How to make your people love change

The simple reason is that change often comes down as prescriptive. It usually comes down with a heavy hand as something people have no choice in. Take, for instance, the discord over going back to the office. There isn’t a single organisation that has announced all-day-in-office or 10-hour workdays that hasn’t faced dissent. 

When you put down a mandate for people to change who they are, how they work, and what they work on, they see it as a violation of their autonomy. Resistance is, therefore, only natural.      

The answer lies in a core need every person has: self-concordance. When change is aligned with a person’s aspirations, values, and purpose, they are more likely to embrace it. To make that happen, we need a mindset shift. This needs to happen at two levels.   

The first thing to consider is that we have to think of employees not as objects of change but as internal customers. Just like marketers try to study consumer behaviour and aspirations with deep granularity, we must try to understand employees in similar detail. And not just see them as professionals but as individuals.  

• What are your growth aspirations as a person? 

• What are your growth aspirations as a professional? 

• What are some pain points in your team that you would love to resolve? 

 This does three things. First, it makes them sit up and take notice. Apathy to change is as much an issue as resistance. So, when we take the conversation to them, they are engaged.   

Second, it meets the employees where they are, instead of trying to push them towards an agenda. And third, and most importantly, it makes them not just invested in the change process but turns them into the change architects. 

What these architects will build may not be the same as what we want them to, but there will be some overlaps. And because we empowered them to do this, they become fellow travelers, and this creates a positive change momentum, which we can harvest to effect the changes we want as well.  

What kind of change are we talking about? Any change that has uncertainty built into it—like mergers and demergers or leadership transitions—needs a more direct approach. Here, we are looking at a change in the growth context. For instance, the back-to-office shift, or when a company is expanding, or is looking to solve a specific problem. 

We worked with a client where there was a need to get out of excessively critical thinking—a practice that had kept them compliant and secure, but was now coming in the way of growth—and move towards a more positive culture. They wanted to develop what the client called ‘learned optimism’. We started with their leaders, who immensely appreciated the mindset shift. But to make a lasting impact, it was important to embed this behaviour change in their culture. For that, we coopted their leaders to create a recipe book with details and expectations of the new attributes.   

For another client, the context was expansion. They had assembled a new GCC unit with people from across the organisation. Since they were a GCC, they were far away from their global headquarters. So, they had three frontiers of change—find a way to work well together with new colleagues, create a relationship with the HQ in such a way that they think of them as thought leaders and not just a back office, and collaborate well across other teams.  

Once the systems and processes are established and goals are mapped out, we can assume that the first frontier has been crossed. But more work was needed for the second and third frontiers. The distance from the HQ there needed to be a two-way understanding of each other. The HQ needed to understand the dreams and aspirations of this new team. 

For the third frontier of working across teams, there needed to be a way for the teams to get to know each other well. The idea was to build the foundations of trust even if they hadn’t really started working with each other.   

Ultimately, change works best when there is trust on both sides. The employees need to trust that the change is not something randomly thrust on them but that there is a larger vision behind the mandates. The organisation, on the other hand, needs to trust its employees and take them into confidence with that vision. It needs to share the purpose as well as the broad framework of change. And then co-opt them into the architecting and roll-out process. 

Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted in this context—Be the change you want to see in the world. I would humbly change that to: Let people be the change they want to see in the organisation.