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Personal change can be one of the most frightening of human experiences. It often requires letting go of old beliefs, behaviors, outlooks, and sometimes even our friends and jobs. At the very least, engagement requires thorough self-examination of obsolete truths. Is it still true? Does this outlook still serve me?
For example, there are quite a few parents who believe their children should set aside their real ambitions by going to college and getting a “real job.” Is that belief system still true? Letting go of that belief system introduces some parents’ greatest fears about their children’s well-being and future. Successful personal change thrives when people help each other. In isolation, most workers cannot even articulate what actually frightens them about change.
Artfully changing our lives and organizations requires that we respond to fear in healthy and positive ways. For many, to fluidly find and listen to the truth, and to skillfully reinvent our lives, requires a reinvention in how we view and respond to fear. In our culture, fear is ridiculed and demonized, yet we still experience it. Self-help gurus promise that if we take their course, we will overcome fear, but it is still there. Behavioral scientists have identified the purpose of fear is to take action, and yet so many of us are conditioned to not take action when we are frightened. The conditioning that has led many Americans to use inaction when frightened has led to large swaths of our culture into creative thinking, which is only the first half of real creativity. Creative thinking isn’t creativity until we take action. Unfortunately, those of us who fear the risk action requires end up running from the very actions that will change our lives and our organizations.
In a culture fixated on security, we have reinforced the myth that there is something fundamentally inadequate about us when we feel fear. If that is the case, we construct our lives around avoiding fear, and as a result, the real and best opportunities don’t even reach our field of vision. All of this strange ideology disappears as we cross a street and a large truck roars around the corner. As it heads directly towards us, our biology takes over. An alarm goes off that pours powerful hormones and chemicals into our body. This system is perfectly designed for pushing us into action. Why does our culture need to make up so many strange stories and myths that contradict basic biology?
One of the most famous quotes of all time is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We sent more than 17 million Americans into World War II. I have yet to find any of those soldiers’ stories repeating the president’s missive. On the other hand, we find countless narratives in which those in the frontlines characterized the experience as the single most terrifying event in their lives. In some cases they did hide. In others they shot first. In all cases, they took action.
Perhaps a healthier alternative statement would be, “The only thing have we to fear is to forget courage.” True courage isn’t about walking into difficult situations as a robot devoid of feelings. As a famous male icon of that era, the brutish John Wayne, once said, “Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”1
Cher has experienced lifelong crippling bouts of stage fright. She tells journalists that it is as bad today as it was in her 20s. Early on, she depended on Sonny Bono to get her on stage and keep her grounded. Today, she deals with it by hiring stage managers who, if needed, drag her to the stage door. Once on stage, that previously terrified woman, in an instant, becomes Cher.2
I mentioned previously how some groups that I worked with in the early days would get into debates about whether our discussion concerned a vision, a mission, or a purpose. This discourse would detour us from defining a new game that would put everyone into action and hence risk. So, I told them to use all three. Similarly, rather than debating whether we should overcome fear, include fear, or avoid fear, let’s move the organizational culture forward by making it okay to be frightened (or not), but always rewarding others for courage. Promote courage. Make courage a vital part of the organizational ethos.
Our dysfunctional responses to fear erode change and engagement. If someone is afraid to look customers in the eye, how can they connect? If a leader is afraid to look at the truth, how will employees trust they can live out their personal ambitions? If a CEO is afraid to stand for value, how can the company foster it? If we continually pine for a simpler past, how can we possibly learn how to build our future? What is it that frightens us about change?
This is what I have learned.
A few years after we began Inspired Work, a series of insights emerged from observing our participants. As they designed compelling change within their lives, our participants had to consistently work through a series of obstacles. Our participants come from every walk of life, but this quest to change brought up fear and discomfort in literally every participant. These challenges can impact many if not all of us.
From the time that we commit to change, we begin a journey that includes four distinct events. Each event has a tendency to be more frightening than the previous step. Embedded in a successful journey through each event is a series of life skills that are learnable. Consequently, many of our participants realize their ambitions by developing the skills. Building these skills within any workforce represents a relatively straightforward and simple exercise. The skills elevate our individual and organizational capacity to change to one of finesse and perhaps even artfulness.
Some of the skills we will examine have been dismissively called “soft skills.” Why? These are often the very skills that require a degree of courage to use and to learn. As we proceed, I propose we aptly name them “courage skills.” When we examine these skills carefully, we find the very tools that help us to connect with the world around us.
As addressed previously, meaningful change begins with a compelling and personalized vision. This is the fuel that drives people to move forward. One of the primary reasons surveys are greeted by the employees with cynicism is that questions are often skewed towards supporting the corporate vision without any interest in hearing what employees want to accomplish.
One of the breakthroughs in this solution will be found in insisting on both strong organizational and individual visions. As robots become part of every workplace, we will not be looking for humans to continue exhibiting the robotic behavior we created during the Industrial Revolution. Getting there requires that we understand the mechanisms in which we commonly trip up and the skills that will help us sail through change. Once activated, the overall process of self-change is learnable and can be sold to all workers. But first, test the processes yourself. I don’t want you to sell something you haven’t embraced. Like learning to play the piano, it can begin with the awkward attempts to play scales and simple pieces of music. Stick with it, work with it, and become artful in changing life for the better.
Without the fuel of vision, there is no reason to go through the discomfort and work associated with personal change. In this chapter, we are going to examine the real reasons we are afraid of change and how to get through the events that cause those fears. To succeed with change, all that it takes is an open heart, a dose of courage, and the willingness to learn new skills.
Successful change is based on a journey that includes four events. Each event has a tendency to be more frightening than the previous step. We master each step through understanding, motivation, and skill building.
Let’s begin with the first step. Consider the possibility that all of us know, on some fundamental level, that when we commit to personal change, we step onto a road that will include a series of progressive challenges. We can easily keep off this road by using three magic words. For example, ask someone the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” Bets are pretty high someone will respond, “I don’t know.” These three words represent the end of the conversation, and unless we persist in answering the question, they are off the hook. In our culture, we seem to have a collective interest in protecting this “out.” When we use the words, people rarely, if ever, challenge the statement.
Step 1: Commit
“I don’t know.”
How do we get past this obstacle? Retire the words. “I don’t know” is no longer a good enough answer. Ask everyone to dig and never settle. Your organizational mentors will be asked to send an employee that offers this out to go back and answer the question. It is a fact that all of us have our own truth. Establish cultures where everyone’s truth is defined and told. Without this one transaction, you have an organization filled with “I don’t know” and this is one of the first seeds of disengagement.
We don’t need to build cultures that scare people into engagement. However, leadership needs to make it clear that we will not accept “I don’t know” as an answer about one’s mission, vision, and purpose. These three words protect “the trance.” Let’s build cultures where everyone is connected to the answer. If it is out of sync with the organization’s mission, vision, and purpose, take the initiative to connect them. Today’s leaders need to skillfully knit the two together.
Step 2: Declare Our Vision
“You’re crazy.”
Everything of value in our culture is a collaborative experience. If that is difficult to ponder, consider that all of us are here because two people collaborated. Let’s agree that our next step is to declare our vision. Who do we tell first? Usually, we begin by telling members of our tribe. The problem is, tribes have rigid rituals and expectations, and when we break those rituals, they generally respond with some form of “You’re crazy.” For example, let’s say that we go home to the spouse and declare, “I’m going to leave the six-figure job that I can do in a coma. In fact, I’m going to start a business that is altruistic in nature.” What will the spouse say? In an alternate scenario we call a meeting with our coworkers and tell everyone, “I know the budget has been slashed by 40% but you know what? Today, we are committing to a business revolution.” You guessed it, they are going to think and say, “You’re crazy.”
In the natural progression of articulating a vision and bringing it to life, we begin by telling someone, and usually that someone is a member of our tribe.
Welcome to the second step.
Many of us don’t really think about the power that tribes have on our lives. Whenever we belong to a tribe, we are making an agreement to play by the rules of that tribe. This is the essence of belonging. Tribes include families, employers, religions, political parties, social groups, and community groups. The power of belonging to a tribe cannot be underestimated. Author Seth Godin said, “It turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.”3 Of course we want to connect! This dynamic also implies how important it is for employers to become the tribe of choice. The dark side of the goodness of tribes is they do have rigid rituals, expectations, and influence that can keep many of us fully stuck.
Los Angeles is a city of tribes with thousands of groups adopting distinct rituals, values, and expectations. I have three styles of suits, two types of sport coats, and two forms of casual wear, all so I can be respectful when I visit client sites. None of them appreciate my showing up in the wrong costume. I’ve been told, “Leave the tie in the car,” “Wear a jacket,” and “You look like one of us.”
The pressures of tribes on career choices are legendary. During a particularly large public program, we had about a dozen men come back from lunch laughing. They had defined the Jewish mother’s hierarchy of acceptable career choices. It was all based on how one mother reacted when the other shared what her son did for a living. There were three acceptable choices and each one provoked varying levels of enthusiasm. A minor rise of the eyebrows was CPA. Halfway up the forehead was attorney. To the hairline? Of course, it was doctor. A specialist provoked a natural facelift.
One of those sons went home and announced he was leaving his legal practice to become a florist. How do you think they responded? I am just kidding when I share that one aunt cracked an egg over her head.
Sadly, our tribe often reacts to a new mission, vision, and purpose with the default reactions of pushback. It isn’t a particularly conscious way to react as it is usually driven by fear. Of course, it is easy for us to react with righteousness and anger. Our loved ones are supposed to support us. Our colleagues are the ones who ought to understand. Our spouses should be happy and back our new ideas. But this is not how human beings process change. Human beings are hard-wired to think of something other than themselves for a maximum of 15 seconds. This means that when we make a declaration of change, the tribe wonders how it is going to impact them or their fears about us. My good friend Tom Drucker launched the Xerox Sales Institute in the early 1980s. Faced with global competition for the first time, Xerox hired a cadre of behavioral scientists to study the psychology of selling. This is where they identified the 15-second process, which turned pitch-selling on its head. People are not interested in our resumes. They are not interested in our declarations. People are focused on one thing and that is fulfilled expectations. Today’s better sales professionals don’t make pitches; they ask great questions. The best of our modern leaders are inquisitive and constantly finding the needs and expectations of their stakeholders. Tribes have a tendency to be more receptive when we make the declaration in ways that fit the tribe’s needs and expectations. We increase our probability of success by managing these tribal responses. Also, a new mission can often require the needs of an additional tribe or moving altogether.
Here are a few examples of speaking or not speaking to expectations:
(Self-Indulgent Version)
“You know what? I’m quitting the law firm on Monday and going to cash in my stock to start a business of my own. I’m buying that florist shop on the corner. You’re upset? Why can’t you be happy for me?”
(Tribe-Friendly Version)
“I have an announcement to make. For the last ten years, I’ve been bringing all of this negative energy to our gatherings. You have become used to my unhappiness with practicing law. So, I’m pursuing work where I can have more freedom and get out of endless, mentally strenuous days. I’m buying that florist shop on the corner and my commitment is to show up to the family with a smile on my face and flowers in my hands.”
(Self-Indulgent Version)
“Profits have been sinking for a long time. So today, we launch a business revolution. All of you are going to bring one actionable innovation to me by the end of the month and we are going to pull out of our nosedive. Now, get back to work.”
(Tribe-Friendly Version)
“Many of you are uncomfortable with the cutbacks and the downturn in the market. I was sad to see so many people leave. But, you are here and you are here for a reason. I am asking that everyone works on one actionable innovation and have it ready by the end of the month. If we create a business revolution, all of us are going to have more to work with, we will have more security, and we will look back on this period as a turning point, one that we remember with pride. My commitment to you is this experience will help all of us grow.”
The problem that many of us have with change is that we don’t really think about the impact and the influence of tribes on our decisions and commitments, especially when it involves a change in the tribe’s beliefs. Sometimes, we hide the commitment so we don’t have to deal with the pushback. Often, a colleague is sitting right next to coworkers, withholding a breakthrough because he is concerned with the cynicism and contempt that would get showered on him for speaking up.
How do we treat the problem?
Giving consultative sales training to every member of our team is a beginning. This is the sales process in which we don’t make a pitch but ask the questions that help us define the needs and expectations of the other people. When all of us learn how to find the needs and expectations of others, every aspect of organizational performance improves. Encourage people to speak up, to declare, to share vision and innovation.
As a leader, there is also great value in defining the tribe. For example, employer brands are just as important as consumer brands. When top-tier students graduate from Stanford, the holy grail of tech education, they will consider Apple, Google, and entrepreneurship. How many will think of Yahoo as an employer of choice? A tech organization’s success begins with the quality of talent it attracts, develops, and retains. The best have clearly defined employer brands, one that has become embedded in their heads. That requires consistency in the message and full truth in the definition. Years ago, I was in the midst of a leadership program at Disney. One of the executives asked me what I thought Disney’s employer brand could be. I responded, “To create magic at great profit in the midst of chaos.” Gasps and laughter ensued. I don’t know where it came from but I still believe this is the culture of Disney. Here is a company that has become an indelible consumer brand throughout the world. There have also been mixed messages about Disney as an employer with some ex-workers referring to the organization as “Mousewitz.” Here’s why: For someone who loves creating magic at great profit in the midst of chaos, Disney is a dream employer. People who love this mission have often worked there for 20 and 30 years. On the other hand, if someone isn’t enthused about the brand, it will be an unhappy ride.
The challenges around declaring our mission or our commitment are learnable. The value of thoroughly defining the tribe raises the probability of “right fit” with our employees and also helping others remain accountable to the tribal needs. Becoming skilled in managing tribal reactions is one of the keys to anyone’s overall success.
Step 3: Draw Healthy Attention to Ourselves
“They’ ll hurt me.”
Our third step introduces new levels of challenge. In order to grow our vision, we have to draw healthy attention to ourselves. In our culture, this very necessary and ongoing action is often thwarted with the message, “They’ll hurt me.”
Fear of visibility has been with us for thousands of years. Out in the jungle, being visible could have dire consequences. In the jungle of business, visibility might turn us into a target.
Quite simply, as we increase our visibility, we also increase the risk of getting hurt. But, it is equally true that when we decrease our visibility we also increase our risk of starving. Consequently, many people have developed just enough visibility to get by, but certainly not enough to thrive. In a world where change accelerates every day, the need to draw attention towards us also grows. Because within the world of change, we have to connect with others, we have to be seen, we have to get others to helps us identify the pathway towards the next bridge, and most of us need mentors to shine lights on our blind spots. If we are “flying below the radar” no one will know we are there and change is ruthless to anyone who hides. Returning to the topic at hand, isn’t it common sense that someone who is hiding from attention is also disengaged?
During the Industrial Revolution, visibility was reserved for sales professionals. The rest of us did what was expected, which was about completing tasks without getting attention. In the modern world, growing transparency gives us no place to hide. Increasing change means having to remarket ourselves in continual ways. As the world speeds up, learning how to give attention to others also becomes a critical and much-needed life skill. Though this move might seem counterintuitive, the world’s greatest futurists and organization development leaders tell us that as software and technology takes over logic-based work, the growth opportunities will go to those of us who are strongly em-pathetic, communicative, influential, gifted storytellers, and able to sell concepts.
The ability to draw attention to ourselves represents a broad set of skills. It is a bit like comparing someone who can drive a car to an individual who is a very good owner of a car. Driving is but one skill. Learning how to select the right car, get the appropriate insurance, maintain it properly, and make sure all of the passengers are safe represents a series of skills, and this is what most workers need if they are to engage, connect, succeed, reinvent, unlearn, and relearn. Without these varied skills attached to attention, we fail because of isolation. In my work with helping people change their relationship towards work, I find that isolation is central to most everyone’s failure.
The challenge of isolation and being starved for attention reaches all the way up to CEOs. In many cases, senior management and owners fail because they cannot establish enough muscle or safety to disclose what they don’t know. We hide our inadequacy and create the delusion of adequacy only to find ourselves jailed in an obsolete playbook.
This isolation is a natural extension in how we lived during the last 30 years of the 20th century. In the 1980s, Alice March, the executive director of Focusing Awareness on Children and Television, conducted in-depth studies about the impact of television on American families. She discovered the average family spends seven minutes a day communicating, four of those minutes are simply commands or requests. That same family goes on to watch television for approximately four hours per day. This means the modern family is no longer an effective laboratory for learning how to draw healthy attention to oneself or give it to others.
In 1990, Barry Levinson produced a movie called Avalon. In it, an immigrant family comes to America in the early 20th century and builds a small furniture business in Baltimore. Every night, they gather around the table and discuss the day, argue, gossip, and get into each other’s business. One day, the patriarch of the family comes home with a wooden box.
He proclaims, “We are going to make a fortune selling this.”
“This” is was one of the first television sets. In the next scene, the family has moved from the dining room to the living room and they are staring vacantly at the box. The movie closes one generation later in the mid-1960s. Two of the children are now parents with their kids. They sit behind individual TV trays looking at a show. They have forgotten each other. They are learning absolutely nothing about the value and need for attention.
Perhaps the baseline in our culture is that most of us have inadequate skills for drawing healthy attention towards ourselves and giving it to others. But when we take individuals who grew up around violent attention, the barrier towards learning the skills is much steeper. Of course, there will be discomfort in learning the skills, but on the other side of the learning experience is a more confident and effective life. We become more visible, we sell our good ideas, we pay better attention to our colleagues, we become more at ease in expressing our needs, and we look our customers and coworkers in the eye. These are the skills that few American families are building within their children. Schools are not performing a much-needed intervention. When we reach the workplace, isn’t it ironic that the very skills workers need to be able to change, connect, engage, and reinvent are branded as “soft skills”?
About 500 yards from our home is a grocery store, part of a big national chain. Every time that I go into that store, there are several cashiers and baggers who will not look me in the eye or connect in any meaningful way. The only reason that we go there is because it is next door. Every time that I see them, I wonder what the story is. Who bullied that person? What happened in his family? Why doesn’t the manager take her under wing and start an intervention? I can’t help but think of our capacity to hurt others so deeply that they have trouble looking a customer in the eye. But these interactions happen every single day and they happen because no one had the heart to intervene and change the legacy. Unfortunately, until these workers are given an intervention, they will also turn off their customers eight hours a day.
Intervening with this deep-seated fear of attention is a matter of business, profits, happy customers, and loyal colleagues. Helping our workers open up and connect is not only life-changing, but when we extend it to all workers, it is game-changing.
In an upcoming chapter, we will outline how to build this skill in everyone.
Step 4: Build Effective Support Systems
“Sounds good. What is it?”
We have arrived at the final step that is the most important ingredient for a healthy workplace, an effective career, and a joyful life. Truly successful people have highly diverse and effective support systems. Many workers don’t define what they really want because, at an often unconscious level, they assume they will not find the support needed to bring that vision to life. Make no mistake: the vision is still there. A true and inspired vision or dream never dies. However, when hidden, it festers. When we operate with a submerged vision, we fall into some degree of malaise, and the job becomes more of a drain than a joy. The trance takes over. But, once we do define our vision, our success is based purely on the quality of our support systems. Therefore, our ability to build support systems is perhaps the single most important skill in becoming successful.
Year in and year out, Fortune magazine publishes its famed 100 Best Places to Work edition. A central theme with organizations that stay on this list for years is a surprise to many. All of them consciously foster strong relationships amongst their employees.4 When two employees form a strong bond, that relationship becomes a new asset within the organization. These relationships lead to more innovation, increased productivity, and strong morale; when the chips are down, that relationship might be the one asset that motivates them to stay and resolve the problems. It may also occur in the form of someone bonding with an outside entity. This new support system can become yet another asset for the employer by bringing in valuable intelligence, new business, and needed innovation. For example, I find that when we give social networking training to human resources, the team brings the outside world in. They access new talent pipelines, mentors, and business intelligence, and become more effective in building their individual careers.
When we do define a vision, success is based solely on the quality of our support systems. For most workers, this is a counterintuitive idea until it finally sinks in. In the old work model, we got punished if we asked for help. It distracted us from plugging bolts in holes and filling quotas. Now, the ability to build effective support systems is the single most important skill in becoming successful with change. The importance of these support systems only grows as the world speeds up. For many, shifting gears in this area will provoke discomfort. In the industrial-based work world, asking for help was viewed as a sign of weakness. Today, it is not only necessary, support systems are the single most important assets that help us change and adapt as the world moves forward. Showing all of your workers how to build support systems and holding them accountable to do that within and outside of the organization will transform your culture.
New support systems can introduce unexpected miracles into the lives of employees. Years ago, I was working with a management team that was facing huge organizational change and daunting competitive challenges. At one point, an executive became emotional and disclosed that she was trying to have a child and that her stress level was so high that her hope of becoming a parent was dissolving. Her colleagues started taking on some of her work to support her. Months later, I was sitting in the lobby of her building. She happened to walk in. We looked at each other and the tears welled up. She was wearing a maternity dress. We hugged. That turning point elevated the lives of her colleagues as well. There are so many myths out there about successful organizations also being ruthless employers; the common belief is that when a woman becomes a mother, the fast track is over. We hear about employers curtailing a person’s future because they stop giving up their life for the job. However, I find it is the organizations that allow employees to develop in all areas of life that sustain success and growth.
Helping a colleague develop insights around the need and value for support systems can change their lives. This past year, a young man was sent to me to discuss his difficulties in getting a film deal. He is a devoted father and his family comes first. He was seriously considering dropping out of the film business and going into a more “practical” line of work. But the quality of his film work was world class. Unfortunately, his support system was almost nonexistent. He had a notion that it was unmanly to ask agents, producers, and studio executives for help. We threw all of our energies into developing a personal brand and developing a solid support system. Within three months, the Sundance Film Festival picked up his first film. Today his career is skyrocketing. Instead of being someone’s gopher, he has a skilled assistant of his own.
Mentorship is one of the purest forms of building high-quality support throughout an organization, leading to employees become more supportive of the organization. Customers can feel it. We teach our employees to practice courage when we learn how to draw effective attention to ourselves and to give it to others, to look each other in the eye, and to ask someone to help with the problems that matter to us the most. Perhaps, if we work hard, our renewed workplace becomes the home that prepares us for the future of work.
It doesn’t get better than that.
• • • • •
Learning how to navigate these steps represents a fundamental beginning towards helping each and every employee to change and engage with the world around us. As they learn, the beginning might feel counterintuitive. Perhaps some will say they don’t have the time to work on anything other than their work. But as they do become involved, more will be revealed, the path will become clear, and they will see how important it is to reinvent and stay ahead of the waves. They will help each other and as they do, the culture turns into something new. The culture won’t become soft. Transparency will become a positive tool for engagement. But more than anything, results will create a new enthusiasm that builds the mission and provides multiple new dimensions to the culture. All will be sustained because everyone is engaged and everyone is accountable.