. Let us know how it made you feel and what you achieved.

Culture is not something we define or prescribe. It emerges. It is a tacit agreement between all participants. I like to think of culture as an unconscious jigsaw puzzle, where each individual comfort zone is made to fit together. Team members fit in the team by adjusting their actions slightly. If we are in a team long enough, these adjustments become part of our comfort zone. And that’s the problem.

I was assigned to lead a large multi-million dollar bid. We were proposing a solution that had not won in the last few years, due to price. A bureaucratic system of interdepartmental paper trail ensured that departments preferred not to share ideas with the others. Corporate silos reinforced with Kevlar. Very little hope of reducing our costs.

Opting for speed and cooperation between departments, I ignored the system. Within days, I had managers pulling me aside to explain that I ought to use the paper trail system. Otherwise, they explained, I would have no way of protecting myself after we lost. I’d surely get fired. Worst, I would drag unsuspecting low-level engineers ignorant of office politics with me.

None of the managers consulted each other before they talked to me. They just did. None of them instructed their engineers not to give me information if I did not document the requests according to the bureaucratic system. They just did.

A few engineers on the team who had been against the system, and followed suit got the same treatment. It was us against the culture. And the culture was winning.

Culture reinforces actions that are aligned with it and resists actions that are not. It does not reason with you. It’s automatic, and comes from everybody, at the same time. The culture validates the comfort zone of all members. Individually, they each defend their comfort zone, and in doing so protect all others. Your changing would force some if not all of them to adjust to your change. Having pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone, you’re forcing them out too. Reaction is swift, and strong.

“Listen sonny, I don’t know how they did things at that place you came from, but that’s not the way we do things around here.”

In physics, inertia is a property of an object that resists change to its motion. The more massive the object, the more inertia it has. It’s the same with teams. Just replace mass with the size of the team. Culture is the inertia of the team.

To beat the inertia we need to apply enough force to enough mass. Within teams, we speak of reaching “critical mass”. Mass for our purpose is a combination of the influence people have, as well as the number of people. The greater number of people that change, the less there will be those who remain to push back. Of course, if everybody changes except for the management, it will be hard to reach critical mass. But we already know that management must support change, so I won’t focus on it.

It’s all about the comfort zone. We must plan Change in increments, designed to minimize individual resistance at each step. And we need critical mass. Enough team members must step through the change process at the same time.

There’s more to change than this, obviously. For example, how to choose the increments to make change happen fast. But without managing the comfort zone and achieving critical mass, change is but impossible.

We individually resist change because we act within our comfort zone. And we can’t change that.

Though we would like to think otherwise, we are predictable in how we work. We favor actions and methods we have already mastered. We are creature of habit, because we trust our habits to produce repeatable and acceptable results. In this comfort zone, we are relaxed, confident, focused. We know how. We have experience. We may not always succeed, or produce great results, but we rarely fail.

It’s not that we don’t like change. In fact we crave it. We want to improve, to get better. But to produce better results we must act differently. This means doing things outside of our comfort zone. Unconsciously or outright we ask ourselves: Will I succeed? Will I do it right? Will it work, for me? Isn’t it most likely I will fail at first?

People will resist change at a personal level if it forces them out of their comfort zone.  Neither management’s wishful thinking about motivation, buy-in and commitment nor threats will change that. And then, there is the reality of the workplace, which compounds the effect.

At work, we can’t jeopardize current results, even for future gains. At the end of the day, we still need to develop products on time, fill orders, and generate profits. An inspiring leader may motivate the team to step out of the comfort zone.  But the team must continue to produce.

We were introducing concurrent engineering methods, trying to involve manufacturing earlier in the design process.  “Management has to understand the impact on my project ” said the lead engineer.  “I am sure this will be good in the long run, but right now it’s adding hours and delaying milestones.  This extra work was not part of the plan.  It should be okay to overrun in this case.”

But it is not OK!  It is wishful thinking.  Reality doesn’t care.  The market doesn’t care.

What would the stock market do with the following press release.

ABC Inc. announced today its “Improved Work – Improved Results” program. Changes in work processes will triple sales and double profitability within a year. Management asks for shareholder and customer patience with the inevitable disruption to order processing and  product quality during the workforce retraining process.  ABC expects to regain any lost customers within six month after completion of the program…

On a personal level, people resist change outside of their comfort zone.  And the workplace increases that resistance by requiring results without interruption.  So where does that leave us?

You cannot cook a live frog by throwing it in a pot of boiling water. It will jump out, and only have sore feet. But put it in cold water, and heat it up gradually. It gets acclimated. It never jumps out, until it’s too late.

In changing how we work, we are the frog. We need to have our comfort zone expanded slowly. We need time and process  to assimilate  new methods.

It’s worth repeating: To be successful a change program must find a process to expand the comfort zone incrementally in order to minimize  the resistance everyone faces to acting outside their comfort zone.

That lead engineer was caught between a rock and a hard place. The fault was with the change method being used.  We were asking for too big a change, too fast.  But, there are ways to implement change so it “sticks”.  An effective “Change Action Plan”  is realistic about resistance and plans for it from the start.  In fact, done right, change can be almost painless.   It involves breaking down the new practice into a succession of achievable small modifications each designed to shift the comfort zone with minimum resistance.  More on that process in a future post.

I’m at my wits end.  But then I see it.  I am up against “the” roadblock to change:

“That’s not how we do things around here!”

During a break, I asked the functional manager:  Why are you here?  “Management think we don’t know how to do our work”, he said.  “The CEO blames us for overrunning. But in fact, if it was not for us, they’d be doing worse.  We’ve been doing this work for 30 years, I think we know how by now”.

We identify with their work.  How we do becomes who we are.  When we have been doing things a certain way for a while, it is the right way.  And doing things the right way makes us right.

Then there is pride.  In a group of 30 engineers, some of them have contributed to how “we do things around here”.  At the time, it solved real problems and produce real results, for which they are rightfully proud.

But improvement means doing things differently.  “The way things are done around here” will change.  But for those who feel right, or proud, it is felt as a personal attack.  Change says: “do it this way instead”.  But they hear:  “your method is no good.  You’re not right anymore.”  And they react against the change, before it even starts.

It’s the self-talk. This running commentary in our head makes comments and passes judgment on what’s happening to us.   Where a “that’s how we do things around here” mentality exists, the typical self-talk is what I faced in that training.  “We don’t need this.” “We’re not being recognized for what we’ve done.”  A less common, but equally disruptive self-talk is “I can’t do this.”  “I am not good enough.”  They’re asking too much.”

We can’t argue with the self-talk.  But we must realize it exists.  Then we can steer it towards something constructive.  Otherwise, change doesn’t even have a chance to start.

After I spoke with that manager, I asked everybody why they thought they were there.  It turns out others felt like him. So I asked the group to look around.  Who had been selected to participate?

Each department had sent its best people.  Why would they do so? Could it be that they wanted those who would best lead the change?  I proposed a new self-talk:  What can you get out of this?  What can you make your own?  Can you become a champion for some of this?  You’re here because you’re the best at how we do things around here now.  Maybe you can also lead how we’re going to do things around here.

Then I went back to the training. We practiced the new methods.  They were tough on me. They drilled me on how, what why, and can I be sure it will work?  They weren’t about to do this blindly.  After all, they were the best.  But they were now ready to consider change.

“The way we do things around here”, for most of us, is “the right way”.   So change can easily be interpreted as making us wrong.  Self-talk is the enemy here.  We will rationalize why we don’t need to, or should not, change.  I had people feel insulted that we would even consider they needed to change.  Or at the other end of the spectrum, they felt overwhelmed by the change, thinking they would surely fail.  Almost every executive has stories of their team resisting change for apparently incomprehensible reasons.

Our comfort zone comprises those actions we can reliably perform to get acceptable results – and avoid failure.  Stepping outside the comfort zone, may hold the promise of better results.  But it increases the risk of failure.  So we won’t stretch our comfort zone too far, too fast. This is especially true in the work place.  Change may be needed, but current results must be maintained while we change.

Culture is like a puzzle. Team members adjust how they work to fit the pattern.  After that, any one member trying to change will face resistance. To avoid all of us having to step out of our comfort zone, we want no one to step out of theirs. The group literally becomes the inertia, making it that much harder to effect change.   Even if a pilot team of “early adopters” were to adopt the new practices, the rest of the group would pressure them back towards the old ways.

We must address the self-talk surrounding “how we do things around here”, or the change process won’t even start.  We must respect people’s comfort zone, or they will pick only those actions closely related to what they are already doing, and ignore the rest.  And, we must commit to change in a big way.  We need critical mass to beat cultural inertia.  A few “stars” won’t carry the team.

Too often, senior management focuses only on what needs to change – the new “best practices”.  But that’s only half the battle.  We must apply similar level of planning and professionalism to deal with the resistance to change pyramid.  Otherwise the team won’t adopt the new best practices.  People resist change.  Even when they know they need to change, even when they believe it will be good for them, they still resist change.