Resistance Fighter

If these people are real grassroots leaders, they won't hesitate to give you a few jabs if they see some problems with the change program. How do you win them over?

You don't. If you spend 40 minutes trying to get one of these guys to buy into the change program, the message you're really conveying is, "I'm not interested in listening to you. I just want to sell you."

Instead, you invest your personal time -- you begin to build a relationship and invite the person to engage with you. You don't want to make a pitch, you want to have a conversation. The symbolic contract is, "I'm offering you a real voice in the process, and in turn, I'd like you to become a voice for the process. If you have a problem with some part of the program, I'll make a change if I think you have a valid point -- or I'll tell you why that's not going to be the case." The important thing is to make it clear that not only will you listen to criticism, but that you'll be prepared to respond in some way.

So if you disagree with them, you've got to tell them, even if it's going to hurt you in the short term.

The smart strategy is to always be up front. Think about reengineering. For a while, people tried to claim that reengineering was not about downsizing. And yet we saw hundreds of reengineering efforts that were, in fact, all about downsizing. I've never understood why management refused to acknowledge up front that people were going to lose jobs -- as if the employees wouldn't figure that out until it was too late. But in fact, they always figure it out. And then you've got people who are cynical and don't trust you.

Can people's resistance to change ever be a good thing?

You bet it can. In fact, change agents should not automatically resist resistance -- they should learn from it.

I was involved in a change effort to make a high-tech, major industrial concern more entrepreneurial, and someone stood up and said that we'd totally missed the fact that there was no way to find critical resources for entrepreneurial ventures in this organization. And he was right. So we asked him to create an internal clearinghouse that would identify key employees' functional specialties, so when we needed people's expertise, we'd quickly know how to find them. Not only did we learn from this guy's criticism, but we embraced it.

It's one thing to promise people that they'll have a real voice in the change process, but how do you deliver on that promise?

From the very first day, you make the process transparent. I learned that lesson about 15 years ago, when I was working on a change project at a money-center bank located in New York City.

We had a dedicated conference room for the change team. And I started noticing that people would go out of their way to walk by the room. Then it occurred to me that, at some level, whatever information that you send out to keep people apprised of the change effort is slightly suspect. Even in the best cases, people will wonder whether you're just spinning fiction. But they sense that what's happening in the room is real.

So the change-team members decided that anyone in the organization could come in and spend half a day with us. We would treat them just as if they were permanent members of the team. The only requirement we had was that any half-day visitor would have to be up to speed on the project. We weren't going to stop work and give them a tutorial on the change process. This set a tone that made a big difference in employees' participation level and trust in the process.

What happens when they walk into that conference room and show you that some tactical part of the change program just won't work?

If you're going to make the process transparent, you've got to be willing to admit when you're wrong, or when someone else has a better idea. Leaders and change agents should obviously avoid going public every time they screw up. But picking your spots and occasionally admitting that you're wrong sends an incredibly powerful message that you're serious about engaging in a healthy debate. And it surprises me how few senior executives are willing to do that. They think that acknowledging even one mistake will make them appear as ineffective leaders, when in fact the reverse is true.

Is there a way to determine whether people have really accepted your change effort -- or are fighting it behind your back?

This is where your project-management skills come into play: Focus on what people are doing, as opposed to what they say they're doing. If people say they're with the program, ask them for explicit commitments. You should, in the spirit of transparency, make those commitments visible and ensure that people are delivering on them.