Leading change in an organization is full of challenges. Most of these challenges are associated with creating a vision, inspiring action, achieving buy-in, and sustaining the change.
And sometimes, we don’t take the simple steps to achieve buy-in. Put simply, everyone hears through their own filter. Therefore the actions we see may not be the actions we expected. Obvious perhaps, and yet when leading change, we sometimes think that things are not happening the way we want because people are resisting.
- Sometimes, they simply didn’t hear
- Sometimes, they heard, but we haven’t made the effort to help them see the value from their perspective, i.e. the WHY
- Or what they heard is different from what I thought I said
- Or they need to hear it more than once; 7 times I have been told is the magic number
- Or they need to do it more than once, or even twice, to “get it”
- Or we simply need to allow time for the change to settle in
So, next time, before calling out a “resister”, first pause and ask them what they heard.
The initial results of my Pivot are excellent. I feel I have much greater clarity regarding the next 3-5 years.. 