Even during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders find ways to resist needed change. There will never be a perfect time for change, and the thought of change can be scary in any business environment, but Edwin Bosso’s message is that the right change only happens if executive leaders force the issue.
Bosso, founder and CEO of Myrtle Consulting Group and the ForbesBooks author of 6,000 Dreams: The Leader’s Guide To A Successful Business Transformation Journey, notes that while there are business leaders who are already implementing change in response to today’s challenging operational landscape, many others are not. The cost of inertia is high, especially if competitors have been triggered to change, so in this Take Five interview, Bosso addresses the five reasons why leaders resist change and struggle to move their company forward.
We want to focus on the best ways to guard against and/or address each of the five reasons that leaders resist change. First, you say they can confuse the important with the urgent. Is there a technique or a way or a process that can be used to avoid that?
“Yes, the easiest thing to do is to build in structured time in the management routine to deal with the important. What I mean by that is the urgent comes to us naturally. It happens, we see it, and we have to react to it. So, it tends to creep in and take more of our days, weeks, and months. The important can be far in the distance and it’s not so much in your sight every day. So, what you can do is have a given moment in the year, whether it’s after your big processing meeting at the beginning of the year or set times every quarter or every month, where you really take some time to think about the business long term.
“It fits in the schedule and goes on during the year, and reminds you that there is a time to think about strategy — mid-term and long-term strategy. Then, you force yourself to get the right people around the table and to have these conversations that almost ignore the urgent and start looking farther ahead. So, there is a concept of the management system that I described in my book that basically describes the management decision-making routine that an organization should have. So, as you construct something like that, you can plan on having set times during the year where you step back and think about what is important for your business in terms of reaching your goals.”
The second barrier that you cite is that managers also lack the courage and leadership ability. You often wonder how people who have these characteristics get into management positions in the first place, but how does an organization combat that?
“For whatever reason, we’ve evolved into a society that has confused the skills that it takes to manage a business and the skills that it takes to lead a business. What happens is that very often, we find ourselves in businesses where people are trained to manage but are not necessarily trained to lead. As a leader, the way you work around that is what I’ve described as the concept of cognitive refraining. That is a personal exercise that you can do to distance yourself from what you are dealing with at that particular moment and try to reframe the world as the way you would want it to be. The visualization of success can be a good way in which you project yourself toward that, so that could be a way to overcome that lack of courage.
“Another way to do it is to simply recognize that not everybody is a leader, not everybody has the ability to run a program. So, if you are manager and you recognize that’s not part of your skill set, it’s important to know that and to surround yourself with people who can help you with that. I am not advocating cleaning house, necessarily, but I am advocating first having personal or individual methods to overcome one’s fear. The other thing is simply having a support system to try and lead initiatives as a team, as opposed to as an individual, when you know that you don’t have the capability to manage all aspects of it.”
A third way leaders resist change, you say, is that they misalign the incentives, meaning they conflate organizational incentives with personal incentives. How do you avoid that?
“You can see that a lot in public companies, for example, where you are judged on quality [financial] performance, whereas something important — transformation for your organization — may be something that lasts a year and that costs money up front. That may be reflected in your numbers. For any kind of company, the difficulty of going through a change process can be perceived as weakness or failure. So, when you’re having to balance that with how you may be perceived or even how you might be compensated in terms of a bonus, that can put a leader in a position of conflict between what’s important to the organization and what’s important to them and their families.
“They have to be able to overcome that. The way you overcome that is with morality and ethics and the understanding that you have a fiduciary responsibility to your employees. You have a responsibility to leave the business better off than you found it when you arrived. So, just having those values puts you on the path of choosing what’s good for the business versus what might be the best for you in the short term.”
If you don’t have those values, how do you get them?
“Well, if you don’t have them, it’s a problem. If you don’t have them, you’re probably in the wrong role. That is an example of when that’s the case, I would clean house. If you don’t have it through normal coaching and through normal feedback that you receive as a manager and as a leader, you need to acquire that during the course of your career. You need to be able to separate the two, but if you don’t have it, it would be an excellent example of a case where other leaders would have to clean house and put in charge somebody who understands that it’s the business before them.”
Another impediment to change is the lack of support and/or resources. How would you either prevent that or deal with it in a constructive way?
“When I talk about resources and support, I’m talking about a willingness of the owners of the company or the board of the company to support you, whether it’s with financial resources or technical resources. My experience in my career is that a lot of times, when people don’t obtain the support they need, most of the time it’s because they don’t do their homework. They don’t ask the right questions or they don’t ask them the right way. What I mean by that is there is a difference between asking for $10 million to do something that is important to the business and asking for $10 million to do something that is very important to the business but is also very well documented, that you have an execution plan for, that you have resources to support it, and so forth.
“So, when we don’t do our homework in the process of asking for support, we very often find ourselves in a position where the answer is no, not because they don’t want to but simply because they don’t have the rationale and the plan. As a leader, the way you overcome that is to make sure you are prepared, to make sure you do your homework, to make sure you describe things in a way that’s appealing to the people who will invest in it. Unfortunately, that’s underestimated.
“The other aspect of this is that it’s a lot easier to get a ‘yes’ to small requests than it is to get a ‘yes’ on a big request, so you also have to use that as an advantage. As you plan this work, you must know that there are different steps in it, and if you can start getting ‘yes’ in the first steps, that gets the different stakeholders in place to better understand what you’re trying to do. When they get emotionally involved in what you’re trying to do, then what you request afterward becomes a lot more logical to them. You are more likely to get the support that you need.”
And then the fifth barrier to change is the lack of a method. That sounds like something you can hire to get done, but I’ll let you explain how best to address that one.
“There are two aspects to the lack of a method. One is lacking a method and knowing that you lack a method, which is the easy one to solve. The other one is lacking method and not knowing that you lack a method, which is a very dangerous position to be in. But lacking a method and knowing that you lack method puts you in the place where you can ask the right questions, you can get the right support, and you can get people to come and look at the business in a way that you can’t. You can get people who can help you frame your request to your leadership or to your owners in a way that you can’t, and that puts you on the path to get the support and the method you need.
“It’s very difficult to learn how to transform an organization in business school. It’s something that you learn because you’ve done it. It’s something that you learn because you’ve seen it done. There is no shame in not being able to do it, but you have to acknowledge that. Once you acknowledge that, then you can get the help to guide you through that process.”
From what you’ve seen in your work, is the COVID-19 situation creating more impediments to change or is it spurring change?
“It can be more of an impediment to change but the answer depends on the industry. The reason it can be more of a driver of change is because it puts all of us in a situation where we question where we are and the things that we’ve done. That’s dictated in the first place by really examining our reality and putting ourselves on the path to transformation. So, if anything, COVID-19 has accelerated that.
“Where we have to be very careful is understanding what we’re are transforming to. The problem in the midst of a crisis is that until things really settle, it’s very difficult to define that future picture and how different it is than where we are now. It’s very difficult to see that. So, what I say to clients is, ‘Don’t sacrifice your strategy for small, practical gains.’ COVID can accelerate change and it can accelerate transformation, but we still have to keep a cool head and make sure that we follow methods to help us properly identify what we’re trying to change, and that we still deploy methods to make sure that we get to where we’re going in the best possible way.”
Click here to sign up for the free IB Ezine — your twice-weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices, and the names you need to know. If you are not already a subscriber to In Business magazine, be sure to sign up for our monthly print edition here.
