Ease the fear of change
Next, Roeder had to convince his people that there was a better way to do business and that it was worth the effort to make it happen. The ability to take action on change rather than just talk about it is obviously the big difference maker.
“One of the definitions of insanity is expecting things to change without changing anything,” Roeder says. “It’s human nature. When you’re managing activities and you’re getting the job done doing things this way, your receptiveness to changing it is, ‘You don’t understand how hard that was to get under control. This is what works. We’re not changing it.’”
It takes an effort on your part to break that mentality, and Roeder faced an immediate obstacle in his endeavor to enact change.
“I sat down with the management team and we were having a meeting,” Roeder says. “I was being told, ‘Listen, Craig, we can probably, as an organization, only take on two or three major initiatives to make organizational change. If we can do a couple of those a year, that’s pretty good.’”
That’s not quite what Roeder was hoping to hear.
“You’re sitting down and there are 14 individuals leading different aspects of your organization,” Roeder says. “So then you ask the question, ‘Which 12 of you want to volunteer to not change anything this year so we can go focus on a couple of other areas?’ Now if I would have had anybody volunteer, I would have known I had the wrong person leading that section. As a manager, they should all be looking to enhance their area of responsibility — ‘How do I make this better? How do I lead this to a new day?’”
To help the process along, Roeder gave each of his managers a copy of the best-selling book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson.
“It’s a little 45-minute read,” Roeder says. “It’s starting to look at change and realizing that most change that occurs in life is positive and it’s for the good. It’s to start not only looking for change but to embrace change so you can be improving constantly. We started to say that there’s nothing really sacred here. Just because we’ve done something a certain way for two, three or four years, that doesn’t mean we can’t change it and come up with a better method.”
It’s all about breaking down barriers and fighting the natural instincts that humans have to resist change.
“You have to break that mindset that we can only change one thing or two things at a time,” Roeder says. “You have to start off with the premise that you can’t be improving if you’re not changing anything. You’re not going to find better ways to execute needs or operations or processes if you don’t change it. It has to change. That’s part of the culture. We have to foster an organization that embraces it.
“If they start seeing that the other directors and managers are looking to enhance and improve their areas, there’s a little pressure to say, ‘You better have a plan, too.’ It’s having a culture that embraces change. If I change something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean we failed. That means we found something that doesn’t work. What else can we try?”
