Leading Change Through Reinforcement

Change is tough and people have a natural tendency to resist it. That is ok. It is human nature. But, we live in a world where the rate of change is accelerating around us. If we don’t have the ability to adapt and help our teams to do the same, we quickly become irrelevant.
If you want to be able to lead your team to success, it is critical that you have the insights and skills required to help them to adapt to the changing needs of customers and the market.

In my last blogs I spoke to two of the things that you can do to change behaviors. Number one is to make sure that those who have to adapt to a new process or way of doing things see what is in it for them. Without this, they are not likely to put in the work required to make that change.

The second thing is to keep what you are asking them to do as simple as possible in order to facilitate their learning the core concepts of what you want accomplish. After this, your team is smart enough to figure out the details for themselves.

Another tactic that you can use to ensure that the change you desire to see sticks is to find as many ways as possible to repeat and reinforce the learnings. A classic mistake that organizations make is that they spend a very expensive two days training their teams on a new approach or system and then the participants are left to fend for themselves while they implement those changes in the real world.

When you role out a change initiative, you need to build in ways to reinforce the learnings and adaptation of your team. Your tools, training and communications need to incorporate the concepts that you have been teaching. Every communication that you make to your team should highlight learnings, successes and examples of how the change is having a positive impact.

Very importantly, your managers should be mandated and have the tools to coach on and reinforce the new behaviors every time that they work with their teams.

Change is tough and no matter how hard people work at it, it is human nature to fall back into old habits. When you roll a change in process or approach out to your team, it is critical that your communications, tools and coaching reflect and reinforce this change. Your team needs to be regularly reminded and gently nudged back on track if they have fallen back into old habits.

If you are able to do this effectively, the success of your initiative will be almost guaranteed.

Hopefully, some of these suggestions have been helpful to you. If you would like help initiating a change on your team don’t hesitate to contact me at marc@solutionsmrc.com. Good luck!

Marc