No, I don't want no Scrubs

Hello! I am sorry for having disappeared the last two weeks. Thanks for being patient with me.

In this post, we review our final tactic on how to increase urgency around needed change efforts: deal with NoNos.

At the beginning of the year and our focused study of leading effective change efforts, we learned the various reasons that people experience reactance in the face of change.

The book clearly distinguishes between a skeptic and a NoNo. For our purposes, we can just say that a skeptic is one who experiences some reactance and against whom we have learned several techniques to gain their buy-in. It is impossible to gain buy-in from a NoNo.

If I can, I typically ignore these people. My goal is to make progress and if I can do so without their influence, I will. The author explicitly calls this out as a mistake. They are much more likely to undermine your efforts in subtle and hard to detect ways - one of which is to “do nearly anything to discredit [you].”

At the risk of sounding narcissistic, I believe I have been victim of someone outright trying to discredit me. It doesn’t feel good.

Let’s move on.

If you’re starting to picture the NoNo as a villain in your story, I think that is the correct sentiment. However, sometimes (perhaps, often times) these NoNos are critical to the business in some way. This adds complexity in our decision on how to minimize their negative impact on the change effort while retaining their useful contribution to the overall business.

Leadership is complex.

Ironically, bringing them into the effort is also discouraged. Remember, these aren’t skeptics and you won’t gain their buy-in.

Well, what is a leader to do then?

We are given three recommendations on how to effectively deal with a NoNo:

1. Distract them - redirect them…like you do with toddlers smh.
2. Push them out of the organization.
3. Expose their behavior in ways that allow natural social forces to reduce or stop it.

Given this and our previous lessons, we can now identify three different groups of people in our organization:

• Those who are already on board with the change.
• Those who are experiencing reactance to the change.
• NoNos.

We should learn to properly categorize those in the second and third groups and deal with them appropriately. In addition to this valuable lesson, I present a summary of what I found most useful from this book in the form of a framework 🙂

A Framework for Determining Urgency

After finishing this book, I’m reflecting on a recent experience within my own organization. The organization was roughly 5 years old when I joined and many of the executive leadership team had been there for many years. The culture at the company had been incredible. Many of the team members praised the organization as somewhere they didn’t think was possible and clearly stood out from other companies.

I joined during a period of rapid growth. In the year before I joined, the company had almost doubled in size and over the last year, we have added more than 50 new team members. In many ways it is incredible but rapid growth comes at a cost.

As I became familiar with the organization and had conversations with team members, it became clear that the culture was starting to suffer. Thankfully, the signals were small and hadn’t yet resulted in some major disaster but we were heading in that direction. I, along with some other leaders, raised the issue and emphasized the urgency around dealing with these issues.

There were others who didn’t think we had a problem. They were drawing from those many years of a stable culture and were unwilling to acknowledge that anything needed to be done. They would use as evidence the statements from current team members who continued to praise the culture and the organization.

As a result, those of us promoting change were met with statements that questioned the validity of the signals. One recurring question was “is this the view of a small number of people or do many people feel this way?”

My personal frustration aside, this is a legitimate question. The larger an organization gets, the more opinions there will be and not all of them warrant action. However, if you wait until everyone is complaining, you’re likely in a situation that is hard to come back from.

So, how do you decide?

I present a framework to help us determine how much urgency is warranted. This draws from a key component of doing strategy: asking ourselves What Would Have to be True?

Given a signal that indicates change is needed, brainstorm answers to the following questions:

• What would have to be true to confirm whether or not this signal indicates a real problem?
• What would have to be true for us to fix the problem? Is that something we are willing or able to do?
• If there were a problem, what would have to be true for us to continue to be successful while not addressing it?

The result is a list of criteria for determining whether there is a problem that needs to be addressed as well as the appropriate information needed to prioritize it against the other needs of the business. I don’t know whether this framework would be appropriate given some major catastrophe that requires a large scale change effort. However, I do believe that most major catastrophes can be avoided if the smaller problems are appropriately dealt with when they arise. This framework can definitely help with that!

So, what’s next?

This concludes our study mode and now we’ll start to read Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance by Louis V. Gerstner. This is a first hand account of the successful turnaround at IBM. Instead of giving you a summary of the book the way we did for American Icon, I plan to specifically call out concepts related to what we’ve studied so far:

• threats to the one leading the change
• reactance - examples of those experiencing it and how Gerstner handled it
• urgency

Thank you for continuing to read and I hope you are learning as much as I am!