Author: Mike Urgo
If you missed last week’s episode, you can read / watch it here. I talked at a high-level about embracing change. I ended the episode on adoption. It’s one thing to embrace the change, to understand it, but it is a completely different thing to adopt it.
I will give you a perfect example that I went through as a leader. I had recently moved to a new team and the process and templates they were using were both inconsistent and or not being used all together.
In meeting with the team, we talk about their challenges and many of them could be solved by consolidating templates for consistency and driving accountability to the new templates through some simple governance. In theory, during the subsequent meetings as we developed consolidated templates together, the team was embracing the change. I felt like we were making progress and was excited to go live with the new templates and start to track the improvements of the team.
However, there was a portion of the team that did not use the new templates in the first week. While they had embraced the change and participated in the creation of the solution, they struggled to adopt the change in practice. Looking at standard change management practices like the one below from the Harvard Business School sounds great on paper. I am sure many people reading this are familiar with these steps in one word or another:
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Prepare the Organization for Change
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Craft Vision and Plan for Change
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Implement the Changes
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Embed Changes Within Company Culture and Practices
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Review Progress and Analyze Results
The problem is, at times, the adoption doesn’t come. I had prepared my team for the change. We had crafted a vision together. We implemented the new templates that were due on an agreed upon date and time and we embedded / aligned them within the culture of our organization. Yet, in the first few weeks the same few people weren’t following through.
So, what did I do?
It is my suggestion to follow the following steps when dealing with a lack of adoption.
- Seek to understand
- Qualify and address any objections
- Have difficult conversation(s) (if necessary)
- Set expectations and enforce compliance
The first emotion as a leader that I have found I need to check is that of anger and frustration, which depending on the scenario is easier said than done. When working with team members or people who are struggling to adopt to a change, if you can’t hold your emotions in check, you are only going to escalate the situation and drive more defiance. So, instead, seek to understand the “why”. I have talked about the “Five Whys” in past episodes and it’s because it’s such a useful tool. It is especially useful if you can tactfully do it without someone realizing that you are doing a root cause analysis on them.
Hypothetical Conversation (based off some real-life experiences):
Manager: Hey, I see that for the last couple of weeks that you haven’t used the new template the team created, can you tell me what you’re thinking?
Employee: Oh, that’s my bad, I just am not sure about it.
Manager: I get it, adjusting to a new rhythm can be challenging, is there something that is throwing you off?
Employee: I just liked what I was doing before.
Manager: Remind me what you were doing before, and why you liked it?
Employee: Well, I wasn’t using a template, we all just all kind of knew what to do and what was going on
Manager: I can see how that could be the case. Remember how we had discussed the value of the templates so that stakeholders and leadership can be informed on progress? Is there a concern around sharing information with them?
Employee: Yea, sometimes when I use templates, I get asked questions anyways. Questions that could be answered if people had read the template, so I stopped using it and just answered questions when they came in. It seemed like a giant waste of time.
Manager: Sounds like you have identified an additional culture change that needs to happen. What if we make a deal? If you give the templates I try, when you get questions that can be answered by a template, I will handle that change conversation with the resource.
When changes aren’t adopted, sometimes it’s easy for a leader to jump to a conclusion that the employee is maliciously defiant. When we seek to understand, we usually find some kind of logic driving the behavior. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but to drive adoption we must understand the “why” behind the behavior. You can see in the hypothetical scenario that while I was seeking to understand, I also was working to qualify and address objections. It’s important to meet people where they are and come up with thoughtful solutions. Avoid defaulting to the notion that “management says so”, that type of logic is what can start to create a toxic culture.
If you find that after seeking to understand and qualifying / addressing any objections that the person is still non-compliant, you may find that you must have a difficult conversation. Those conversations are never easy and as I am typing this, I am adding difficult conversations to my list of future episodes. In short, those conversations need to be factually based and while sensitive to emotions, presented in a simple and objective way to the person. The conversation should always end with a choice, especially if the adoption is required for the job. They need to understand that while they can’t be forced to adopt the change that by choosing not to, they are putting their position in the role at risk. This conversation should typically include an HR representative and should be a last resort.
The most important step is the final one. Hopefully you can come to an understanding without a difficult conversation. Regardless it’s imperative that the expectation of adoption is clear and ramification of not adopting the change be very clear. These ramifications will obviously range in seriousness depending on the significance of the change. It’s important to be clear and concise when setting these expectations and have them written down so that there is a lower chance of miscommunication.
To summarize, adoption is more than just change management, it takes effort, patience, and sometimes difficult conversations from leadership. I have found that the more you seek to understand and take the time to hear people out, the more they will be open to adopting the change. This is especially true if the change management principles were originally followed.
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