Managing The Change

[0:00] Full Funnel Freedom followers, this special episode solo pod talking about change

[0:05] and how people don't. So what does that mean? Well, check out the episode and find out about how people actually move from where they are to where we want them to be and how as leaders we can keep that momentum going so we don't become part of the huge number of change initiatives that end up failing.

[0:27] Music.

[0:32] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. If you are listening to this, you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue. Purpose of Full Funnel Freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your.

[0:45] Music. So it's Labor Day and we are starting to slowly emerge from the stupor of summer holidays, our sellers are starting to come back and looking at the end of Q3 thinking about how all those deals that they promised us would get across the finish line by the end of the quarter probably going to get punched into Q4 and that ties into today's topic which is around change and how people don't actually change. That's a very common cliche in personal and professional conversations. How can I get them to change? Or I wish they would change. And people don't change. Change is external and impersonal. Change is really like a light switch. So we don't have a CRM. We do have a CRM. We don't work from home. We do work from home. Our comp plan looks like this. Our client plan looks like that. That's change. Change is super simple. Humans, on the other hand, transition.

[0:45] Funnels consistently, reliably full.

[2:01] And for leaders, one of the biggest challenges that we have when we are implementing and leading a change, and there's a data out there that says as some number that blew my mind. It was 83% or 93%, something that I thought this cannot be true. Of all corporate change initiatives fail and.

[2:29] My belief is that that is largely because leaders look at it as a change instead of as a transition. And this also comes from experience when I was working in the corporate world and we decided to implement a CRM and how that went over or, in fact, didn't. In fact, as I've said on previous episodes, I believe the maximum adoption level we got from our national sales team was 55%, which sounds good, and it's more than half, and it still wasn't awesome because we still had almost half of the national sales team not actually using the CRM really at all. And though and on several of them that did were even getting into malicious compliance which is the previous version of quiet quitting i like malicious compliance better which is like doing just to the letter of the job right so if they were required to enter a task for every phone call they would enter a task that was called phone call and that would be the whole the whole task which is malicious compliance so as leaders we go through these emotions just the same way that our team members do. And this is detailed in more in my book, Change the Sandler Way.

[3:54] And those stages of transition are similar to those stages of grief. So it's denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment. And for our team members.

[4:09] Some of them are not going to make it all the way through. They may get stuck in one. They may get stuck in desire. They may get stuck in resistance. Once they get to exploration, though, now they're at least on the way to fully transitioning and adopting the new behavior. Because ultimately, all change is about behavior. Behavior so whether we comp on this model now and our seller's behavior is focused on those activities and we shift our comp plan and we our sellers are now focused on these activities once they get to that exploration stage they usually get to commitment uh because they're already on that path however they can't get stuck in denial they can't get stuck in resistance The key thing to watch to understand where our team members are is in that behavior side. And you may have key members of your team that say all the right words when you're in a group.

[5:11] And when the group disperses, then they go back to their old patterns of behavior. And I've experienced sellers who, when they're in front of their leaders, say all the right things, yeah, boss, great idea, et cetera, et cetera, except they stick to their same behaviors, whether that's prospecting opportunities that are considered to be too small now, or they're focused on selling products that they're comfortable selling and used to get comped on versus the products that leadership wants them to be selling. And are now incentivizing them to sell more of because they've adjusted the compensation plan, it all comes down to behavior, which can be very frustrating because I know for me, I lead with trust. And so when someone says, I'm going to do this by this time, I inherently trust them. And trust, as the cliche goes, takes years to build and seconds to take away.

[6:06] So if you do lead with trust, you may end up getting your heart broken a couple of times like I have. Have however in that leading with trust we do get to forgive the person and so if they say i'm going to do this by this time and then they don't do it then we can certainly circle back and say what i heard was you were going to do this by this time what did i miss and it gives them that are that them that opportunity to say okay i did say that i'm sorry i will make it up and now we can add in a little bit of extra commitment. Great.

[6:44] I'm excited to see you do that. What happens if this happens again? I don't want to ever have this conversation. So when we look at denial, that's pretty easy. Those are individuals who are saying, I don't like this. This isn't going to happen. This can't be happening, etc., etc. Resistance is.

[7:05] Can be active or passive. So very similar to active resistance is fairly obvious because it will manifest in behavior. And we've all experienced that at some point in our careers, whether we did it or we had a colleague who actively resisted. The passive resistance is that insidious, malicious compliance or quiet quitting. And the key part of managing denial and resistance is understanding where our team member is coming from. Now, ultimately, our team is going to break down roughly 20, 60, 20. 20% of our team are going to be change champions in change the Sandler way. I call them angels.

[7:51] They're the ones who are right on board. They're changing their behavior. They're adapting in real time. Let's get going. The bottom 20% in the book, they're called atheists. And there's no religious significance to any of this. I just like alliteration. It doesn't matter what the change is, they're going to resist it. They're the change deniers. And traditional change management for leaders says that we need to go down and coach, cajole, beg, incentivize, and threaten those atheists to get on board. And I will tell you, audience, they're never going to get on board. Don't burn your time with them.

[8:30] Let them go. They're there by choice. Now, if they want to adapt and come back, great. However, it's unlikely. Help them understand that this is the way things are going to be. That was the old model. This is the new model. And you will help them go be more successful elsewhere if they choose to not adapt to the new model.

[8:51] In the middle, we have our fence-sitters. In the book, they're agnostics, right? So we have angels, atheists, and agnostics. Now, this middle 60%, they're likely your veterans who have been through way too many flavor-of-the-month change programs. And so they're going to wait this one out. They believe us as their leader and because of scar tissue that they have from hopefully not us previous leaders they're going to think yeah you know what i'm gonna wait this one out you know maybe hamish went to a conference and saw speaker got all pumped and excited and he's going to be on to the next shiny object in 30 days. So with those agnostics, we help them see how to adjust. We give them the path and we encourage our change champions.

[9:52] To go and talk to the fence sitters to help them understand how the change champion got to where we as the leader said that we want our team to be.

[10:05] Because sometimes cousin Steve or cousin Susie needs to go down to the, uh, and say what mom or dad has been saying in a different way that's going to resonate. And I've experienced this working with my clients where one time in a session, I had a seller who asked a question and I gave them a couple of ideas. And in the back of the room, I watched the sales manager cover their eyes and lean on the table. I went up to that manager afterwards and I said, did I say something offside? And they said, no, I've been telling that seller to do exactly what you told them for the last seven months and they've just never done it. I said, yeah, sometimes it's got to come from an external resource that for whatever reason is more resident than the boss.

[11:01] So those are the three groups that we're going to encounter when we get into change. We have our change champions, the angels, we have the change deniers, the atheists, and we have the fence sitters who the agnostics who we'd like to to move into champion territory. They're just going to take a little while longer. So denial, resistance, especially that passive resistance is really dangerous. Now we get an exploration. Now, once we're into exploration, this is where we're noticing our team members are starting to make those adjustments. And this is a key inflection point in any change initiative, which is we as leaders have to recognize the small wins.

[11:45] If we don't, our team is eventually going to get demotivated because a change is the hardest thing that humans can do. Because our brains are wired to keep us safe, which usually means stuck. And so any kind of change, even if we are asking our team members to adjust two inches to the left, that's it. You're on this path. You're marching on this path. Great path. And two inches to the left. That's all we want you to do. That's a huge leap.

[12:19] It doesn't sound like a huge leap. And again, leaders went through all of these emotions, denial, resistance, exploration, commitment, months ago, because we had to. You know, if we're going to roll out a CRM or do a work-from-home policy or adjust the comp plan, we didn't come up with it the night before we rolled it out to our team. Unfortunately, we forget as leaders that we went through all of those stages. And so when we come to our team and say, hey, group, here's the new benefits plan. And we're shocked when they don't give us 100% boss great idea, because they're just starting denial, resistance, exploration and commitment, which again, we went through months ago. What we need to do in that that case or what we what we want to do is recognize those small wins right so when our our team members take a quarter of an inch step to the left we got to recognize that, and it doesn't have to be a pizza party and some leaders are like well they're supposed to go two inches why do i have to recognize the quarter of an inch because it's the thing that's going to to keep the team moving forward. Because no matter how resilient we are as humans, without.

[13:42] The prospect of success and without recognition and validation of those small wins, we will eventually give up. Because again, change is the hardest thing that we can do. So if we don't have that that reinforcement that we're on the right path we're eventually going to give up this plays out in personal relationships I would imagine several of you listening have had the experience with a personal partner and whether it was you or them who was doing or not doing something that the other person wanted done or not done and the other person you know let's say it was you in this case that you weren't doing something that your partner wanted you to do and you started making little baby steps, you know, maybe it was putting your clothes in the laundry basket to use a, a cliche from, uh, from com from T television comedies. And you didn't get a, a stroke or a, or an attaboy or an attagirl for doing that.

[14:46] You'll probably do it for a little while, not that long, but a little while. And then eventually you're going to be thinking, hey, I'm doing this because you asked me to. Can you give me a stroke? And as leaders, we might think, hey, that's their job, right? They're on this path. They've got to move two inches to the left. And that's what we need to do. And I even told them we need to move two inches to the left by the end of the quarter. So I even gave them a timeline. So they should be changing how they march. They should be shifting right now.

[15:24] That's not the way humans work. And when we discount those four stages of transition, we unintentionally make our job harder and we make it more likely that our change implementation is probably going to end up in that 83% or 93% or whatever that ridiculously high number is of change initiatives that fail. Now that we're into the exploration phase, recognizing those small wins is going to keep the change momentum. And then finally, commitment. That's where our team is two inches to the left. They're marching in a line in that new direction. The change has been successful.

[16:04] Now we can celebrate. Now we can move forward into the next initiative. So ultimately, as leaders, keep in mind that humans do not change. They transition. The four stages are denial, resistance, exploration, commitment. A percentage of our team is going to get stuck in one of the first two stages and may not make it through. So we need to be prepared for that. We've got to recognize the small wins and the small changes in behavior that our teams are making, our individual members are making, so that it keeps the momentum going and ultimately creates a successful change. I'll be very curious to hear in the comments what your big takeaways were from this episode and how you've implemented what you've heard today in a change initiative to increase its chances of success. Until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel of freedom. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15 minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[17:33] Music.