A typical quote we hear from your subordinates is, “There are so many political dynamics among the executives that this change is being torn apart. They are not willing to work together, nor admit they are actively working against their peers’ agendas. We need them to lead as a unified team, not bicker and fight with each other.”

Most senior leaders see themselves as individual contributors. They naturally think first about the success of their business unit, process, or function, and orient to the success of the enter­prise second. At a distant third, they sometimes support their peer’s needs and success.

Over the years, this individualistic orientation among those at the top often creates major internal competition for power, resources, staff, project priority, compensation, promotions, and general attention. If this internal competition goes unchecked over many years, it manifests into power struggles, alliance building, internal resistance, and withholding of support from other executive’s agendas. How true is this for you and your team?

Sometimes, the political terrain in the top echelons becomes so fraught with conflict that the senior executives themselves dare not address it, no matter how costly the finger-pointing and backbiting is to the overall performance of the organization. You might find in your own team that talking about the quality of your relationships with each other simply has become too threatening. You might even think that it is better to just leave things alone. However, in your gut, you know that such dys­function can destroy any chance for success in your large change efforts. Why?

Because large complex change—especially transformational change—impacts people and processes across boundaries—boundaries of role, function, process, and organization. Conse­quently, transformation demands cross-boundary support at the top. It is a non-negotiable requirement of success. You can suc­ceed if you have it, but have very little change if you do not. In addition, if you do not have it with your peers, you can hardly expect the rest of your organization to have it either.

How do you get the needed support from your peers?

This is critical! Employees believe what they see (behaviors and actions) and are generally skeptical of words, especially if your words do not match your deeds. Consequently, you must walk your talk if you want to minimize employee resistance and maximize their buy-in and commitment.

Major change, especially transformational change, demands that people change personally. This means you as well as others. The most courageous thing you can do is to go first, with your own personal change. Identify how you need to think and act differently for the change to be successful, and then proactively change your self. Get an executive coach if that will help. Mod­eling personal change yourself and creating safe conditions for others in the organization to follow in kind may just be the bold action that transforming your organization requires.

For example, if you are attempting to create a collaborative cul­ture, then you must work collaboratively yourself. Provide fewer answers and ask more questions. Get more people involved, and keep those not involved informed. Ask for others’ input in situations where you would normally take control. Communicate more. As Gandhi put it, “Be the change!”

Remember that personal change is critical to your success, and it cannot be accomplished in one executive development expe­rience. It is a process, a journey, and take courage and convic­tion to see it through amidst your organization’s changes.

As the sponsor of major change, you have a critical role to play in your change effort—a role that cannot be delegated to anyone else. Furthermore, your role requirements last throughout the change all the way to completion. By the way, completion does not mean when you have implemented the change; it means when your organization is running effectively in its new state and realizing the full value of the change. In short, you must stay involved far longer than you think.

Typically, we see leaders initiate their change efforts by identi­fying desired outcomes, naming a project manager, allocating budget, and specifying a timeline. Then, they either get too involved with the details of the change, which stifles their change team’s efforts, or at the other end of the continuum, they simply disappear, popping in occasionally to assess what is hap­pening and make key decisions. However, their absenteeism has left them uninformed and unequipped to make sound decisions about the change. Sound familiar?

Sponsorship demands that you find the middle road and stay strategically engaged with your change effort through its full lifecycle. Keep your hands out of the details, but your head fully into the strategic issues. Remember, organizational change is primarily business strategy implementation. You are the key person to link your change effort to the business strategy to ensure the change delivers what your strategy demands. Plus, your change team needs you to help them understand the larger strategic challenges the organization faces so they are not blind­sided by them as they plan the change.

We frequently hear project heads, change team members, and consultants bemoan, “Once the future state has been decided, we can never get the attention of the leaders to make key strate­gic decisions about implementation or even offer needed input. It is so low a priority that they squeeze critical discussions about the change into one hour in the middle of their monthly meeting agendas, or become totally inaccessible.”

Do not let your change teams say this about you. Stay informed so you can offer intelligent input and be able to make sound strategic decisions when necessary. Make yourself available to your project team to offer your strategic insight when they have a breakdown they cannot fix or are faced with unfamiliar forks in the road. Discover the barriers they face and use the power of your position to clear the way. Make sure your peers in the top team are providing what your project team needs to succeed, whether that be access to their line leaders, staff for special change tasks, or time on their mid-level manager’s agendas to integrate the change work with their operations. Know what is working and not working so you can justly hold people accountable for progress.

In last month’s letter, we suggested that you needed to stay far more involved—strategically (not tactically)—in your change efforts, all the way to completion. We suggested that you will need to break down organizational barriers for your change team, provide input, offer guidance, and make decisions at criti­cal junctions. Much of your needed involvement will regard human and cultural issues.

Are you equipped? Do you understand human dynamics during change—such as motivation, resistance, human needs and drives, communication and behavioral styles, and emotional reactions and the mindsets that trigger them? Do you feel capa­ble dealing with the impacts that your change may have on your existing culture, or how to transform your culture to serve your outcomes while your organization undergoes its change?

Most senior executives are not so equipped. They are far more skilled with the strategic content of their businesses than the people issues, especially during change. They understand their markets, customers, products and services, business models, and organizational systems and processes, but do not under­stand how to constructively address the psychology of people, change, or culture. In fact, most change efforts fail not because the executives designed the wrong “content” solution, but because they could not get them implemented effectively by their people. Either resistance was too great, political maneu­vering derailed the effort, employees withdrew their participa­tion, or once implemented, people simply ignored the new state and went on using the old technology or process. Sound famil­iar?

People issues have not always been of such great concern. Until the 1990’s, most change was developmental or transitional, with far less significant human impacts. At most, people had to modify certain behaviors or learn new but similar skills to implement change. But now, most major change is transforma­tional, which impacts people far more deeply, often emotionally and within their own belief and values systems. In transforma­tion, fundamental ways of being, relating to others, and operat­ing are often radically changed. This makes expert treatment of human and cultural issues a critical success factor in transfor­mation. (See Beyond Change Management: Advanced Strate­gies for Today’s Transformational Leaders, Anderson and Ackerman Anderson, 2001, for a review of the different types of change and their human impacts.)

Sponsoring transformational change requires you to understand what makes people tick, both what ignites their passion and commitment and what causes them to resist. If you learn about human emotions and the belief systems that trigger them, you will be better able to design and implement your change efforts so they cause people to commit and participate in positive ways.

If you do not attend to or understand human dynamics, then you will inadvertently make decisions that have huge negative impacts on your people without having the forethought to put in place ways to mitigate those impacts. Here are a few examples of emotionally costly decisions:

These common actions will disrupt your change effort, slow it down, and make it far more costly. Mitigate these potential road blocks by learning about the human and cultural dynamics of change so you will understand how to generate alternatives that create commitment rather than resistance.

Typically, a new business strategy requires several major changes, and perhaps many smaller ones. Many executive spon­sors will set all of these efforts loose on the organization, even promoting executive incentives for each one who succeeds the fastest. Since each is its own separate change effort, they staff these efforts, budget for them, govern them, and monitor them as independent projects. To make matters worse, the leaders of each effort may run their projects using different change mod­els, competing consulting firms, and the same people who need to keep the business running effectively while they simulta­neously attempt to change it. Unfortunately, this strategy of unleashing numerous isolated efforts creates impossible levels of chaos, confusion, and competition. It increases the cost of your overall change, radically slows its pace, and can destroy employee morale and commitment to change. Fortunately, there is a better way.

Integrate your change efforts from the beginning. Once you identify your major initiatives, establish a change infrastructure for how you will govern them, make decisions, allocate resources across them, and determine overall pacing. Create overarching agreements for how to minimize the complexity and burden on your organization and overtly share accountabil­ity for enterprise-wide success.

Make sure your infrastructure includes a multiple project inte­gration team. Use this team to streamline and consolidate your interdependent projects, remove redundancies, and share resources.

And think seriously about using a common change process methodology—one that allows for customization for the unique needs of each initiative, cross- fertilization among them, and a shared language and approach to handling process complexities and human dynamics. See the Article, “How to Implement a Common Change Methodology to Increase Your Organization’s Change Results and Skill.”

Lastly, be sure to set your changes up to interface effectively with your ongoing operations so that neither is sub-optimized. You can change your business successfully while you run your business successfully only if you integrate the two so neither derails the other.

You can blow holes in the potential success of your change efforts by setting unrealistic timelines. Just because you want the change to go fast does not mean that it can go fast. It is fine to create a real sense of urgency for change, but that does not mean that its timeline can be expedited beyond what is humanly possible.

Speed is a product of a number of variables: the complexity of your change, the change readiness and capability of your orga­nization, the resources you have allocated, and the state of your current operations. Mixed together with a healthy dose of oper­ational reality, these variables establish the timeline that is pos­sible. Your change could go faster if it was less complex, or your organization was more ready or had more change skill, or you allocated more resources, or your current operations were in better shape. But each variable is what it is right now, and the mix of them all determines the speed possible now.

When you establish timelines that do not mesh with these reali­ties, your people will see right through them, and you will lose credibility. Furthermore, the very people you need to make the change happen will begin to resist, resent, and fight the change because they feel victimized by its timeline. Their stress increases, and they begin to think that since the timeline is unre­alistic, so is the change effort and its leadership.

An unrealistic timeline does nothing to increase the speed of change. It actually slows things down because it drastically lowers the change readiness of your organization, and can even reduce performance in the ongoing business. There are defi­nitely ways to increase the speed of your change, but setting unrealistic timelines is not one of them!

This recommendation goes directly to your leadership mindset and style. When an organization feels “done to” by change—rather than inspired, involved, and led—resistance abounds. Recent management literature has focused on the dangers and obsolescence of the “command and control” leadership style, with good reason. If you assume that your people will change because you tell them to, or threaten punishment if they don’t, backlash is inevitable. Of course, making critical change is important to the future of your business, but holding your peo­ple hostage is not the answer. Resentment and “workforce rage” will grow. Loyalty to you and the organization will go out the window. Your credibility will shrink. So, what can you do to engage and compel your people to take on the challenge?

Change does not happen from the outside in… “Do it because I said so.” It happens from the inside out. People can only change—really change—when they understand buy in to the need, and decide to do things differently. Your leadership responsibility is to create that understanding, test it, model it, and make it palatable and compelling. Engage your people to think about what needs to change and why. Involve them in generating potential solutions, out-of-the-box possibilities. Give them an opportunity to have a say—if not some real influ­ence—on the new future you are asking them to create. With your leadership and real employee engagement, your people will see the value of change and make it happen because they want to, not because you demanded it.

One very powerful way to generate momentum and readiness is to consciously build a critical mass of genuine support for the change. Identify the most influential “opinion leaders” from all levels of the affected functions, the most powerful executives, and the staff that show the most enthusiasm and understanding for the changes you seek. These people form your “bank account” of support. Knowing how much positive energy already exists for the changes is key to understanding how much more support you must then generate from your “fence-sitters,” and eventually, from converting your resistors. Remember that critical mass is a game of inertia, not specific numbers. You must mobilize enough support to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and give the change a life of its own, like a snowball rolling downhill picking up speed. Only then will your change happen.

The best way to spread understanding, generate creative think­ing, and build critical mass is through participation. There is a full range of engagement strategies from which to pick. Do not make the mistake of thinking that when you ask your people for their ideas, you must then do what they say. This leads to the faulty leadership assumption that it is better not to ask at all. Do ask, but set clear expectations for what will be done with the input. With your people engaged in the possibility of creating a better future for their organization, you will have added impor­tant weight to the critical mass of support that you must have to succeed.

Many organizations are run with cultures and mindsets that demand, “Get it right the first time, and do it now,” “Mistakes are not to be tolerated,” and “Project plans and predetermined budgets are sacred.” If your changes are transformational, they will be unruly, unpredictable, and messy while happening. Project management tools and structures are too rigid as the backbone for guiding your transformational process. They do not accommodate the human roller coaster, and they typically generate the misconception that the plan is the reality.

Because you will need to figure things out as you go, you will need a different navigation system. Transformation requires a vehicle for seeking out daily surprises and responding to emer­gent needs and new information. We strongly recommend that you create a course correction system, an ongoing mechanism for generating new information and out-of-the-box thinking. You will also have to create the cultural expectation that the breakthrough solution you seek might come from any part of your organization or any person. Since this co-creative way of working is unique in most organizations, as illustrated by the predominance of command and control leadership, you must not only create this course correction vehicle, but also embed it, use it, and model its value to the organization on behalf of pro­ducing a successful change. This suggestion is one of the most powerful ways we know to alter your culture and mindset, and to build your organization’s resilience for keeping up with the perpetual demands for change.

When a major change is announced, and the leader named to it is someone who simply has time on their hands, or comes from a distant staff function, or does not have the right experience or influence or power, the signal about the low importance of the change is unmistakable. Or just as bad, the person named as leader is known to have a political bias that will skew the out­come from the start.

Your top change leaders must have organizational savvy, politi­cal clout, respect, and wisdom about the required future state needed, emotional intelligence, and people and cultural know-how to be successful on any major change. This means that an underling, a human resource staffer, or an external change con­sultant cannot run your change, especially if it is transforma­tional and long term in nature.

This also means that you must make a hard choice about nam­ing a highly respected line leader as the top orchestrator of your change. Although it is tough to take someone you rely on from your ongoing operation, think about the risk of not doing so and having your change fail. Put the right people in charge and ensure that they have the support, time, and resources they need to be successful. Choose people who can interface confidently with your ongoing operation and see the big picture of that which is best for the overall organization. Choose someone who will do the personal and cultural work as well as the technical and financial work, and someone who will engage the best resources in the organization to create the critical mass of sup­port and behavior change you need. And by all means, take their ongoing responsibilities “off their plates” so they can focus their attention on the change. If your change is big, this means full-time attention.

Most consulting firms have enormous technical, financial, or professional expertise to offer you, as well as armies of staff consultants to help you succeed. When you are faced with the unknowns of transformation and are driven by the fear of fail­ure, external consultants can appear to be a very appealing solu­tion to your woes. We see three limiting patterns in this scenario:

When you need certain kinds of external help, hire for that. Stay in control and always negotiate check-points that enable you to review and alter your consulting relationships when you recog­nize the need to do so. When you have many major change ini­tiatives underway requiring different kinds of consulting expertise, put a savvy change leader in place to oversee the big picture, and even coordinate and align the various consulting firms you have engaged. Keep your organization’s interests at the forefront, and if you lose sight of them, call “time out” with your consultants to regain your footing.

The number of disenfranchised competent internal resources (i.e., technical, business process, change management or orga­nization development specialists) who leaders do not use on their change efforts is quite astounding. Learn about and use your internal experts, or at least team them up with your exter­nal consultants for partnering or learning purposes. Don’t assume that because you have hired external support and are paying a lot of money for these people, that they automatically know more than your own people. Ask around.