How To Lead Change
A startup is always changing. It must change to grow, to respond to customers and stakeholders, and to develop strengths and flexibilities to endure challenging environments, conditions, and competitors. Enterprises also must change when the people who form the enterprise change. Successfully leading change is an essential skill of all entrepreneurial leaders (and a generally useful skill for all of us).
Most people consider change scary. Change triggers the fear of the unknown, because we can never know all aspects of any change with certainty. Many of us have a heightened fear of risk as well, and this adds to our fear of change whenever someone asks us to change something we feel has been successful for us—something that has not been anxiety provoking and perhaps has even produced some reward. The skill of leading change revolves around creating the conditions that make everyone participating in the change feels secure that the change will be a good thing.
How does change happen?
We note that all change efforts can also be described as projects. A project is when a group of people get together to take actions that lead to something new happening, which is the same as making a change. I will use the concepts of “change” and “projects” interchangeably.
Leading change always involves one group of people taking actions to get another group of people to change what they are doing. The two key groups responsible for changing things are 1) the “project team” and 2) “those impacted.” There is one more player to mention, and that is “the sponsor,” the person who funds the project and provides the resources to do the project. The sponsor may or may not be a member of the project team. In an early-stage startup the founder is the sponsor for all change, but as the organization gets bigger, department managers may have resources to sponsor projects. If the startup has major outside investors, it will likely have a Board of Directors and the Board can sponsor changes (like selling the company).
The Five Ducks
While there are countless books on the subject of change, the method that is most successful and easiest to practice is called The Five Ducks, which refers to five prerequisites that, when in place, vastly increase the chances the change will be successful for everyone involved.
If everyone involved feels the change is being well led, anxiety is reduced and they are in a better mindset to support the effort. In the parlance of relationship building, we are figuring out how to get everyone to cooperate in achieving the shared objective, which is the desired change.
This means everyone can get their promised payoffs, which are their expected benefits from making the change. By getting everyone to cooperate you eliminate resistance. In other words, you get everyone to not compete in wanting a bigger payoff.
This method looks upon the leader as the conductor that keeps the orchestra playing one tune with everyone in tune. The five ducks get the players aligned on a single purpose and makes it straightforward for the leader to know how to keep them aligned.
The five prerequisites for successful change are:
Duck 1, which we call Comprehension: All members of the team responsible for designing and implementing the change must all share the same understanding of the change objectives.
Duck 2, which we call Motivation: All members of the team implementing the change must be motivated to see that the change is successfully accomplished.
Duck 3, which we call Skills: The project team must possess or have under their control the skills necessary to design and implement the change.
Duck 4, which we call Resources: All the resources required to perform the project must be made available to the team as they are requested.
Duck 5, which we call Communication: Everyone impacted by the change must understand its importance.
Why these specific ducks?
Each of these ducks eliminates a major cause of failure for attempts at change.
Change can only be precisely implemented if everyone responsible for implementing the change—in other words the project team—understands what exactly is the desired change. This is the comprehension Duck 1 and this is tricky to do because there can be multiple points of view on how things will look and operate once the change is made.
For example, there’s almost always a profit point of view, but there also might be an improved method for doing some tasks that people had enjoyed doing that might be changed. Changing these otherwise enjoyable tasks cannot be ignored, they must be explicitly discussed and decided upon by everyone on the team. In most efforts to create change there are people who lose status and those who gain status. Prospects for training and advancement also change, and people generally have feelings about far they are away from actual customers?
If these different many points of view are not discussed with the details of the overall vision for the change, then each person will have their own different interpretation of what the change is meant to accomplish and how it will work. This causes disagreements to arise after the project has been launched, which then lead to loss of trust in the leader, wasted efforts, and a project in disarray that can no longer go forward. That is why aligning Duck 1 is critical. In sprint 13 we go into detail about how you make sure this duck is aligned and stays aligned.
The reason for Duck 2
Because people only do what they are motivated to do, and because making new things happen and stopping other things from happening is hard, you need a project team that is dedicated to seeing the change is successfully implemented. This means everyone on the project team must be personally motivated to enjoy the benefits of the change. Money can be a motivation, but status, autonomy, career advancement, or the opportunity to do something that has never been done before can be more powerful motivators.
Every team member will be motivated differently and these different motivations matter to the person who is leading the change. The point is that the change leader must understand the motivation of each person on the team to ensure they are motivated to see the change successfully implemented as fully understood from the efforts to align duck 1. Sprint 13 also describes how you make sure Duck 2 is aligned and stays aligned.
The reasons for Duck 3 and 4
Every change requires some set of skills to enable it and to enable everyone impacted by the change to thrive. Doing a project without the right skills leads to poor results, which in a startup means death. It is incumbent on the project team to list the specific and special skills needed to make the desired change and to make sure these skills are available when and wherever needed. Again, we will get into the details in sprint 13.
Every project requires resources. This could be money, people’s time, space, or maybe specialized equipment or software. When critical resources are unavailable the project grinds to a halt, loses momentum, and worse of all it looks like a failure. Trust is lost. An insidious version of this problem is when resources were promised to arrive, but when they were needed, they did do not arrive. This destroys moral and motivation. Sprint 13 will get into the details.
Why Duck 5?
Finally, it is critical to get all the people NOT on the project team that are impacted by the change to be motivated to embrace the change and not to resist it. This Duck 5 is about the need to align everyone that you want to do things differently than they used to, which means they will be naturally resistant to what you want. To them you must communicate the importance of the change to:
the organization and its mission,
the people they work alongside within the organization, and
their ability to master their job.
The description of the importance of the change is made to appeal to the general human motivations described in sprint 11 on Motivating Others. It is also based upon what was discussed in sprint 8 on Relationship Building.
Aligning Duck 5 requires the leader communicates the importance of the change as described in sprint 9 and therefore the leader must receive feedback that his or her message was accurately received, understood and agreed upon.
Creating a shared understanding of the importance of a change makes it much more difficult for an individual to fight the change in the open, or even covertly. If even only a small percentage of employees and stakeholders do not feel the change is important, then it will be poorly implemented and the potential benefits of the change will be lost. Aligning Duck 5 and keeping it aligned takes a great deal of effort, which is described in detail in sprint 13.
Aligning these five ducks puts into place prerequisites to change that eliminate the most common causes of failure.