(And styles / approaches for communicating,influencing, motivating …)
In my work related to managing organizational change (“MOC”), I have closely observed many of those leaders who I believe have been consistently successful – in building great teams and in driving and sustaining successful change within their organizations.
And I found common patterns in their approach.Almost all of them were great communicators – and by that I do not mean the highly articulate, having deep command over the language, excellent “public speaker” kind of person (though having such attributes clearly helped), but the one who seemed to connect well to the audience and get her / his message across loud and clear.Almost all of them were as comfortable in one-on-one interactions as they were in large groups.In fact, they seemed to believe that the success of any change management initiative was directly proportional to their proximity to the subject (meaning both the topic of change as well as the person / team being subjected to the change!) – and thus paid particular attention to one-on-one and small group interactions.From an MOC perspective, this is almost a no-brainer since all organizations are made up of individuals – and to bring successful change in an organization, one needs to change each individual that belongs to it (“organizations don’t change, people do”, though a cliché is still the reality)!
Digging deeper, another pattern that I observed was their ability and willingness to use a mix of levers in their approaches to motivate and influence their team members towards adopting the change in question.These leaders would use, what I call the the 5 Es – Explain, Excite, Enlist, Enable or Enjoin – in an appropriate mix in their approaches.The mix was determined by the leader based on her / his understanding of the nature, preferences and biases of the audience; rarely was a single lever used in isolation.
Part of the leader’s approach or style would focus on the “rational” – messages in this part were weighed in favour of logical explanations – the discussions and conversations revolved around the why of the change, the "logically" derived implications and / or potential benefits for each of the team members, etc.That would then lead to the what and the how about the change, and the role of each team member. This helped the team understand the change better and put their rational energies to work for the change.
But even the most rational of individuals is not fully rational, all the time.Almost all individuals have emotions, sentiments, feelings...and much of this may or may not be based on rational foundations.Successful leaders included in their approaches, elements that excited the audience, stoking their emotions and sentiments – joy, fear, aversion, anger, etc.Done well, this harnessed the emotional energy of the team in accelerating the change.The late Sumantra Ghoshal (Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School) observed that whenever companies have achieved radical and sustained change, they have often adopted one of two approaches for stimulating the behaviours and actions of their people – “killing the dragon” approach to generate emotions of fear / threat or “winning the princess” approach to harness the joy and excitement of pursuing a dream.
But rationality and emotions do not completely define us.We also have an innate desire to be part of a larger story, a larger purpose; we espouse values and follow some or the other faith (not necessary of the religious kind) – these elements too contribute to what makes each of us. And in some of these pursuits, we are quite often content to be “followers”; I have found that successful leaders, particularly those who had earned the deep trust of their teams, leveraged this aspect (“…trust me, let’s do this and we’ll come out on top…”); they exhorted the teams to identify with the change journey and enlist in it based largely on the team’s faith in their leader.
Successful leaders also recognized that their efforts would be more effective if their teams were enabled appropriately – this enablement was in the form of training, sharing case studies, visits to or interactions with others who had been successful in similar initiatives, or provision or implementation of specific tools / techniques / methodologies etc.In most cases these approaches to enable the team not only increased the level of confidence and risk-taking ability of the team members, but given that such efforts translated to investments or expenses, conveyed a powerful message to the team that the leader meant business and put money where the mouth was!
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “enjoin” as “to direct or impose by authoritative order”.I found that successful leaders were never shy of using their authority to good effect in driving change – if their situation so demanded.These leaders were able to leverage their formal leadership authority, bestowed upon them by virtue of their organizational position, and enjoin their team members to act and behave in the desired manner.
Used in the appropriate proportion and measure as dictated by the context, I believe the 5 Es significantly enhance the probability of achieving successful change.
What has been your experience?Do you an arrow that can be added to the above quiver, another E maybe?
