Leading Change With Simplicity

Changing the behavior of your teams can be quite challenging and there is an actual physiological reason for this. The neuron pathways in your brain get wired such that it is much easier to go a certain way whenever you are exposed to a stimulus that has been seen before. The more you see that stimulus, the more ingrained the pathway. It is like your brain develops a rut that you fall into every time that you are exposed to a specific situation. That makes habits hard to change.
In my last blog, I spoke to the importance of making sure that whatever the change or new procedure you wish to implement is, it is critical to effectively explain how that change will help those affected by it. If people do not see what is in it for them, they will be much less likely to engage and commit the effort required to alter their habits.

Another thing that I have seen which really helps people with change is making that change as simple to understand and implement as possible.

If you have a sales or marketing background, I have no doubt that at some point in your past you have seen the rollout of a new sales model or customer management system fail because there was so much information presented, so much change required, that the participants where overwhelmed by what they perceived needed to be done. Once this occurred, their will to make the change was lost and the initiative died due to passive resistance.

When I was working to move my sales team to being more customer-focused, a key challenge was to get them to recognize that each customer has different business and personal priorities. If the reps couldn’t recognize different customer types, they would not know how to appropriately adapt their presentations to the specific needs of the customer and the rest of the initiative would fail.

To teach this, we introduced a very simple model with only four profiles of our most obvious customer types. There are many, many different types of customer profiles, but in order to make it easy for the team to learn and more importantly, for the managers to coach the larger concept, we kept it as simple as possible.

The critical thing that we needed to achieve was to get the reps to make that first step of recognizing the differences between their customers. Once this occurred, they were able to see the value of the new approach and were more than smart enough to figure out the more complicated customer profiles.

The mistake that I see management make over and over again is that when they introduce change, they make it so complex, so overwhelming that no one is able to see the first steps to take in making the most important elements of that change happen.

So, when you are introducing change to your team, remember, keep it simple so the big concepts are understood and bought into. Once this has occurred, your team will be more than smart enough to take the next steps on their pathway to change.

Marc