Q. What is your approach to those who resist change?
My approach has been to try to position things such that it almost becomes their idea.
It takes a lot of effort and time to do that. It’s working with someone in almost a scenario where they are not even aware they are being worked on. Eventually, if you make them feel they are ultimately making that contribution to change, they are totally on board. Now that doesn’t always work.
There are people who are dead set against change. I’ve been fortunate not to have too many of those. In the case where you do, it may come down to quite simply expressing to someone that it’s a democracy up to a certain point. I had the mindset that every change was going to have to be dealt with in a collaborative effort.
It wasn’t going to be me coming in and telling them, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ because that was never going to work. My approach early on was to try to convince people not only what we needed to do, but why we needed to do that. I felt that people were more receptive if they knew why we were doing things, not just that we were going to do it that way.
At first, it’s a dialogue. ‘Why do we need this? I don’t understand. I don’t get it.’ We just keep chipping away at all the defenses until we get to the point where they hopefully understand that it’s for the betterment of the company as a whole.
Q. How can your image help you get buy-in to change?
Leaders are very intimidating figures. I’m also intimidating because I’m fairly tall. I intimidate people just being around them. So I try to make people feel comfortable very early in a conversation.
If they want to close the door, we close the door. If they want to leave the door open, we leave the door open. I ask them, ‘What makes you comfortable?’
I like for people to know why we do things — not just what we’re going to do but why. I think it’s the right thing to do, to explain the reasons why. I’m not a very complicated guy, so my team knows that I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining reasons. But I will try to put it in context of why we’re doing things.
At the end of the day, we’re all adults, at least we should be.