The four building blocks of change
Four
key actions influence employee mind-sets and behavior. Here’s why they matter.
Large-scale
organizational change has always been
difficult, and there’s no shortage of research showing that a majority of
transformations continue to fail. Today’s dynamic environment adds an extra
level of urgency and complexity. Companies must increasingly react to sudden
shifts in the marketplace, to other external shocks, and to the imperatives of
new business models. The stakes are higher than ever.
So what’s to be done?
In both research and practice, we find that transformations stand the best
chance of success when they focus on four key actions to change mind-sets and
behavior: fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing changes through
formal mechanisms, developing talent and skills, and role modeling.
Collectively labeled the “influence model,” these ideas were introduced more
than a dozen years ago in a McKinsey Quarterly article, “The psychology of change management.” They were based on academic
research and practical experience—what we saw worked and what didn’t.
Digital technologies
and the changing nature of the workforce have created new opportunities and
challenges for the influence model. But it still works overall, a decade and a
half later In a recent McKinsey Global Survey,
we examined successful transformations and found that they were nearly eight
times more likely to use all four actions as opposed to just one. Building both
on classic and new academic research, the present article supplies a primer on
the model and its four building blocks: what they are, how they work, and why
they matter.
Fostering understanding and conviction
We know from research
that human beings strive for congruence between their beliefs and their actions
and experience dissonance when these are misaligned. Believing in the “why” behind
a change can therefore inspire people to change their behavior. In practice,
however, we find that many transformation leaders falsely assume that the “why”
is clear to the broader organization and consequently fail to spend enough time
communicating the rationale behind change efforts.
This common pitfall is
predictable. Research shows that people frequently overestimate the extent to
which others share their own attitudes, beliefs, and opinions—a tendency known
as the false-consensus effect. Studies also highlight another contributing
phenomenon, the “curse of knowledge”: people find it difficult to imagine that
others don’t know something that they themselves do know. To illustrate this
tendency, a Stanford study asked participants to tap out the rhythms of
well-known songs and predict the likelihood that others would guess what they
were. The tappers predicted that the listeners would identify half of the songs
correctly; in reality, they did so less than 5 percent of the time.
Therefore, in times of
transformation, we recommend that leaders develop a change story that helps all
stakeholders understand where the company is headed, why it is changing, and
why this change is important. Building in a feedback loop to sense how the
story is being received is also useful. These change stories not only help get
out the message but also, recent research finds, serve as an effective
influencing tool. Stories are particularly effective in selling brands.
Even 15 years ago, at
the time of the original article, digital advances were starting to make
employees feel involved in transformations, allowing them to participate in
shaping the direction of their companies. In 2006, for example, IBM used its
intranet to conduct two 72-hour “jam sessions” to engage employees, clients,
and other stakeholders in an online debate about business opportunities. No
fewer than 150,000 visitors attended from 104 countries and 67 different
companies, and there were 46,000 posts. As we explain in “Winning hearts and
minds in the 21st century,” social and mobile technologies have since created a
wide range of new opportunities to build the commitment of employees to change.
Reinforcing with formal mechanisms
Psychologists have long
known that behavior often stems from direct association and reinforcement. Back
in the 1920s, Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning research showed how the
repeated association between two stimuli—the sound of a bell and the delivery
of food—eventually led dogs to salivate upon hearing the bell alone. Researchers
later extended this work on conditioning to humans, demonstrating how children
could learn to fear a rat when it was associated with a loud noise. Of course,
this conditioning isn’t limited to negative associations or to animals. The
perfume industry recognizes how the mere scent of someone you love can induce
feelings of love and longing.
Reinforcement can also
be conscious, shaped by the expected rewards and punishments associated with
specific forms of behavior. B. F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning showed
how pairing positive reinforcements such as food with desired behavior could be
used, for example, to teach pigeons to play Ping-Pong. This concept, which
isn’t hard to grasp, is deeply embedded in organizations. Many people who have
had commissions-based sales jobs will understand the point—being paid more for
working harder can sometimes be a strong incentive.
Despite the importance
of reinforcement, organizations often fail to use it correctly. In a seminal
paper “On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B,” management scholar
Steven Kerr described numerous examples of organizational-reward systems that
are misaligned with the desired behavior, which is therefore neglected. Some of
the paper’s examples—such as the way university professors are rewarded for
their research publications, while society expects them to be good teachers—are
still relevant today. We ourselves have witnessed this phenomenon in a global
refining organization facing market pressure. By squeezing maintenance expenditures
and rewarding employees who cut them, the company in effect treated that part
of the budget as a “super KPI.” Yet at the same time, its stated objective was
reliable maintenance.
Even when organizations
use money as a reinforcement correctly, they often delude themselves into
thinking that it alone will suffice. Research examining the relationship
between money and experienced happiness—moods and general well-being—suggests a
law of diminishing returns. The relationship may disappear altogether after
around $75,000, a much lower ceiling than most executives assume.
Money isn’t the only
motivator, of course. Victor Vroom’s classic research on expectancy theory
explained how the tendency to behave in certain ways depends on the expectation
that the effort will result in the desired kind of performance, that this
performance will be rewarded, and that the reward will be desirable. When a Middle Eastern
telecommunications company recently examined performance drivers, it found that
collaboration and purpose were more important than compensation. The company
therefore moved from awarding minor individual bonuses for performance to
celebrating how specific teams made a real difference in the lives of their
customers. This move increased motivation while also saving the organization
millions.
How these
reinforcements are delivered also matters. It has long been clear that
predictability makes them less effective; intermittent reinforcement provides a
more powerful hook, as slot-machine operators have learned to their advantage.
Further, people react negatively if they feel that reinforcements aren’t distributed
fairly. Research on equity theory describes how employees compare their job
inputs and outcomes with reference-comparison targets, such as coworkers who
have been promoted ahead of them or their own experiences at past jobs. We therefore recommend that
organizations neutralize compensation as a source of anxiety and instead focus
on what really drives performance—such as collaboration and purpose, in the
case of the Middle Eastern telecom company previously mentioned.
Developing talent and skills
Thankfully, you can
teach an old dog new tricks. Human brains are not fixed; neuroscience research
shows that they remain plastic well into adulthood. Illustrating this concept,
scientific investigation has found that the brains of London taxi drivers, who
spend years memorizing thousands of streets and local attractions, showed
unique gray-matter volume differences in the hippocampus compared with the
brains of other people. Research linked these differences to the taxi drivers’
extraordinary special knowledge.
Despite an amazing
ability to learn new things, human beings all too often lack insight into what
they need to know but don’t. Biases, for example, can lead people to overlook
their limitations and be overconfident of their abilities. Highlighting this
point, studies have found that over 90 percent of US drivers rate themselves
above average, nearly 70 percent of professors consider themselves in the top
25 percent for teaching ability, and 84 percent of Frenchmen believe they are
above-average lovers.This self-serving bias can lead to
blind spots, making people too confident about some of their abilities and
unaware of what they need to learn. In the workplace, the “mum effect”—a
proclivity to keep quiet about unpleasant, unfavorable messages—often compounds
these self-serving tendencies.
Even when people
overcome such biases and actually want to improve, they can handicap themselves
by doubting their ability to change. Classic psychological research by Martin
Seligman and his colleagues explained how animals and people can fall into a
state of learned helplessness—passive acceptance and resignation that develops
as a result of repeated exposure to negative events perceived as unavoidable.
The researchers found that dogs exposed to unavoidable shocks gave up trying to
escape and, when later given an opportunity to do so, stayed put and accepted
the shocks as inevitable.Like animals, people who believe
that developing new skills won’t change a situation are more likely to be
passive. You see this all around the economy—from employees who stop offering
new ideas after earlier ones have been challenged to unemployed job seekers who
give up looking for work after multiple rejections.
Instilling a sense of
control and competence can promote an active effort to improve. As expectancy
theory holds, people are more motivated to achieve their goals when they
believe that greater individual effort will increase performance.Fortunately, new technologies now
give organizations more creative opportunities than ever to showcase examples
of how that can actually happen.
Role modeling
Research tells us that
role modeling occurs both unconsciously and consciously. Unconsciously, people
often find themselves mimicking the emotions, behavior, speech patterns,
expressions, and moods of others without even realizing that they are doing so.
They also consciously align their own thinking and behavior with those of other
people—to learn, to determine what’s right, and sometimes just to fit in.
While role modeling is
commonly associated with high-power leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Bill
Gates, it isn’t limited to people in formal positions of authority. Smart
organizations seeking to win their employees’ support for major transformation
efforts recognize that key opinion leaders may exert more influence than CEOs.
Nor is role modeling limited to individuals. Everyone has the power to model
roles, and groups of people may exert the most powerful influence of all.
Robert Cialdini, a well-respected professor of psychology and marketing,
examined the power of “social proof”—a mental shortcut people use to judge what
is correct by determining what others think is correct. No wonder TV shows have
been using canned laughter for decades; believing that other people find a show
funny makes us more likely to find it funny too.
Today’s increasingly
connected digital world provides more opportunities than ever to share
information about how others think and behave. Ever found yourself swayed by
the number of positive reviews on Yelp? Or perceiving a Twitter user with a
million followers as more reputable than one with only a dozen? You’re not
imagining this. Users can now “buy followers” to help those users or their
brands seem popular or even start trending.
The endurance of the influence
model shouldn’t be surprising: powerful forces of human nature underlie it.
More surprising, perhaps, is how often leaders still embark on large-scale
change efforts without seriously focusing on building conviction or reinforcing
it through formal mechanisms, the development of skills, and role modeling.
While these priorities sound like common sense, it’s easy to miss one or more
of them amid the maelstrom of activity that often accompanies significant
changes in organizational direction. Leaders should address these building
blocks systematically because, as research and experience demonstrate, all four
together make a bigger impact.
By Tessa Basford and Bill Schaninger
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-four-building-blocks--of-change?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1604
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