Concepts and Application

Using Organizational Culture to Support Recipients of Change

Some associations we talked to seized the opportunity to use an already healthy culture to support the change process. These were often the cases that reported the easiest governance transitions. Compare, for example, the two quotations below:

1. “There was a tradition of no change, a mindset that ‘if it produced me, it must be good.’ So we got some resistance from board and staff.”
2. “Our culture worked for us. The board was always open to change.”

In the first instance, the change process took four years and some effort due to a conservative professional culture that valued consistency. It's normal to expect some professions to react to change less dynamically than others might. Ultimately, this association's leaders anticipated the possibility of resistance and planned for it to achieve the improvements they sought.

In the second instance, Mark Dorsey, CAE, who is CEO of the Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors (AASI), described a change process of about a year and a half in which the board worked effectively in partnership with staff to restructure itself, delegated responsibly, and “owned” the solutions. He credits the successful governance restructuring they accomplished to an association culture where board members were focused and asked “the tough strategic questions.”

The point is that in the end, both of these cases were success stories because leaders worked with and through, rather than against, their prevailing cultures.

Using Emotional Intelligence to Support Recipients of Change

Experts also suggest that change agents who are skilled in emotional intelligence—the human ability to monitor one's own emotional state and those of others—will be most successful at supporting recipients of change as they adjust to a new set of expectations (Huy 1999). Organizations can invest at the institutional level in building their capacity to manage the emotional aspects of change. This institutional “emotional capability” in turn offers change recipients the empathy, time, support, positive reinforcement, and information they need to adjust to change. This point is illustrated in Connie Wootton's story at the start of this chapter.

Emotional capability is also built through experience at successful change in the past. Even minor successes produce residual feelings of self-efficacy and make leaders bolder at tackling new challenges. Organizations should look for opportunities to celebrate any successful changes. Dale Brown, CAE, president and CEO of Financial Services Institute, observed how his board became more effective over time by building a “culture that is very trusting of each other through relationship building.” Victoria Ceh, MPA, of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, described an organization in which “we play hard and we work hard.” In his former role as executive director at Delta Sigma Phi, Scott Wiley, CAE, observed, “There has to be an element of fun. At the end of day, people want to be part of something bigger than themselves, something they can look back on positively and warmly.” And Christine Todd, CAE, of the Northern Virginia Association of REALTORS® recalled,

I was worried that I was always giving them bad news. So at the end of the year at one of our conventions we made it really fun-filled. And the board at the time said, “Chris, we needed this so badly.” This was a huge lesson for me—give them a break, have fun.

Habitualizing Change

Organizational change and development experts suggest that change takes root as change recipients get used to a new way of doing things. Individuals in the change process (members, board members, past board members, external constituents, the public, staff) will all need to be shepherded along in a deliberate and caring manner until there is critical mass and momentum to habitualize the change. And then the organization itself will need to habitualize the new routines to create the desired change outcomes. Connie Wootton's story, given earlier, helps to explain why this strategy works.

In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg (2012) distills prior research to explain how individuals and organizations change habits. In case after case, from champion athletes to workers in the London Underground to activists in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, from corporations to hospitals, Duhigg explains how individual and organizational habits are changed through use of the Habit Loop (Figure 2.1).

Habitual cues result from either a gradual awareness of something not working or triggers, each of which can be boiled down into one or more of the following: location, time, emotional state, other people, and an immediately preceding action. When you actively become aware of those cues or triggers and the default behaviors that are prompted (seemingly automatic, rarely reflected upon) that lead to previous rewards, then creating a plan that anticipates cues and choosing alternative behaviors can deliver a different reward (a new, preferred outcome).

We found in our interviews many cases of organizations engaged in governance patterns who told us “it had always been done that way.” Applying the Habit Loop to board change, a change agent can challenge organizational or governance habits by actively introducing new cues and rewards. For example, in our consulting work, we once encountered an association with an unusual set of bylaws and asked, “Why does your organization have board positions for both a chair and a president in your bylaws?” It turned out no one had ever considered that question or could remember why it was included in the bylaws of this 50-plus-year-old association. When the board considered the work involved to manage the two roles with their overlapping responsibilities and to keep track of who was doing what, the directors easily recognized that there was an opportunity to revisit this. The cue was to create the understanding that “perhaps we don't need to do it this way,” and the outcome was a reward in the more efficient and productive use of volunteer board time and energy the organization could enjoy.

In the context of governance, then, a cue can be either slow, gradual awareness, perhaps helped along by questions from an objective outsider or board newcomer, or it can be a trigger resulting from an internal or external event. Boards that desire to move along the journey toward high performance have an opportunity to pay special attention to possible cues and triggers. The rewards that come from the outcomes of awareness and reevaluation and the possibility of applying or adopting something new create the culture of change and a new way of being or doing—a new normal.

Change is really about behaving in a new way, largely as a result of changing a habit. And changing habits is hard. Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, studied healthy habit formation among 82 people over a 12-week period. Subjects chose simple habits like “drinking a bottle of water with lunch” or more difficult tasks like “running for 15 minutes before dinner.” While Lally found that on average, subjects took about two months before a new behavior became automatic, the total time to habit acquisition ranged widely from 28 to 115 days. This study is important to our discussion in emphasizing that some board members, volunteers, staff, and members require more time to adjust to new governance processes. Governance experts suggest introducing proposed changes incrementally, repeatedly emphasizing and practicing new governance processes, and actively managing the process (see Chapter 4 for more).

Summary

This chapter helps us understand how people experience change emotionally and cognitively. In Chapter 3 we discuss further the strategies that association leaders used to help individuals adjust emotionally to new expectations.

Awareness of the need for change is often not lacking. We may know what's wrong even though we can't seem to get it fixed. Consultants often report that their job sometimes is simply lending authority and credibility to help develop traction to address an issue that some in the organization have already identified as a problem.

Establishing consensus that the change is needed and finding the right path toward better practices, and then making it happen, can stump many organizations that operate by default. It's not necessarily a “we've always done it this way” consciousness that stumps organizational leaders; it is also basic subconscious programming and lack of overall awareness (not everyone knows what they don't know) that sometimes makes us blind to the influence of ingrained detrimental activities, operations, or behaviors.

Working with a specific change model helps to engage the recipients of change successfully because it can decouple the emotional aspects of the change response while at the same time teaching a new way of understanding an organizational problem. Broaching the subject in the boardroom can be difficult because there can be a tendency for board members to take the suggestion as a personal attack on their leadership abilities. But broaching these practices as something reflective of the increasing sophistication and professionalization of the nonprofit sector can make the process nonthreatening and the results empowering.

The stories of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and the American Occupational Therapy Association that follow describe cases where board members recognized the need for change but had to work through its more emotional implications first. As the cases illustrate, methodically and diligently working with a change model helps bring everyone along during the process.