Thursday, June 13, 2013

Change is hard Keith Ferrazzi

Change Is Hard





The only genuine, sustainable motivator is a sense of a larger purpose aligned with personal goals.


This post was written by the Greenlight Research Institute Staff.
The English language is full of sayings about change being hard: Better the devil you know. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Don't jump from the frying pan into the fire.
This aversion to change is hard-wired into our brains, adjacent to the neurons that control our aversion to loss (research shows that the psychological impact of a dollar lost is 2.5 times greater than that of a dollar gained).
In organizational settings, this intrinsic resistance to change is reinforced by company routine ("That's how things are done around here") and the desire to fit in ("How will going along with the proposed change make me look to my peers?").
Corporate leaders faced with the daunting task of motivating change to achieve a strategic objective wrestle with this reality every day. Smart leaders realize immediately that what motivates them does not necessarily fire up the troops.
The smart ones also understand that 20th-century carrot-and-stick ways of "motivating" people don't work for most of today's workforce.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his team at Duke showed that when dealing with mechanical skills, a large pay incentive translated into better performance. But in jobs that required conceptual abilities and high-level thinking — that is to say, most 21st-century jobs — they found that monetary incentives had little impact on performance. In some cases, big monetary payoffs actually diminished motivation and performance along with it.
What might be the answer – a larger sense of purpose – is suggested in the work of Adam Grant at Wharton Business School. Grant found that employees for a fundraising call center who had been briefed on the job's capacity to benefit others (the Task Significance group) performed better than a group briefed on just the job perks (the Personal Benefit group), securing twice the pledges.
Is Intellectual Understanding Enough?
But is an intellectual understanding of a larger value or "purpose" of a change initiative enough? It turns out the sources of a sense of purpose are varied and multifaceted. Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan, in Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, cite hundreds of examples of a "motivational arsenal" used in successful change initiatives. Among them are emotional connection, pride in the end product, and the desire to enhance daily routine.
One thing is certain: Motivating a workforce with a sense of purpose is not as simple as telling stories about the good the firm does in the world — though that's certainly important. So what's the missing ingredient?
The Personal Connection
In dozens of client engagements, we have found that no matter how loyal the employees, or how much pride they have in the company and its legacy, they won’t be motivated to change for the company's sake unless they can clearly envision how their own personal goals will be realized by the collective change the company wants everyone to make. That’s why companies that are effective in change efforts focus on getting people to “feel” the need for the change. Personal motivation always leads the desire to change.
Sometimes the personal, emotional impetus is as simple as connecting the company's
plan to, say, grow 10 percent this year and 20 percent the next to the tremendous opportunity it will afford for each employee's own personal growth, well beyond additional fiscal rewards that might come their way.
But it’s never a “once-and-done” deal. True change acceleration is a multipronged, sustained effort that operates at the highest levels of company leadership but is made real by incremental, individual improvements at every level.
True change demands that leaders lead by example and demonstrate unprecedented humility, vulnerability and candor about their own personal shortcomings and goals. Doing so places an “emotional wrapper” around the change and moves people to try something that’s daring, dangerous and risky. Such change also requires hands-on coaching in relationship skills and bold new communication habits.
And in stark contrast to those who argue that such "soft" rubrics can't be measured, Ferrazzi Greenlight's facilitators have proven the opposite: Identification and tracking of leading "change indicators" supports a change initiative's sustainability and creates a “movement” that dramatically accelerates results.
We'll be outlining these central components to what we call our Ferrazzi Greenlight Change Acceleration System in upcoming weeks. Please keep reading, and feel free to comment on your own experiences with the role of purpose in driving change in your workplace.


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