As a leader you face a dilemma: When adaptive challenges appear, you have to confront them with purpose, resolve, and speed. But you also have to be collaborative. You can't rush into change or you might find yourself alone. At the same time, there may not be time for consensus. And it may never come anyway. Leaders tend to respond in one of two ways to this dilemma. In the research I conducted for my book, Epic Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age, I discovered that when leaders are confronted with a change imperative, they often try to smuggle or muscle change within their organizations. Let me explain these two tendencies and then offer a better approach.
Smuggling Change
Leaders who smuggle try to hide what they're doing from the full view of the organization. They try to conceal change, manage it as a covert action, do it in a corner. The motivation is simple pain avoidance. Unfortunately, the approach usually fails in the long term.
Smugglers assume that change will cause alarm and resistance. Rather than confront these obstacles, why not avoid them? The first part of the logic is sound. Change often does create angst and opposition. But the logic breaks down after that. Successful organizational change isn't based on a calm beginning; it's based on a successful outcome, which requires an educated and aligned organization. So if you launch your efforts peacefully through a smuggled effort, you have simply delayed and probably increased the angst and opposition that you tried to avoid. Sooner or later, the organization has to take the reigns. You must ultimately hand it over to others for implementation.
Smuggled change efforts are often the ones you don't hear about until the organization feels the rub later on. It doesn't take long for that to happen. For example, at a professional services organization, the accounting department, with full executive support, installed a new system to track consulting travel and expenses. Rather than communicate the change and solicit input from the consultants, the department tried to smuggle the effort, thinking they could make it painless, seamless, and transparent. True to the pattern of a smuggled change, frustration and resistance surfaced in all quarters of the organization:
" "Why wasn't I consulted?
" "This new software system doesn't do what the old one could do.
" "The old process wasn't broken.
" "You should have designed it differently.
In the end, the backlash was overwhelming. After several fitful months of trying to make the new system work, the company threw in the towel.
Muscling Change
A second pattern is for leaders to muscle change. Muscling is the process of using formal authority, raw power, and sheer force of will to make change happen. Muscling rests on a similar logic. When you attempt to muscle change through an organization, you are apt to make one of the following assumptions:
" I know what's best for the organization.
" There's no time to discuss it.
" You will only resist me anyway.
" You will only be convinced after the fact.
" Organizations respond best to pressure.
There are elements of truth in all of these assumptions, and leaders who press people into service to muscle change have demonstrated impressive results in the past. But this is less true today because the loyalty-for-job security compact is not something that organizations can offer any longer. As a result, there is far less tolerance of leaders who want to lead by mandate or rule by fiat. As a general rule, employees confronted with a muscling leader tend to engage in passive-aggressive behavior, or they simply leave. With the increasing competitiveness of the business environment, and the average CEO tenure in steady decline, employees understand that they can wage wars of attrition with muscling leaders and have a good chance of winning. Like smuggling, the muscling approach to change often yields results in the short term. But in the long-term, you suffer the consequences of stout resistance and widespread employee disengagement.
Embracing Change
Instead of smuggling or muscling change, the most successful change leaders I studied squarely embrace change up front. Embracing change is based on the concept of organizational energy, and the principle that it's the leader's role to replenish energy in the organization throughout the change process. A leader who embraces change acknowledges the two requirements that it always makes: First, change imposes a work requirement on the organization. Second, change imposes a stress absorption requirement as well. Regardless of the nature, scope, or duration of a change, the leader who leads it is by definition asking the organization to perform additional work and absorb additional stress. You're far better off to measure and prepare for these requirements up front rather than pretend they don't exist or believe that a simple decree will take care of them.
Understanding what energy is and how it works inside an organization is vital to leading successful change at any level. The most fundamental definition of energy is the capacity to perform work and cause change. Unless you can single-handedly create change, you can't smuggle it into your organization because it represents work. That work requires both people and their discretionary efforts. Without energy, nothing happens. If you've ever been part of a major change initiative, you learned first hand and by observation that it requires large amounts of energy to fuel the efforts of people. If the discretionary efforts of people drive change, then we can define energy as any source of motivation that will bring that discretionary effort forward, such as:
" Urgency to change
" Leadership credibility
" A coalition of support
" A vision of change
" Actual results
" The benefits of results
As former Harvard professor, John Kotter, explains, "Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms, but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, a feeling of control over one's life and the ability to live up to one's ideals. So the capacity of an organization to perform change work is based directly on the motivation to give discretionary effort.
To take it a step further, the central mechanism of change is an exchange between the leader and the led. Because the change process requires energy to sustain it, it becomes the leader's job to replenish energy throughout the process. In the successful cases of change that I analyzed, without exception, leaders were able to maintain a continuous exchange of energy for effort. If the leader has no energy to offer, there will be no exchange. People don't give effort for free.
Leaders may have reserves of good will and credibility that can sustain willing effort for a long time, but when the reserves are depleted, the change process will likely dip into a failure pattern. Regardless of how beautifully equipped your change initiative may be in terms of time, resources, and expertise, it will fail without energy. Nothing can compensate for its absence. A recent McKinsey study concludes: "Whatever a company's potential, transformation is doomed to fail unless change leaders can release and orchestrate the energy within the organization. Remember, only free-willed individuals have the ability to perform work and accomplish change. Success depends on the willingness of people to apply effort. So in order to truly lead change, you must be able to motivate people to dip continuously into their collective store of skills, knowledge, and expertise and give freely.
Energy Management is Your Job
You're responsible for energy management. It's your job to meter the flow inside your organization and replenish it through an ongoing exchange of energy for the discretionary efforts of people. Change will flourish on the basis of the transactions of energy for effort.
At the same time, you need people to support change early. You can't always wait for them to cross a threshold of conviction. Sometimes people contribute generous amounts of discretionary effort well before this point based on a prior exchange. For example, people often support change initially simply out of loyalty to a person they trust. Anything that creates motivation to support change falls into the category of an energy source.
Consider this simple example. At a large consumer products organization, the CEO announced a major cost cutting initiative to trim 20 percent out of the operating and capital budgets. A month after the announcement, the director of information technology noticed that requests for new computer hardware had spiked as an immediate response to the belt-tightening measure. Employees flooded her with requests, hoping they could squeeze in last-minute orders before everybody got serious with cost cutting. During the next executive meeting the IT director said nothing about the clamor for hardware. Instead, she brought her laptop computer to the meeting, explained that it was not the latest and fastest machine, and then she mentioned that she had cancelled her order for a new one. During the next month, not a single request came to her desk for computer hardware of any kind. Her simple announcement in the meeting supplied significant energy to employees, which they readily converted to improved cost performance.
Finally, the other side of energy management is regulating consumption. Don't let consumption outstrip what's available. Some leaders take on too much change at once because they haven't developed an intuitive sense about pacing and spacing. When there's too much change going on, people run ragged, resources get strained, and time runs out. Like individuals, organizations can buckle under the weight of too much change. You simply can't take an organization to the level of maximum exertion and keep it there. Change is a vigorous activity that must include a renewal cycle. Organizations that do it well resemble a tailback that punctuates periods of rest with moments of maximum exertion. The underlying principle is that change represents a process. Every process requires energy for its operation. Change is certainly no exception.
