How to Lead Change When People Don’t Care

It's hard to lead change when people are too busy and distracted to care.

In this article, learn:

• Why it's hard to get people to care
• How to build buy-in, step by step

Is this an attention span problem?

I’ve seen a few articles recently suggesting that millennials now have a smaller attention span than a goldfish. Thanks to screen time, distraction and general inferiority, millennials have now fallen below goldfish on the focus ladder, checking in at only five seconds of uninterrupted focus time.

As it turns out, this ‘data’ is totally bogus. First of all, fish have exceptional memories. Goldfish can remember things for up to five months. If you've ever had fish or been near them and you want to rub your fingers over a fish tank, you'll see pretty quickly that they remember what that means.

Secondly, our attention spans haven't shrunk. What has changed is the density, saturation and quantity of information we're trying to jam into them. The number of ads we see a day, the amount of content that's coming at us, the number of emails that we have in our inbox, the number of messages that we've got on our phone, and the number of balls we're expected to juggle at any point in time. It’s a lot. There’s more of it, it’s trickier, it’s denser, and it’s asking more of us in response than at any point in history.

This means we're competing in a tough environment when we're trying to get people's attention, much less to secure their commitment or action. So we need to work a little harder to keep things moving.

Is that annoying? Sure. But that’s the environment we’re operating in, and if we can’t do anything to change it, we may as well work with it.

Why it's hard to get people to care

There are two main reasons why it's hard to get people to care: it's easy to drop balls, and commitment needs to be earned.

1. DROPped BALLS

There’s plenty of things that rob us of our time and energy. Compliance requirements. Process. Lack of sleep. People needs. The easy, trivial tasks that steal our bandwidth. Shifting priorities. Shifting dates. Shifting… everything. Life stuff. Personal stuff. Health stuff. General bullshit and drama.

Here’s the thing: it's really easy for us to drop what's important to us.

I have a commitment to a half-hour daily exercise practice that I know will undoubtedly transform my day and my mood. But what's the first thing to go if I stay up too late working and then I don't get enough sleep? …you guessed it. I don't exercise in the morning.

What have you started and loved lately, that you’ve dropped? A podcast you were listening to? A course you’ve signed up to? A new hobby you really enjoy? It’s easy to put away even the things we love the most, when life gets busy and we lose focus.

The lesson here is simple: we drop the things that are important to us, much less the things that are important to anyone else. So it’s even easier for other people to drop the commitments they’ve made to us. Which is fine, and understandable – but isn’t going to help us make progress.

So, what can we do? How do we get people involved with our initiative, strategy, working group or programme? It’s not hard, it just takes some thought.

2. EARNed COMMITMENT

There are some basic preconditions we need to meet before we can expect people to commit. Unfortunately, in an organisational setting, we often rush. People often ask me to run workshops to get people to “own” a new programme – which is a pretty big ask for something they've never heard about before! It’s a bit like proposing on a first date.

(Now, there are some communities where you can get away with that. I spent my formative years in Ashburton, which is a town about an hour south of Christchurch. And I had three kids by 26. Things happen fast there. You go to a party, before you know it, you're having a baby. Your results may very)

Most of the time, though, a first date proposal won’t land. We've got to do a bit of work first. We've got to attract some interest. We've got to show them why they should be interested in what we've got to offer. We've got to prove that we can back it up. And then we can ask for a commitment.

Work's a bit the same.

YOUR CHANGE LEADERSHIP TOOLKIT

This magical ladder is the foundation of Meetings that Matter, and is an utterly indispensable tool to diagnose workshops, relationships and conversations of all kinds.

FIVE LEVELS OF BUY-IN

Let's dig into each of the five levels to learn why they're hard, and what you need to do to move forward.

1. Toxic
2. Tedious
3. Talkfests
4. Teasers
5. Transformation 

LEVEL 1: TOXIC

The first level is toxic, or tense. When things are toxic, there's conflict. Sometimes it’s visible. Sometimes it isn’t, and it shows up as tension. Sometimes, it’s even trickier and it shows up as things we aren’t even saying.

Conflict is toxic, because it makes it really difficult for us to trust each other. And when people don't trust you, they can't hear a word that comes out of your mouth.

Or maybe they trust you, but they don't trust each other. It might be that they don't trust their boss right now, because they’ve heard rumours of a restructure. It might be siloed or adversarial relationships between teams. It might be tension within a team.

Either way, unless we’ve got a strong foundation of trust to work from, it’s extraordinarily difficult to go any further.

Top tips to build trust

• Speak the same language. Thanks to processing fluency, people automatically trust you when you build familiarity through shared language.
• Acknowledge current or historical grievances. Don’t pretend stuff didn’t happen - bring it up, work it into the big picture narrative and move on.
• Don’t use jargon. If you send out a meeting invite that says, "We would like you to be involved in our continuous improvement, agile, change transformation, digital strategy programme” you’ve already lost the game.

Level 2: TEDIOUS

Trust is great, but it’s not enough. The next variety of relationship or meeting is the tedious one. Here, things are boring. And boring makes us frustrated. Because we have no real connection to what’s going on, and we don't really know or care what we're doing or why, we get frustrated at the time and energy we’re wasting.

If we want to put the tedium away, we need to connect to purpose. Rather than telling someone they need to be involved in a "Continuous improvement, digital strategy business change programme,", which sounds a lot like something boring they don’t have time for, connect to why you need a programme in the first place.

Try talking about the time that’s being wasted and the overwhelm experienced in your teams. Try talking about the impact on mental health and wellbeing. Try talking about the money being wasted on systems that don’t talk to each other.

Even better… try asking people why. Before you even start talking about what you need to do, or how you’ll make things better, take the space to ask people why it matters at all.

Top tips to connect to purpose

Don’t tell, ask. A classic sales method is never to sell to someone – but have them sell to you. In a conversation with a potential client, I’ll never tell them why they need me – I’ll just ask them what they’re struggling with, and how things would be better if they could beat it.

Notice we're not even talking about ownership yet? We're just going, "Care, please. For the love of god, care about my thing." Because we've got to earn our way there.

When we have people connected to why something matters, the tide changes. We shift from a zone where people walk out of your conversations feeling worse than when they went in, to a situation where people are feeling better.

Welcome to… the talkfest.

Level 3: TALKFESTS

In the talkfest, everybody comes together and talk about what's going on. Talkfests have a really important role to play, because they build understanding. Knowing why something matters isn't enough. You have to be able to locate it in a broader context, and understand what’s going on.

What gets problematic is when we get stuck there. We come together to talk about things every six weeks, but nothing happens.

The problem here is that it’s all too much. We’ve got so much context that it feels immovable. So, to move on from a talkfest stage, we need focus. We need to focus our energy and we need to focus our attention on our most important priorities.

Top tips to DRIVE focus:

Narrow the playing field. Ask questions like…

• What are the three things we should focus on to move forward?
• What are our priorities?
• What matters the most?
• If we could only fix one thing, what would it be?”

Level 4: TEASER

Once we’re focused, we can move on from the talkfest and actually get some work done. Enter: the teaser. Here, we all trust each other, we all care, and we've agreed where to put our attention. Fantastic. You have now officially gotten further in your strategy and change process than most teams and organisations.

At this point, things are starting to feel quite good, because you've got agreement. You’re nodding your heads together. You’re leaving meetings on a Thursday afternoon feeling like you’re not wasting your time.

The problem is: people agreeing to things to your face or on email or in a room doesn't necessarily translate to people actually doing anything. If you’ve ever agreed on something in a meeting, and then been baffled when nothing happens, you’ll understand the danger of the teaser. It’s not because people don’t care – they’ve just got their own shit going on. They're overwhelmed. They're looking for a new apartment. They've got too many emails. They're dealing with people issues. The problem here isn’t a lack of care, but a lack of balance and personal connection.

Moving on from the teaser requires genuine commitment. Agreement is not enough. With commitment, people have real skin in the game. At this point, we move away from theory, and we ground people's focus and energy back to what our ideas really mean, for us. Which is why commitment is all about personal connection. What each person will fund. What each person will lead. What each person will change, do more of, do less of, or do differently.

The appointments they put in my calendar. The meetings they've scheduled. The purchases they’ve made. The conversations they’ve had. Commitment makes things real.

Top tip to build commitment:

Peer pressure works well here. Ask people to commit to action, within the next week, in front of others.

Note: this might not be about committing to implementation, or transformation. Sometimes, commitment is about taking the next step.

Level 5: TRANSFORMATIONAL

At the transformational level, things feel quite magic. People aren’t coming together to talk about what they should do, or will do. They’re talking about the progress they’ve made, and the things they’ve done. In a transformation meeting, you’re sharing progress and action rather than ideas.

At this point, we need momentum. Because good things don’t happen by themselves. In between starting something and finishing something, there will always be any number of hurdles that are going to get in your way. Too many small, unacknowledged hurdles, and your project will die.

Rather than launching into a strategy process or a change process assuming that people will stay the course, assume that they won't. Build your communication and milestones in a way that support people, on a continuous basis. Celebrate small successes, and make them visible along the way, so that people feel committed to keeping things moving.

Top tip to build momentum

Don’t prescribe to people what their ongoing commitment needs to be… ask them.  

• Where are your meetings and relationships currently at?
• What can you do to take the next step up the ladder?

LEARN MORE ABOUT BUILDING BUY-IN

• Check out Meetings that Matter for tips on how to run strategic conversations that drive change outside the meeting room
• Enrol in Not An MBA to boost your change leadership skills.