"Give me something to believe in!"

I have to admit that I have a rather eclectic taste in music.  I enjoy listening to just about every genre (classical, rock, country, pop, jazz, blues, even occasionally hip hop and rap), depending upon the prevailing mood of the day.  My background preparation for today's post jogged a musical memory from the 1980'-1990's era hair band Poison, who released a song in 1996 called "Something to Believe In".  It's a classic rock-n-roll ballad, and I immediately thought of it when I started to write this post.

We all need something - a purpose, if you will - to believe in.  All of us, leaders and managers as well as front-line employees, want our work to have meaning and value.  Keeping with our recent theme on managing change, according to Emily Lawson and Colin Price, writing for the McKinsey Quarterly ("The psychology of change management"), individuals will alter their mind-sets only if they see the point or underlying reason for the change (and if they also agree with it).  John Kotter (see Kotter's 8-step change model) calls this "creating a sense of urgency" for change, while others have called it a "burning platform".  Whatever you call it - a sense of purpose, meaning, a sense of urgency, or a "burning platform" (I am going to call it a "change story"), the ultimate success of any organizational change initiative will depend to a great extent on how this "change story" is told and the degree to which the leaders and employees in an organization believe in it.

When talking about purpose, leaders can leverage something that is called cognitive dissonance (first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950's and mentioned at least a few times in previous blog posts - see for example, "Sour grapes and sunk costs..." and "Blue sky on Mars.  That's interesting").  Cognitive dissonance arises when individuals find that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions (an extreme example would be an agnostic priest).  Individuals are internally motivated to eliminate this cognitive dissonance by either changing their beliefs or changing their actions.  In other words, if individual employees believe in the organizational purpose, they will be internally motivated to change their actions (otherwise, they will suffer from cognitive dissonance).  

There is of course another important point.  As Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken from McKinsey & Company observed, a compelling change story is not enough.  Keller and Aiken have worked with a number of organizations on their change initiatives, and they generally employ two types of change stories.  The first is the "good to great" story, which often goes something like this: "Given our historical market position, skills, assets, and staff, we can easily become the industry leader."  The second type of change story is the "turnaround story": "We're performing below our peers.  If we are going to survive in this market, we have to change how we operate." 

The problem here is that both these kinds of change stories ("good to great" and "turnaround") will motivate only 20% of the entire workforce.  Both these change stories center on the organization itself.  In general, there are five sources of meaning:

1. Society (e.g., "Our initiative is going to improve the health of our community")

2. Organization (the "good to great" and "turnaround" change stories focus on the organization)

3. Customer (e.g., "We are going to improve access to care at our hospital, which will improve the patient and family experience")

4. Team (e.g., "Our initiative will focus on improving staff wellness and resilience")

5. Individual (e.g., "Our initiative will empower our front line workers to make decisions")

I've been a part of one of the organizations that Scott Keller and McKinsey evaluated for a major organizational change initiative.  When he asked a room full of leaders, managers, and employees which of these five sources were most important, we separated equally into five groups.  In other words, a change story focuses on just one source of motivation (say, the customer), you will only be motivating 20% of your workforce.  The McKinsey team has found this result in surveys of literally thousands of employees working in organizations from every industry they've studied.  The implication is that leaders have to tell five change stories at once!  

Keller and Aiken write, "What the leader cares about (and typically bases at least 80 percent of his or her message to others on) does not tap into roughly 80 percent of the workforce's primary motivators for putting extra energy into the change program."  The lesson is that the change story has to be told in five different ways in order to capture the attention of and motivate the entire organization.

I will continue on the theme of a compelling change story in my next post.