00:00:00.20 Junior: If I have to get alcohol into a speakeasy during prohibition, I have two options I can muscle it in, through coercion and force, or I can smuggle it in through, manipulation and deception. Welcome back everyone to the leader factor. I'm jr. Back with my co-host, Doctor Tim Clark. And today we're going to be talking about the failure patterns of change management.

0:00:22.07 Timothy Clark: Oh, I love I love this topic.

0:00:24.05 Junior: Me too. And the toolkit that leaders use to manage change. We're going to be talking about mafia bosses and dictators. We're going to be talking about con artists and politicians. We're going to be talking about sketchy MLMs.

0:00:38.03 Timothy Clark: We have something to learn from all these people.

0:00:39.22 Junior: We certainly do. And we don't often look at them when we're talking about leadership aspiration. That's true. We probably should. They have some things to tell us. They have a tool kit and many of them are effective in deploying that tool kit. Some achieve great short-term results, some great long-term results, some with ethics and some without ethics.

0:01:03.01 Timothy Clark: Yeah. So, we do need to pay attention.

0:01:04.18 Junior: We need to pay attention. There's something to be learned for all of us as we look more broadly at influence, not just fortune 1000 leadership.

0:01:13.27 Timothy Clark: I think, junior, any time you find an organization that's adaptable, over time, you need to pay attention. And some of those organizations that you just mentioned have shown that adaptability. So, they have they do have something to teach us to do.

00:01:27.25 Junior: Are there any non-obvious places that you look for leadership lessons?

0:01:32.28 Timothy Clark: What do you know what? I had a thought. I was thinking about that because I saw your question last year. My wife, my wife and I, were in Europe, and went on a bike trip in Amsterdam, and we got our bikes and were in a little group, probably like 15 of us. And we had this woman that led the group, and she took us north of this city into these little towns.

0:01:56.28 Timothy Clark: And I watched her leadership all day. We had a crash. We had unforeseen events. We had all things; all kinds of things happen. And she was an incredible leader. And I've just been reflecting on her ability to lead in a dynamic environment and her change management skills that she exhibited. So, there's one for.

0:02:19.26 Junior: You, but she doesn't lead a big.

0:02:21.02 Timothy Clark: Organization. No, it doesn't matter. She was demonstrating the skills, the ability to respond real time, the ability to connect with people, the ability to use, to collaborate. It was pretty amazing. Oh.

0:02:36.02 Junior: That's cool. Very cool. I will add comic books to the list.

0:02:40.12 Timothy Clark: Comic books?

0:02:41.05 Junior: You can learn about leadership from comics. Maybe that's another episode I.

0:02:45.17 Timothy Clark: Can't wait to hear.

0:02:46.15 - 00:03:09:24 Junior: We should bring some comic books in, and we should do a leadership deep dive. Another time. So, the premise of today's conversation is that organizations have to change. We're in a highly dynamic environment, and organizations have always had to change, but they need to change with greater pace today because the dynamic environment is different than it was 100 years ago.

0:03:09.26 Junior: So, you managed through big change over the course of your career. I've seen it at scale with our clients. I've seen local changes in our own organization. And so, it's been interesting to see the toolkit that you wrote about an epic change so many years ago applied to the clients that we have applied to our own organization, and we're going to take a few of those concepts today and some stuff that's, not new.

0:03:35.27 Junior: So, Tim.

0:03:40.25 Timothy Clark: We're okay. We're good.

0:03:42.21 Junior: Okay. More than half of the fortune 500 today are not going to be there in the next ten years. Did you know that?

0:03:54.00 Timothy Clark: That's amazing to think about.

0:03:55.01 Junior: It keeps shortening. I feel like every time I look at the shelf life of a fortune 500 slot, it goes down and down and down. It used to be that if you got in, you're probably going to stay in for a lifetime, right? And now that's no longer the case. If we look at the spectrum of influence, this slide, this is where a lot of this content comes from.

0:04:19.05 Junior: We've talked about this, before. The two axes are intent and influence intent. Over here on the y axis. Influence over here. And don't look at it as just a grid with axes, because mathematically, you'll get hung up, but intent high up here and influence lives right here in the middle, in between covert and overt influence. Over here on the covert side, we have manipulation, which uses deception over on the other side.

0:04:53.28 Junior: Look, I'm already making too many notes. I know production crew coercion. We have force unhealthy influence. So, they're unhealthy on both sides. On the unhealthy side, we have Charles Ponzi. On the right-hand side, we have Al Capone. Yeah. And hopefully we can land somewhere in the middle. But looking at the toolkit of those two is an interesting thing to do.

0:05:18.15 Junior: So, we're going to look specifically at the failure patterns. Anything you want to call out about the spectrum of influence before we dig into it.

0:05:29.13 Timothy Clark: The failure patterns run on both sides. I think it goes to the heart of what change management or change leadership is as an applied discipline. One of the things that we like to say, JR, is that the ability to lead change is a gateway competency in the 21st century. If you can't lead change, you can't lead. So, think about that.

0:05:48.16 Timothy Clark: If you can't lead change, you can't lead. And it makes sense. If you can't lead, change that. What are you doing managing the status quo. But that's not leadership. That's management. Right now, you're a caretaker. And so, by definition leading change means or leadership. Leadership means leading change. And that means that you're using influence, not coercion or manipulation, because you're not going to be able to sustain the effort as we're going to see as we get through as we talk about several examples.

0:06:25.07 Junior: So, if we zoom out and we ask ourselves, why is change so hard? I have a couple ideas. The first is that people don't resist change just because it's new. They resist because it threatens their identity. I've been thinking about this point a little bit. I don't think it is so much because that something's new. People do new things all the time that would be advantageous to them.

0:06:49.13 Junior: They see something. Maybe this will make me happy. Maybe this will bring some satisfaction. I'll do a new thing. That's no problem at all. But they resist when it changes their identity. If it's not their choice and this gets into the muscling in the smuggling. You and I were talking off air about the fact that that might be the reason that people buck against change is it's imposed in a meaningful change initiative.

0:07:17.07 Junior: You're not just asking people to do something different, you're asking them to be someone different. And so really, we are talking about identity when we're talking about a lot of these changes. And that is a difficult thing for people.

0:07:29.12 Timothy Clark: It really is another way to look at it, junior, is to think about change on a spectrum. At one end it changes. Let's say it’s small, it's minor, and so and so at that end we're talking about an adjustment, a modification, a tweak. So, everybody in the, in the listening audience I want you to think about that.

0:07:52.20 Timothy Clark: So, so it's very small change at one end. At the other end of the spectrum, it's major. It’s discontinuous. It's very significant change. Right at the, at the, at the, at the. Let me start that again. At the, at the end of the spectrum where change is minor, it is also intuitive. If you go to a person or go to a group, you go to a team, you go to an organization and you say, we want to make a modification.

0:08:35.13 Timothy Clark: We want to make an adjustment. We want to tweak this or tweak that. Everybody will look around and they'll shake their heads, and they'll say, okay, fine, we can do that. It's within the realm in the range of expectation and understanding. And so, it's intuitive and it's not a problem. But as soon as you move from minor change to even mid-range change, medium change and anything beyond that, it is no longer intuitive and it's no longer within the range of expectation.

0:09:11.15 Timothy Clark: And that's why we have organizational change management as a as a discipline. Because people don't know how to do it. It disrupts them in terms of their skill, their knowledge, their experience, and it disrupts them emotionally and psychologically. So, anything beyond a minor change is outside again of the realm of normal expectation and understanding and skill. That's why we're here.

0:09:41.03 Timothy Clark: That's why we're talking about this.

0:09:42.17 Junior: So, let's assume that we have a change to be made, and we've moved past minor. It's now moderate to major change. Yes. And I'm a management villain. I have two options. The first in my toolkit is to smuggle.

0:09:57.17 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:09:57.29 Junior: So, smuggle the change in this slide, hide it and hope for the best. When I first pulled up this slide, I thought it. I needed a way for it to render. No. Turns out design, design, smuggle it, change, hide it, and hope for the best. This is an attempt to introduce a change initiative without being transparent, right? Without being visible.

0:10:22.08 Junior: Forthcoming. We are intending to deceive. We throw it out there and we hope for the best. Jillian and I were talking. So, what's an example of this, Mike? Well, you just change the vacation policy in the employee handbook and don't tell anybody.

0:10:36.27 Timothy Clark: Right? There you go. Yeah.

0:10:39.24 Junior: The options will become increasingly apparent as your management tenure increases. Right. You'll see opportunities to do this everywhere, especially now that we've called it out and we've given it a name. Right. This is called smuggling.

0:10:53.13 Timothy Clark: Smuggle change. Yeah, yeah.

0:10:55.10 Junior: Tell me more about it. Smuggling change.

0:10:57.09 Timothy Clark: It's a natural tendency. Why? If you're if you're a leader and you have a responsibility to, to implement some kind of a change, why is there a natural impulse or a natural tendency to try to downplay a change or do it in a corner, kind of like a covert action? Why? Why are you trying to do that? Because you're trying to reduce or remove or eliminate potential resistance in opposition.

0:11:29.10 Junior: You assume that the change would cause alarm.

0:11:32.11 Timothy Clark: That's right. Lots, lots of resistance. And so, you go in and you you really misrepresent what it is. Now. You're well intentioned, right? Right. Militias. Yes. Yeah, I would say most of the time. Right. You're not malicious, but you are you're you're taking some liberties in missing misinterpret me and, mis framing what it is.

0:12:02.26 Junior: But the mal intention or the ill-intentioned leader would say that they are, well, intention.

0:12:08.22 Timothy Clark: I know how you, I guess how you hide it.

0:12:11.03 Junior: I guess they would say I'm just taking some liberties.

0:12:13.15 Timothy Clark: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm going to give you an example. Several years ago, I worked with a big media company, a news, a news organization, and they had television news. They had a newspaper, they had, a website. They had every news outlet that you could have. And, and there were changes in the industry and they needed to reduce costs.

0:12:43.22 Timothy Clark: They could see what was happening in the internet age with, digital media. And so, so and so they began the process of reducing cutting costs. And one of the things that they did is they went to all of their journalists. Now think about, think about the different journalists that they had. So they had they had, journalists that worked in print, print journalism.

0:13:08.24 Timothy Clark: Right, right. Photographers. They had reporters. They they subdivided their reporters that some did, daily news, some did longform journalism. And they wrote these big, long articles on, on big issues. Then over then they had radio. I forgot to even mention radio. They had radio news, big radio presents. Yeah, big, big radio presents. Then they had television news, they had anchors, they had co-anchors.

0:13:40.28 Timothy Clark: So, they have all these journalists and they and they say, well, our industry's changing. It's consolidating. Print, print journalism is going away to a large extent. We've got to reduce costs. The entire cost structure of our organization needs to change. And so, we're just gonna make a little tweak here, and journalists are going to become multi-platform journalists.

0:14:10.09 Timothy Clark: So, you are going to cross train so that you can do it all. Now, they they really downplayed this going in. They said, hey, it's not a problem. You're all professional journalists and we're you're going to pick up some skill, you're going to pick up some skills in some of these other areas. But think about this. These journalists have been working their entire professional lives in one area.

0:14:34.14 Timothy Clark: You're a photographer. You are a, a radio news person. You're a TV news person. You are a reporter. You are a long form journalist and writer. Well, those are deep skills that they've been doing. But the organization came to them and said, it's no problem. We're going to cross-train you. They downplayed it and it it just created an uproar.

0:15:06.13 Timothy Clark: Right? Right. Because they said, well, so what does what does that mean? That means the next time we send you out on a story, like, like if there's a local story, we're going to send two of you. One of you is so you're going to learn how to be on both sides of the camera, right? Right. So, you're going to be the camera person, and you're also going to be the person that's reporting on the other side of the camera.

0:15:30.08 Timothy Clark: And you're going to write the story, you're going to publish the story, you're going to do everything. So, no more than two people go out for any story at any time on any issue. Theoretically, it makes sense. Oh yeah. We're going to cross-train you in each of these platforms of journalism, and you're going to be fine. Theoretically it makes sense, but in reality, it was incredibly disruptive, and they really tried to smuggle it until they realized the just the reality of what they were asking and how hard it was going to be.

0:16:11.25 Timothy Clark: And when the journalists on the other side of that announcement, they felt betrayed. They felt disrespected. They felt like, you don't appreciate what I've been doing for ten or 20 or 30 years. You don't appreciate the depth of my skills because you think that, oh, in a month I can cross train, and I can be this multi-platform journalist.

0:16:39.01 Timothy Clark: That's not even possible. So, you really haven't even thought through it. So, there's an example for you, junior, it was very difficult for this organization to, to recover from this. Yeah. And they had to retreat from a lot of it. They did a little bit of cross training, but it wasn't even close to the initial idea that they had.

0:17:02.26 Junior: If you're on the receiving end of that idea and you feel like something's being held back, that the organization's not being completely forthright, then you're going to assume ill intent. How many times has a leader held back something good? Rarely. How many times have they held back something damaging, something risky, something toxic all the time. And so, you have to be tuned into that as a leader.

0:17:27.28 Junior: If you are not in the business of full disclosure. Not that you have to be all the time for all reasons. There's a healthy dose of disclosure in any situation. But if you are seen trying to hide something, people will assume that you're trying to hide something bad. If there's they see 10% of the picture in this communication that goes out, they're going to assume that 90% is lurking behind closed doors.

0:17:53.10 Junior: It's going to come and get them as soon as the thing actually goes live, which is probably what happened, I'm assuming. Right. Well, how did that play out?

0:18:00.25 Timothy Clark: Well, well, they tried to implement it, but they ran into a brick wall that you can't cross train that quickly. And they completely, misinterpreted what it would take. And, and, and so they had to retreat. They did a little bit of cross training, but that was really it. Yeah. That was as far as they could go.

0:18:24.26 Timothy Clark: Yeah. So, they had to they had to walk that back. And it was pretty humiliating for everybody. Yeah.

0:18:31.09 Junior: So, one of the big takeaways from this point is if you use this tool as a leader, if you try to smuggle change, smuggling invites suspicion. Suspicion is not what you want to create inside your team or organization. So now that we've introduced this tool, I would encourage everyone to label it when they see it in others or themselves.

0:18:52.00 Junior: You don't have to call it out to everybody airlines, but you can say to yourself like, oh, that's some smuggling going on. Or when you feel inclined to do that, you can call it out to yourself and say, oh, you know what? That that feels like it would be a smuggle. Let's not do that because it's going to invite suspicion.

0:19:08.09 Junior: It's going to erode the trust of my my team, my organization. I'm going to lose credibility. And it's not going to be a good day.

0:19:13.21 Timothy Clark: And think hard about why you are thinking about smuggling. What is your incentive? What is your motivation? What are you trying to avoid? What part of the reality of of the initiative or the change initiative? Are you worried about?

0:19:34.17 Junior: If it's well-intentioned, then I would say that it's fear. Right? And maybe it's also fear if it's not well intentioned. But if you have the best interest of your people at heart and you feel an inclination to smuggle, you’re probably scared of the confrontation, you're probably scared of the conversation. And when you feel that that's immediately when you have to go have the conversation, you turn around.

0:20:01.07 Junior: You don't run away from the thing. You run toward it. You attack it head on, and you have a reasonable discussion with your people. And we're going to talk about how to do that later in the episode. We have some practical tips.

0:20:11.24 Timothy Clark: One last thing was smuggling. Smuggling. If you go straight to smuggling, almost by definition, it means that you did not take the opportunity to solicit feedback, advice and input from your people who will be affected by this. You. You came to a conclusion most of the time unilaterally or with, a little bit of due diligence, but not a full-blown analysis of what you're trying to do.

0:20:41.07 Timothy Clark: So, you skip that. Yeah. And you and you proceed to try to implement the change. Right? Right. You did not go to the people and get the advice and counsel that you needed from them. So, there's a so the smuggling attempts you to avoid soliciting feedback. Yeah.

0:21:02.24 Junior: And maybe I'm a little bit more cynical. I won't give as much grace on this topic. But if you're smuggling, you know it. You know it. If you're in a position to smuggle, you're smart enough to get to that position, which means you're smart enough to know that you're smuggling. So, I think nine times out of ten, it's not benign.

0:21:23.13 Junior: I think that people know exactly what they're doing, and it's intended deception. It may not be.

0:21:31.08 Junior: Super dangerous. It may not be violent, but I don't think that it's well intentioned. Okay. Let's go to the second tool. So, as we talked about at the very beginning, if you got to get something into the speakeasy you can do it through manipulation. And that's the smuggling we talked about. Or you can use this the, the fist brute force coercion.

0:21:52.23 Junior: And we call this muscling change. And it's a failure pattern of many leaders. It's also a very effective tool of mafia bosses depending on the timeline you're working.

0:22:02.10 Timothy Clark: Yeah, it's really true.

0:22:03.19 Junior: So, tell me about muscling. Well, have you seen this? How did you come to this conclusion that this was the.

0:22:08.29 Timothy Clark: Other, another failed other tool? Right. So. So if you go back to that, that spectrum of influence, junior deception is directly connected to smuggling. Coercion is directly connected to muscling. Muscling means that we're going to press people into service. We're going to force it through. And this is now there are times when you have to do this. Let me let me mention a couple.

0:22:38.12 Timothy Clark: When you have an issue related to safety or, or security or compliance and you don't have a say, right. There are certain things that we have to do and there's no argument. And so, we have to go do that. But we can be transparent about that, and we can explain why. And everybody understands that there are issues that fall into those categories’ safety, security, compliance.

0:23:08.21 Timothy Clark: But outside of that, if you're muscling it's a massive liability to the organization. I'll give you an example from my own experience years ago, I ran a consulting firm based in San Francisco, and we then merged with another consulting firm based in Boston. You know, it was my job to lead the merger integration process and put the new organization together and get everything going.

0:23:45.28 Timothy Clark: Well, well, just so happened that both organizations were losing money. They were hemorrhaging pretty badly. And so and so the first order of business was, among other things, is we needed we needed to reduce costs. And we needed to act with urgency. We needed to act swiftly. And so went in. And when I say we, I mean, I mean, the executive team, we looked at the cost structure, we looked at everything.

0:24:14.16 Timothy Clark: We started trimming. We tighten our belts. It was a full out austerity, effort to reduce costs wherever we could. In some cases, we made unilateral decisions without consulting the people closest to the issue. And I still remember I made some mistakes in muscling through. We had we had this, this incredible urgency to kind of right the ship and, cut the losses and see if we could get into it back into a positive cash flow.

0:24:59.12 Timothy Clark: And so were acting with great urgency. But we made some mistakes. I personally made some mistakes in muscling some things in, restructuring some of the departments and changing some of the roles and changing some of the processes. I made some mistakes in the fact that I was muscling, and I and I didn't take the time and it didn't need to take a lot of time, but I didn't take the necessary time to let people weigh in and give their analysis and give their input, because were moving so fast.

0:25:37.05 Timothy Clark: And I thought I was justified in everything that I was doing, but I.

0:25:39.28 Junior: Wasn't. If you needed to get into the black and there was that much urgency, do you think that gathering the feedback would have changed the what of the situation at all, or do you think it was just a a difference in how?

0:25:54.26 Timothy Clark: I think it would have changed it a little bit? I think we would have changed what we did and the sequence in which we did it, to return the organization to profitability. I think in retrospect, I think there are things that we could have and should have done differently. And we and we would have, we would have learned more if we would have been just a little bit more patient.

0:26:21.26 Timothy Clark: Doesn't mean that you're not moving quickly and but you can still solicit feedback and input when you're on the run. You can still do that.

0:26:31.11 Junior: So it's not necessarily or it's not a style thing to appease your people. You think you would actually get some concrete differences. I do the way that you did the change I do.

0:26:41.19 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:26:42.08 Junior: That's interesting.

0:26:43.14 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:26:44.00 Junior: Often when people make those types of changes, they're saying a few things to themselves into the organization. Not that you were in this case, but I know what's best for the organization. You know, there's no time to discuss it. You'll resist me anyway. So I'm making the decision for you, right? Once we implement it, you'll see I was right.

0:27:02.09 Junior: And organizations respond best to pressure. So we're just going to amp up the pressure.

0:27:08.23 Timothy Clark: And in this case junior, normally if you if you do a merger integration and you're acquiring a new entity and you're merging.

0:27:19.29 Timothy Clark: You would take some time and go on a listening tour and you would talk to people, that are working for the, acquired entity. And you would be very careful about analyzing everything and how you're going to, to do the merger integration. And what's the sequence, what's the timeline, what's the schedule? Where are there potential efficiencies?

0:27:49.24 Timothy Clark: Where are there potential synergies? How, autonomously are we going to allow certain departments, to, to do what they do versus integrate them tightly? These are all questions that you go through in a merger integration. And so normally you would take a little bit more time and, and be very careful and thoughtful about the way you do it.

0:28:16.18 Timothy Clark: Were moving very quickly, which we needed to do, but still in retrospect would have done some things differently.00:28:24:15 Junior: So the outcome of smuggling change, we said, was suspicion. Smuggling invites suspicion for muscling the change. The outcome is rebellion. Muscling invites rebellion. So did you feel any of that? Would you call it rebellion after you muscled through some of those changes?

0:28:44.25 Timothy Clark: You don't you don't often see? Rebellion is a very strong word, but you do see signs of resentment and bitterness. You see employees become jaded and cynical, and you see evidence of that. And when you sit down with people one on one and you break through those defenses and you get them to open up, a lot of times you'll find someone saying something like this.

0:29:14.14 Timothy Clark: No, no one asked me. Yeah. And that's offensive because I'm an expert in in my area. No one knows this, this, this part of the business better than I do. And I feel hurt, I feel betrayed, I feel offended because why wasn't I enlisted in this effort much, much more so, so I so you can see how that happens.

0:29:45.08 Junior: On then that energy doesn't go nowhere. It creates black markets.

0:29:51.13 Timothy Clark: Yes.

0:29:51.23 Junior: And that's another thing that I would add to the idea that muscling creates rebellion. Muscling also creates black markets. That's very true. So whatever you're trying to snuff out, whatever trying to move, whatever you're trying to alter usually ends up rearing its ugly head somewhere else. If you're going to outlaw a certain application. Right. We don't use slack for whatever reason, like what's up?

0:30:16.16 Junior: What's going to be used the very next day, and people are going to work around it if they're not committed to the change, if they're being forced and come.

0:30:24.19 Timothy Clark: Come post upheld.

0:30:27.10 Junior: Goodness compelled into change and they're going to find the next best option. Right, right, right. And so it doesn't solve the problem necessarily, even though it may appear to in the short term, you have watercooler chatter and you have things that pop up in other areas.

0:30:45.22 Timothy Clark: That's true. It goes underground. The opposite position, the resistance. It doesn't just dissipate in a day or a week or a month and sometimes or sometimes even a year. Junior. I remember when I was in the steel industry and I was a plant manager, and people, people were still nursing the, the, the, the wrongs that they felt had been committed against them years earlier and certain initiatives and changes that were made to them, not with them.

0:31:24.24 Timothy Clark: And they have long memories. Yeah. And it's incredible how those, those things linger and it affects productivity. It affects attitude. It affects the willingness to collaborate. It affects a willingness to put forward an idea. Right, right. It's incredible what it does to the culture. Yeah. It's not short.

0:31:52.04 Junior: Term. Now teams do have long memory and that's often what they remember most about a leader is the way that they handle the specific change, for better or worse. Right. Often for worse. So, let's get into the solution side. We've talked a lot about the problems. So to recap we've talked about the two failure patterns. Smuggling invites suspicion.

0:32:13.03 Junior: Muscling creates rebellion. Those two things can be effective in the short term if you're a con artist or a mafia boss. If you aspire to be a great leader, can't use those tools. You got to find something different. And we talked about influence in the spectrum of influence in that original chart. And there are some other practical things that we can do to increase our success rate.

0:32:35.20 Junior: And it all leans on this principle here, which is the difference between compliance and commitment. Those two failure patterns will get you compliance in the short term. What is compliance? It's someone’s hands, right? They'll do the thing. Begrudge Ingly and maybe you get a certain percentage even of their hands. Commitment also enlists the head and the heart. Those two things you can't be compelled.

0:33:07.05 Junior: There you go. Do you speak English to do you can't be compelled to give your mind and your heart.

0:33:13.14 Timothy Clark: You can't.

0:33:14.21 Junior: You can be compelled to give your hands. But even then, that's a stretch. So really, you are in charge at the end of the day. Of those three things, you have to give them of your own free will and an organization, a leader can persuade that out of you, they can coax that out of you. They can influence that out of you.

0:33:37.11 Junior: And that's where change management becomes an art is. And listing those three things from people.

0:33:45.10 Timothy Clark: I think I think to sustain think about this, to sustain high performance in any organization, whether it's a small team or a larger organization, you need to find a way to persuade people to release their discretionary effort. That's commitment. As you said, Junior: compliance is okay. You got my hands. But I'm doing it from a standpoint of compliance.

0:34:18.26 Timothy Clark: I'm complying. But I'm not giving you the full my full ingenuity. I'm not giving you, my full critical thinking. I'm not giving you full capacity for both execution and innovation, which comes with commitment. And so and so if we put this team or this organization on a compliance track through muscling or smuggling, I go I go back to how people feel.

0:34:52.03 Timothy Clark: You are you're more paternalistic if you're not malicious. At best you're paternalistic. And it's offensive to people. And I underscore that point because they're saying, well, why am I here? Right, right. I'm not here to just follow instructions. Even though we do owe have procedures and we have policies and we do what we do. But I'm here to make things better.

0:35:22.15 Timothy Clark: I understand how to do that. And so as a change leader, your job is to draw out the discretionary effort of people. Let's understand that this is not change management goes way beyond it. Sure, it's strategic and it is intellectual in our ability to analyze what needs to be done, make decisions, carry those out. But let's understand that change management is deeply psychological and emotional.

0:35:54.12 Timothy Clark: To be a great change leader, you are also a grief counselor, helping people mourn the loss of the current state.

0:36:05.13 Junior: That's so not overstated.

0:36:07.24 Timothy Clark: And you are a triage nurse and you're helping people. What do we do? And change management. We go from current state to future state, and we're leading them on this journey from current state to future state. And during that transition, we are we are not in a state of equilibrium. We're in transition. There's no stasis. What do you hang on to during transition?

0:36:40.09 Timothy Clark: A lot, a lot of times people attach to the status quo, right? They make attachments to the status quo, and that's a source of stability for them. But when the status quo goes away, what do they attach to? They can't attach to the status quo. I can tell you what they should be attaching to. It should be attaching to the vision of the organization, the strategy of the organization, and the integrity and the capability of you as the leader you are.

0:37:13.07 Timothy Clark: You are the repository of their fears during transition because the status quo is no longer here. And yet we haven't got to the future state yet. So it shines a light on the role of the change leader and how critical the change leader is. So in that in in that context, if you are the repository of people's fears and you are the grief counselor and the triage nurse, think about how devastating it is for you to muscle or smuggle and the disrespect that they feel from those two approaches.00:37:52:01 Junior: I love that point, and it makes me wonder maybe that's an appropriate question to ask ourselves. Are you the type of leader worthy of your people's confidence in a time of trial? Yes, if that is so interesting. If they have attached so much confidence to the status quo being static and the environment, and that's what holds the trust the second that's ripped away, if they don't have confidence in the leader, then there is no trust.

0:38:19.16 Junior: There is nothing to hang on to. I hadn't considered it that way. And I like the way you framed it.

0:38:24.10 Timothy Clark: Think about how encrusted and calcified and fossilized and grooved the status quo becomes.

0:38:37.15 Timothy Clark: And how attached people get to it. It’s habitual. It's emotional. It's psychological. Right. It's all of those things. The attachments become so strong, so intense, so almost immovable. And now we're going to break camp and we're going to leave all of that, and we're going it's a it's we're going into uncharted territory to some future state.

0:39:09.24 Timothy Clark: But by the way, when we do change management, if we're doing it right, we may understand in kind of broad contours where we're going and what we need to accomplish. But then a lot of the detail along the way is emergent. Who's going to figure that out? The leader. No, not the leader. The people on the ground, the people that that understand the business that that are working in the functions.

0:39:36.10 Timothy Clark: So they're going to figure it out.

0:39:37.22 Junior: Well, this idea is an ode to your, definition of culture, which is the way we interact. If that's what culture is, it means that culture can remain intact even when the situation is incredibly dynamic. If you said that it wasn't that in culture is the situation, culture is the surroundings, then things will break. Culture can't stay stable.

00:40:00.17 Junior: So I really like that idea of being in a dynamic environment where people have confidence in the leader, they have confidence in each other, they have confidence in the way they interact. Culture remains stable amidst turmoil and chaos. That's outside. That's right. So you can adapt to a highly dynamic environment by keeping culture high. In other words, the quality of interaction high.

0:40:23.20 Junior: And you can make it through. You'll be an adaptive organism. I like that frame for a team much more than try and maintain the status quo, try and keep the stakes in the ground and keep nothing from changing. It certainly frames the leader as a different person and role and player in that situation. Okay, so let's get into these will burn through them relatively quickly.

0:40:49.01 Junior: So how do we create the commitment if we're not after compliance. We want commitment. We want the full person in their discretionary effort. First thing we need to do is start before we need to. This seems to be, success pattern. If someone sees the change on the horizon, they call it out and say, hey, it's on the horizon.

0:41:07.09 Junior: We see it. It just crept up. We're paying attention to it. We're going to shed light on it. We're going to tell everybody about it, and we're going to work on it together. You may not even have anything to say about it. You may not have it may have no implication, but just the fact that you're calling it out and saying, hey, there's something that might be going on here I think gives your people confidence.

0:41:31.28 Junior: Instead of waiting, allowing your people to figure that out on their own and ask why you haven't said anything about it.

0:41:38.23 Timothy Clark: That's right, that's right. You may not be able to make it out. You don't know if it's an opportunity. You don't know if it's a threat. You don't know if it's a crisis. You don't. You don't know. You don't know what it is. But you identified at the first opportunity. You're trying to play offense. You're trying to be preemptive.

0:41:55.26 Timothy Clark: Because what do we know? We know that if you don't choose change, change will choose you. And you'd rather play offense than defense gives you a lot more options.

0:42:05.01 Junior: And you want that change to feel like momentum, not shock. If sometimes you will have shock and you won't be able to choose that. But if you do have a choice and you see something in the distance, start before you need to. It doesn't mean that you need to roll out the comms tomorrow, but it needs it means that you need to start your comms plan tomorrow.

0:42:23.28 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:42:24.23 Junior: Number two, make your people coconspirators in the change.

0:42:28.06 Timothy Clark: I like that.

0:42:28.29 Junior: I use that language on purpose because I like what it feels like. Coconspirator means we're on the same team, and there's this element of mischievousness to it, which I kind of like. We're conspiring together, right, to figure out what we're going to do and not I'm going to conspire for you or against you, but with you, I'm inviting you in.

0:42:52.00 Junior: I'm telling you what I know about the foggy environment, and we're going to make sense of it together and come up with a plan.

0:42:58.26 Timothy Clark: I love that. I love that Coconspirator co-creator.

0:43:04.29 Junior: Right? Yeah, but co-creator just does. Yeah.

0:43:07.01 Timothy Clark: It's not.00:43:07:13 Junior: The punch.

0:43:07.29 Timothy Clark: You know. No it doesn't, no it doesn't.

0:43:09.16 Junior: But if you're conspiring together, I think that the fundamental mechanism that we're tapping into there is choice. I'm not choosing for you. I'm not compelling you to do anything. I'm inviting you in and you're part of it. You're part of the team. You have influence on where we go. Maybe you see something I don't, and I'm acknowledging that fact, which is why you're here.

0:43:28.19 Junior: It's why you have a seat at the table, and we can make this out together. The only place where that's not appropriate, as you said, is when urgency is like at. It's pegged out. And we need to do something back. Now. Right yesterday. Number three, make the contrarian move, the expected move in a highly dynamic environment where change is necessary.

0:43:57.11 Junior: Let's take your example of the media company. If the news outlet knows that print media is going the way of the dinosaur, the people will expect what most people would say, which is, hey, you know, it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay. We will adapt. You all are going to upskill. And, you know, we'll keep as many of you as we can.

0:44:25.16 Junior: And I think we're going to make it through the other side and we'll just we'll just develop as an organization. Everything's going to be okay. Right? That's what people expect. We know that's not true. So if you make the contrarian move, you can gain a lot of credibility and trust. If you say, hey, this is going to disrupt our business and it's going to be painful, it's going to be horrible.

0:44:46.27 Timothy Clark: Yeah, yeah.

0:44:47.22 Junior: I think it's going to be horrible. It's going to be horrible for me because I have to manage through this and figure it out with you all. It's going to be horrible for you because not all of you are going to make it through the other side and collectively, like it's just going to be a bad time. Yeah, yeah.

0:45:00.24 Junior: All right. Yeah. But here's what we're going to do. I think that invites so much more trust and so much more. It's more authentic and just calling it as it is. And even over overselling it the other way. Right. Not just saying, yeah, like it'll probably be problematic, but saying no, like it's going to be dire and it's going to be horrible.

0:45:25.20 Timothy Clark: It goes step beyond that. Junior and as I worked with, as I have worked with leaders on large scale organizational change initiatives over the years, I would go to them and I would say there are three things that are true and you know it and your people know it. And so you need to acknowledge these three things to your people.

0:45:49.17 Timothy Clark: Number one, you don't have all of the facts. Number two, you cannot promise zero loss. And number three, you cannot eliminate all of the pain. Those three things are always true in every large scale change effort. So, let's be honest about those things. Let's acknowledge those things to the organization. And let's work with that understanding that builds trust.

0:46:21.15 Timothy Clark: Even though because we just know these things are true and we can't remove them.

0:46:28.18 Junior: I love that I'm going to I'm going to keep that one of mine. I'm going to use it next time. We've got to make a change. Number four build a trust reservoir before you spend it. Trust. It's not built at the moment of change. We all know that that should be obvious, but what's non-obvious is just how long it takes.

0:46:49.12 Junior: And how intentional you have to be to build that reservoir before you need to make a debit.

0:46:54.20 Timothy Clark: Yes, yes.

0:46:55.19 Junior: People need to be able to hang on to you. As you said, you need to be the stable piece in the environment. That means a lot of things. That means that you have to you have to have your own life in order. You have to have your own affairs in order as it relates to the business, as it relates to the change, so that you're not flung into space because of the change.

0:47:16.06 Junior: People need to be able to see a track record and know going into that change, well, like it's pretty windy. It's pretty stormy. Can I attach myself to this person? Right. It's like that scene in the original twister. It's the greatest show where they're in the barn and the tornado's coming.

0:47:35.25 Timothy Clark: I didn't see that.

0:47:36.23 Junior: They lashed themselves to the horse post. It's so cool. So, the tornado comes, it rips off the barn, and they're in the middle of the tornado. Just like, anchored to these horse posts that you would tie a horse to.

0:47:50.08 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:47:50.17 Junior: It makes me think that, like, you need to be that horse post that's right for your people. Like the tornadoes here. Can they lash themselves to you or not? Because if they see that you're just another piece of the barn that's going to get taken with the storm, they don't want to attach themselves to you. What are they going to do?

0:48:06.28 Junior: They're going to run the other way, and you've got people running all different directions, doing all sorts of things. It's dangerous for everybody and no one lives.

0:48:13.26 Timothy Clark: What a metaphor. Right?

0:48:15.18 Junior: So that I think maybe we'll just leave the metaphor as it is, because I think so much of what that means is implicit, hence the beauty of a metaphor. But that makes me think, right? What type of leader do I want to be? How stable do I want to be in chaos? Because that's when it really matters.

0:48:35.03 Junior: it's dire. People will vote, when it really matters, and it really matters when

0:48:40.15 Timothy Clark: So, what do you say when every person gets the vote? It's just the way it is.

0:48:46.13 Junior: What do you think is, as we wrap up today, any final thoughts you want to leave people with?

0:48:52.17 Timothy Clark: As a leader, you are responsible for the adaptive capacity of your organization. And so much of that goes back to the way that you lead change. And you've got to avoid these failure patterns. Change is hard enough and it's constant enough. And I think I just think it's so valuable to call these out because we see these failure patterns again and again and again, muscling on the one hand, smuggling on the other.

0:49:26.27 Timothy Clark: And so, I would just, emphasize that. And then also, again, repeat the fact that if you can't lead change, you can't lead.

0:49:38.00 Junior: Agreed. A couple things that I would leave you with. There are a lot of good principles we talked about today. One would be. If you can just avoid the failure patterns, you are going to be better at leading change then a vast majority of people. Yeah. So, it's probably reasonable to expect that you remember muscling and smuggling. So just don't do that.

0:50:07.10 Junior: You'll feel the pull to do that occasionally, and you probably have a tendency to use one of those tools more than the other. Use it less. Eventually don't use it at all and try to attach yourself to tools and build the skills that are healthy forms of influence, because that has a much longer shelf life, leaves a much better legacy and lets you sleep at night.

0:50:33.12 Junior: So, with that, we will wrap up, for today. We appreciate you listening. This has been Tim and JR with the leader factor. We will catch you in the next episode. Bye everybody. Take care.

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