One of the surest signs that change leaders don’t know what they are doing is the excessive use of jargon.  It’s easy to spot.  Just listen for words like strategic, alignment, partnering, values, sustained, vision, execution, branding, methodology, governance, scalable, global, integrated, empowerment, enablement, or any other intelligent-sounding, yet empty clichés that assume speakers have the right answers and listeners should feel assured.

Jargon epitomizes the use of karaoke leadership¹.  Dreary leaders without a shred of inspiration can have the false security of instant, plug-and-play success.  Here you go, pick up a microphone and read this script.  It’s safe and well produced and gets heads nodding and crowds whooping with lighters in the air.  You are a business genius.  You are a rock star.

Business leaders are not the only ones who are susceptible to the empty-headedness of jargon.  Listen to politicians talk about unemployment, for example.  The policy discussion on both sides of the Atlantic is filled with the rhetorical jargon of the policy extremes.  The conservatives talk of “fiscal responsibility,” “tax cuts,” and “deregulation.”  They say that the long-term unemployed “don’t want to work” or they “lack the necessary skills.”  The liberals, who have been noticeably silent of late, talk of “job creation,” “retraining,” and the need for “compassionate leadership.”  Meanwhile, 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are staying afloat with part-time work that fails to use their skills.  The situation is even worse in Europe where countries like Spain are experiencing 21% unemployment.²

The jargon on both ends of this debate gives the appearance of strong leaders taking proud, principled stands.  But that’s the problem.  They just keep standing.  And standing.  And there is never any action.  There is never any real change.

Jargon is a tool of dominance.  It creates distance.  It marginalizes.  It forms a barrier that blocks open communication.  It limits innovation and thwarts authentic, grass roots problem solving.

Worst of all it fools change leaders into thinking they can hide their ignorance, their uncertainty and their fear.   They can’t.  Listeners are smarter than that.  Whether employees, customers or citizens, they eventually see through the gibberish.  They know that complex, large scale change is imperfect and messy, and that’s okay.  That’s part of the deal.

Include others by speaking directly and in plain language.  Truth helps people get beyond the guesswork and confusion and on with the business of managing reality.

1. _{Karaoke leadership.  I borrowed this concept from Malcolm McLaren’s presentation “His Life, Authenticity vs. Karaoke Culture.”  McLaren was the designer, producer, and founder of the Sex Pistols who died in April 2010.}
2. From “Against Learned Helplessness,” by Paul Krugman, The New York Times, May 29, 2011.

“When all else fails, read the instructions.”

That simple, seven-word warning ought to appear on the instruction manual for everything that comes unassembled.  It should appear in bold face, large font letters on every purchase from Ikea, every home theater system, every backyard play set, and every brightly-colored, multi-part plastic child’s toy packaged in an injection-molded, twist-tied, tape-enclosed box. 

If you are like me, you may have looked at a seemingly harmless collection of parts and tossed aside the manual thinking you could put it together using common sense.  “I’m intelligent and capable,” you thought.  “Who really needs to bother with the time-consuming process of reading the instructions?  How hard can it be?”

Right!                                                                                                                                    

That’s when we find ourselves, hours later, furiously picking through the rubble to find the discarded instructions.

It is part of our proud, achieving nature to try to do everything our way, and only when the prospects of failure become overwhelming do we begin to think about asking for help.  Even then, we do so not by recognizing our own shortcomings, but by asking for help with the failings of those who thwarted our success.  The product was designed poorly, the instructions were unintelligible, or the bystanders were making too much noise for us to concentrate on this ridiculous mess.

There aren’t many areas this applies better than managing change.  All too often I watch seasoned managers rush headlong into large change efforts with the idea that their own common sense will get them through.  Even those who have led change before think that the only help they need is with the execution of deliverables—that’s project jargon that translates to producing PowerPoints, emails and pdf’s.  Rarely do change execs look for help assessing the human risks or identifying actions for managing them.  That would be like admitting they couldn’t lead or their managerial skills were ineffective. 

“Our organization doesn’t have much patience for change assessment,” stated a senior executive for a financial services organization going through a post-TARP operational restructuring.  “We’re a smart group focused on the business of implementation.  People around here only need help making sure the work gets done.”

That sounds strong, business-like and efficient, except for the fact that two months into the three-year project, they were over budget, facing stiff internal resistance to the proposed solution and negotiating with project sponsors who were “losing confidence.”  To make matters worse, the corporate communications group was so nervous about the change communications work product that they inserted themselves by requiring approvals before the change team could send any communication to the employee population.

Maybe the change leaders should have read the instructions.

Amazon.com lists over 13,000 books about managing change.  I have only read a few dozen, but it’s enough to know the lessons learned are similar no matter the author and approach.  Save time, hassle and the pain of undoing the mess caused by applying common sense.  Instead, read the instructions.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a project manager who wanted an assessment of his team’s capability.  The project had been moving along without significant problems, but was approaching an intense period with several critical milestones.  The project manager felt unsettled because his team was not providing the analysis and insight he expected.

“I don’t think I have a team that has the right skill set,” the project manager confessed.  “We’re coming up on some very important milestones and they’re not sharing the usual level of detail.  I’m concerned they don’t know what they are doing and that I’ll have to make some decisions without their input.”

When I spoke with the project team, they expressed a similar frustration.  “I don’t feel like he trusts us,” the validation lead shared.  “Meetings feel more like an inquisition.  We’ve all worked on similar projects before, but he hasn’t recognized any of our experience.  We know he’s a good project manager, but he doesn’t seem to know we’re good, too.”

There have been a number of studies that examined the relationship between trust in management and the actual performance at the group or organizational level.  One study, for example, found that when basketball team members trust their coach, their performance is better.  Another study found that when restaurant employees trust their manager the restaurant’s sales and net profits increase.  The results of these studies demonstrate that when employees trust management, organizations have greater success.

More importantly, a study by Sabrina Deutsch Salamon (York University) and Sandra Robinson (University of British Columbia) found that when employees feel that they are trusted by management, organizational performance is improved.  This is significant because it shows that a sense of “felt trust” affects performance beyond the effect of employee trust in management.  It shows that when employees feel trusted by management it can have a direct impact on the top and bottom lines.

This is a very different picture than the leader standing on a pedestal waiting for employees to prove themselves and earn his or her trust.  These results suggest that successful leaders start the relationship by actively showing employees they trust them through words and deeds.

For many organizational leaders and human resources professionals, this study validates what they have known intuitively for years: the more you engage and involve your employees, the more you give them autonomy to perform their jobs, the better you tap their intrinsic motivation and drive employee performance skyward.

Unfortunately, many of the well-developed techniques of organizational management and control work directly against these findings.  This is especially true of rigorous project management methodologies.  They enable companies to organize people in different places with different skills to perform tasks with structure consistency, but at the risk of marginalizing the relationship building skills that build trust.

It’s a delicate, but important, balance.  To be a successful leader, especially under the demands of time-intensive projects, requires that you apply the formal structures and process needed for systematic execution AND that you show a willingness to be “emotionally vulnerable and human with one another.” (Patrick Lencioni)

It turns out that Douglas McGregor was on the right track about how to manage in the future with his concept of Theory Y managers:  People are more self-directed, committed and creative when managers develop a climate of trust by communicating openly, minimizing the relationship distance between themselves and their subordinates, and creating a comfortable environment where employees can develop and use their abilities.

Every time I hear Tom Chaplin’s delicate and vulnerable delivery of Tim Rice-Oxley’s lyrics, I imagine an executive choosing this song as the script for their change announcement.   The balance between an urgent necessity and a confusing transition strikes a note of truth that if only spoken more frequently would show an incredible regard for the feelings of employees.  An understanding of that depth creates the trust and emotional connection needed to get others engaged, collaboratively, in building the future.

So little time
Try to understand that I’m
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody’s changing
And I don’t feel the same.

Change is a lot like going from Oz to Kansas.

On one hand, it’s as uncomplicated as closing your eyes, clicking the heels of your ruby slippers and willing yourself from one place to another.  Individuals and organizations have the ability to make change that simple—an uncomplicated choice, a straightforward decision, a path taken with no looking back.  And like Dorothy learns at the end of the movie, we always have the potential to instantly go home.

On the other hand, most of us need to follow a Yellow Brick Road.  Yellow Brick Roads provide clear paths, somewhere to place our attention, and the constants during times of turmoil when monkeys are flying toward us in attack.  We may not always stay on the path, in fact it may not even be needed to get to our destination, but it is there to provide a unifying sense of direction and purpose.  Even if it is not exactly the way home, it prompts the action required for us to achieve our objective.

In any successful change campaign, change leaders must present a clear, straightforward step that employees can take to help them move toward the destination.  Even if more complex action is required at some point in the future, a well-defined first step or two provides welcome reassurance.

After landing in a strange land where nothing looked familiar, Dorothy was quickly comforted to know that the Yellow Brick Road would lead her to someone who could get her home.  She had no idea of the challenges that she would find on the road ahead, but the road itself provided the comfort needed to get moving.

Resistance to change, much like the flying monkeys, is always lurking somewhere in the shadows waiting to wreak havoc on your efforts.  Even when employees buy into your change vision, they quickly develop cynicism, or resistance, if they don’t know how you plan to achieve the vision.  By showing them the first few bricks, you start them down the path required to move forward.  More importantly, once you have them focused and moving, they start to define the subsequent steps and can help identify additional requirements needed to achieve the goal.

Those first few steps are critical to get employees engaged.

George, the director of a government agency’s maintenance and utilities function, was trying in earnest to improve the operational effectiveness of his organization knowing that many jobs were at risk to outside contractors.  The organization’s labor costs had increased, and the agency they served was less satisfied with the quality of work and the time it took to complete projects.

George and his deputies knew that they were going to have to change the managerial and employee culture from a “government mindset” to a “business mindset.”  So, they started peppering their daily conversations with this message.  They would say things like “We have to start thinking like business people,” or “What are you doing to become more efficient?”

The response of the organization was a universal, “Huh?!”  Employees understood the objective—and they wanted to save their jobs—but they had operated a certain way for so long that they didn’t know how to get from Point A to Point B.  George was communicating, “We want to go home,” but he wasn’t showing employees the Yellow Brick Road that would lead them there.

When he and his leadership team pointed out the first few bricks, however, his organization got fully engaged.  One brick was to start measuring aspects of their performance, such as the cost per job or the days to completion.  Another brick was to provide outside benchmarks of cost and quality.  And the final brick was to “give permission” for employees to work outside the guidelines of policies and procedures if they could show it would lead to higher quality and better service.

Once those steps were identified and taken, employees at all levels found their brains, hearts and courage and skipped happily down the Yellow Brick Road toward Oz.

As Ed Roland and Collective Soul express so well, great results happen when you begin to listen.

In the late 1980’s, the economy in Japan was strong, and everyone was making money, trading stocks, investing in real estate, and busy buying assets throughout the world.  Behind all the luxury and pleasures, however, lay the realities of a grueling corporate life that had employees constantly working and constantly stressed.  Physicians in corporations started to worry about stress related disorders in the work force as their schedules became overrun with employees suffering from anxiety attacks, ulcers, headaches, insomnia, and depression.

The word “karoshi” (Karo= overwork, Shi= Death: Death from overwork) became a regular topic on the evening news, in the morning papers and in the conversations of union leaders, business executives, attorneys, statesmen, clergy and families.

With the mounting social pressure, Japan’s health and safety law was amended and made business owners responsible for the health and safety of their workforce, including mental health. A subcommittee of the Ministry of Labor decided that managers in corporations should have some knowledge of stress and stress related disorders as well as relaxation methods and listening skills.  The government also gave out grants and other promotional measures so that businesses would implement a Total Health Promotion plan (THP).

During one of the promotional workshops Akira Ikemi, then a teacher and researcher at University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan (UOEH), met the health and safety staff form Daihatsu.  As a result of this encounter, he went on to create a remarkable listening workshop that he taught for the next twenty years at Daihatsu and to other major Japanese corporations including Mitsubishi Chemicals, Sumitomo Steel, Nippon Steel, and NTT.

The real value the workshops came from the results of a study he conducted while teaching with his colleague Shinya Kubota.  Using pre-training and post-training surveys, they discovered a strong link between managerial listening and the mental health and satisfaction of employees.  Employees who perceived their supervisors as having strong person-centered attitudes—demonstrated significantly by active listening skills—exhibited less fatigue, depression and anxiety than those who did not.  They also found that this same group of employees had higher levels of motivation, better relationships with coworkers, and increased levels of productivity.

Ikemi also found that listening skills are teachable.  Managers who participated in listening training programs were able to develop the skills and techniques that create these positive effects.

So, listening isn’t just some touchy feely practice held up as an ideal by those trying to get managers to put away their iPhones.  It’s hard-core capability that is proven to produce profound physical, emotional and cognitive results.  It can take managers from “walking in the desert all alone” to having the capability to connect, engage and create higher levels of employee performance.

Hey you’re now thirsty
Walking in the desert all alone
Hey you’re now searching
Lost in isolation from your soul
The bullets you bite
From the pain you request
You’re finding harder to digest
And the answers you seek
Are the ones you destroy
Your anger’s well deployed

Hey why can’t you listen
Hey why can’t you hear
Hey why can’t you listen
As love screams everywhere

Hey you now hunger
Feeding your mind with selfishness
Hey you now wander
Aimlessly around your consciousness
Your prophecies fail
And your thoughts become weak
Silence creates necessity
You’re clothing yourself
In the shields of despair
Your courage now impaired

You crucify all honesty
No signs you see do you believe
And all your words just twist and turn
Reviving just to crash and burn
You’re fighting till the bitter end
If only your heart could open up
And listen

Orchestra conductors must exercise a unique style of leadership.  They must listen intently, and without saying a word, draw out strong performances from their orchestras.  This requires that they learn to be the ultimate collaborators,  understand the unique capabilities of each musician and decide how best to blend them into a coherent whole.

In this video, Itay Talgam shows that contrary to their popular image, the best conductors are not dictators.  Instead, they are successful by being great teachers and by mastering the art of helping others give voice to expressive contributions.  The most successful conductors believe in the inherent capacity of the people they lead to accomplish whatever is required.  The players may need to be coaxed, nudged and enticed, but masterful performances reside within them.

Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic and author of The Art of Possibility, suggests that one way to determine whether you are on track is to look into the eyes of those you lead.  “The eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren’t shining, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing that’s keeping my musicians’ eyes from shining?’”

Conductors, or leaders, who recognize that they do not need to make a sound or dominate or control, can focus on enabling others to be more effective.  They can help others feel energetic, lively, engaged and focused not only on the task at hand, but more importantly, connected and listening to the other musicians, their orchestral collaborators, required to make beautiful music.

How to love.  How to live.  How to fix anything.  How to lose weight.  How to stop worrying.  How to find your passion.  How to train your dog, bird, cat or dragon.  How to make money.  How to get into college.  How to stay in college.  How to interview.  How to get a job.  How to get a good paying job.  How to start a business.  How to sell.  How to manage projects.  How to manage time.  How to set goals.  How to influence people.  How to negotiate anything with anybody.  How to teach.  How to train.  How to write.  How to retire.  How to survive the end of the world.

We live in a “How-To” world.  A quick search of “How To” in Amazon.com yields over 300,000 books with the phrase in the title.  The popular For Dummies series has over 1700 titles and the Idiot’s Guide series has nearly as many.  And take a look at your local newsstand and you’ll see magazine covers littered with articles telling you the 5 things you must know, the 3 insider secrets that will guarantee success, or the 7 steps to improved performance.

We love quick solutions that are easy to identify and implement.  It is comforting to think that the answer to all of our problems—with romance, with money, with business—can be provided with a few simple action steps or the application of a “best practice.”

We know through our own experience, however, that the How-To’s don’t always solve the problem because they rarely have the depth required to affect our particular situations.  The quick fix might get us part of the way there or solve the problem momentarily, but inevitably we revisit the same issue again and again looking for another band aid to stop the bleeding.

Here’s the deal . . . Managing change well is not about a quick fix.  It’s about a mindset.  It’s not about a multitasking shortcut or a cell phone app.  It’s about consistently applying the disciplines of listening, understanding, adapting, learning, changing, creating, inventing, and engaging.

So, go ahead and stock up on the tools, templates, technologies and How-To manuals.  They will help you get started and be a reference when you get stuck.  But then, let go.  Roll up your sleeves, dig a little deeper, let your mind take flight, color outside of the lines, play, innovate and have fun with the real, collaborative work required to create sustainable change.

In my personal life, I am an optimist.  I believe fully in the power of positive thinking and the value of spreading good cheer wherever I go, if only because it makes life more fun and enjoyable.

But when it comes to managing change, I believe in realism.  A key component of the Architecture of Change is being brutally honest about the challenges that may impact the success of the project.  If you are going to prepare to manage change effectively, you have to understand the organization’s underbelly.  You have to understand the 3F’s–the fears, frustrations and failures–of the organization and its people.  Only then will you understand how to navigate resistance.  Only then will you understand how to leverage the initiative to turn dissatisfaction into satisfaction and apathy into enthusiasm.  It provides the depth of understanding required to make the emotional connections that accelerate acceptance.

Do you have to go that deep to drive change?  No, but then your project—whether a technology or outsourcing implementation, merger, divestiture, restructuring or any other kind of change—is nothing more than a technical implementation.  You may get the benefits of the new technology or process, but you miss the larger opportunity for achieving the benefits of broader behavioral or cultural change:  better utilization of process or technology; increased cost savings; or improved organizational effectiveness.  It’s the difference between “completing the project” or “achieving the real results.”

The challenge with understanding the requirements for change at this deeper level is that it demands a high degree of discipline, desire and patience.  It requires that you listen without trying to solve or fix or judge or react to the “negativity” that you hear.  Only then can you take it all in, go beyond the superficial symptoms and solutions, and identify broader strategies for achieving more sustainable results.

This can be especially challenging for those executives who don’t like “whiners,” who want “solutions, not problems,” or who want their people to have “positive attitudes.”

Just the other day I reported the results of a readiness assessment to a twitchy exec who anxiously awaited the report of weeks of interviews and focus groups designed to give feedback about the technology and process change he was implementing.  I had the fun job of telling him what, deep down, he already knew:  the customers were at best apathetic, and at worst, hostile toward the change.  In addition, his direct reports were concerned that the change was “doomed for mediocrity.”

I didn’t make it beyond the first couple of PowerPoint bullets before he slammed his fist on the conference table and said, “I highly disagree with these results!  You don’t know what you are talking about.  I don’t like the language you’ve used to provide this feedback.  All this negativity!  If you want to advise this organization you are going to have to focus on more of the positives.  We have to tell this organization the change will be good for them and I’ve hired you to help put an end to this complaining.”

He eventually calmed down and admitted that he had heard all of this before.  And he also realized the words he didn’t like were direct quotes from his organization (and I edited out the most hostile comments!).  But he continued to struggle with what to do with the information.  His urge was to gather everyone in a room, give them a tongue lashing and to tell them if they just changed their attitude . . .

I love the above video.  The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) produces fantastic content with genius graphics, and in this video, shares the enlightening commentary of Barbara Ehrenreich.  From 1991 to 1997, Ehrenreich was a regular columnist for Time magazine. Currently, she contributes regularly to The Progressive and has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications.

Whether or not you agree with her politics (which for some may immediately disqualify her as an “approved” voice for business), the lessons in this video are important for understanding how to manage change well.

It’s actually a different variation of the Boy Scout motto:  Be Prepared.

Be prepared to manage the worst case resistance.  Be prepared to handle strong emotions.  Be prepared to find multiple ways of getting through to stakeholders.  Be prepared by understanding the influence networks, the politics, the cultural norms, and the variety of stakeholder perceptions, interests and desires.

Be prepared to accept the good, bad and ugly that exists within our organizations and to realize it represents a rich diversity of brain power that, when tapped, will help us adapt, create, invent and collaborate on the way to great results.

Are we really surprised?

Companies have been obsessed with pay for performance for almost two decades.  And like any obsession, it has clouded the judgment of executives and others, such as human resources professionals and consultants, who should know better.

The problem is that pay for performance is founded on a two faulty beliefs:

1. If you reward something you get more of the behavior you want.
2. If you punish something you get less of the behavior you don’t want.

Unfortunately for our misguided execs, study after study has demonstrated results that massively contradict this way of thinking.  It’s hard to fault them entirely.  Logically, one would think that incentives work.  The science, however, has proven otherwise and has found:

1. As long as the job involves only mechanical skills or rules-based tasks, incentives work as expected.  The higher the incentive, the better the performance.
2. But once the job calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill—some conceptual and/or creative thinking—a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

These results have been replicated over and over again by psychologists, sociologists, and economists . . . including those funded by that left-wing, socialist institution, the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Even a recent study from McKinsey found that three noncash motivators—praise from immediate supervisors, attention from leaders, and a chance to direct projects—are at least as effective as the three most highly rated monetary ones.

Now, don’t misunderstand me.  Money is a motivator.  If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated to do the job.

Once you pay people enough, however, it is no longer a factor in motivating performance, especially in jobs that require basic cognitive, conceptual and creative skill . . . the majority of jobs in the U.S. economy.

Organizations must stop drinking the pay for performance Kool-Aid.  Pay for performance, carrot and stick management, performance appraisal, time clocks, verbal and written warnings, and many other management and HR practices are outdated and just don’t work.

Instead, it’s time to equip managers with the tools to manage in the modern workplace and support them with HR programs and practices that encourage the right behavior.  That’s about redefining what it is to manage and it’s about completely overhauling HR.  More importantly, it’s founded on the notion that we stop treating people like cogs in a machine and start treating them like smart, creative, self-motivated people who want to at all times do their best.

That’s not just some feel good manifesto.  It’s the fact-based, scientific reality required to be a high performing organization.