4. A Few Authentic Informal Leaders

SCENE: Mid-May, the evening of the same day as the leadership meeting. Back at Casimir’s.

ALEX: I’m glad you didn’t leave town right away and were willing to meet up again. And I also appreciate that you don’t mind coming back to the same restaurant.

KATZ: I’m a creature of habit, particularly when it comes to good food. And I’m happy to be helpful—it feels like you’re on the brink of doing something really important for Intrepid, and that’s always worth my time. But tell me what got you so riled up at the end of our meeting today—I think that something bigger than Calvin’s return is on your mind.

ALEX: I won’t beat around the bush, Katz. One of our board members, Sebastian, had sent me an email that said we had to discuss something urgent. I spoke to him right before dinner. You know how we’ve been struggling to develop an e-commerce strategy? The board seems to think that acquiring a small local startup in this space could be the answer, and they have suggested that I meet with their founder and start to think it through.

KATZ: [Raises his eyebrows] That is news. How do you feel about it?

ALEX: I have mixed feelings, of course. I’m already struggling to make all the different parts of the current company work together and be in sync; the idea of bringing in some new entity seems like it might be the thing that tips us over into total chaos. I’m also proud that the board thinks that we’re up to this and supports the idea of real investment.

[Alex looks far away, as if trying to see into the future; then, with visible effort, he focuses again on the topic at hand.]

What would a prospect like this do to our conversation about culture, though? Should we hit the pause button until I figure this one out? Does it make sense to try to understand Intrepid today if Intrepid might change so dramatically in the future?

KATZ: Let’s not jump so far ahead yet—let’s keep to where we are today.

ALEX: Because the deal might fall through anyway?

KATZ: That, of course, but not just that. Let’s say that you knew with certainty today that you’d be integrating with another company. Do you know why most mergers fail?

ALEX: Culture issues, I imagine.

KATZ: Yes, that’s right—clashes in working styles, disparate ways of behaving, different sources of emotional energy. Integrations are always grounded in rational reasons, and then the irrational, emotional side of an organization refuses to fall in line. A new org chart makes perfect sense on paper but asks people to work in ways that they aren’t accustomed to, that go against the grain of what they liked about their previous job. It’s very common. Whether or not you should acquire this startup isn’t just a question of whether it aligns with Intrepid’s strategy or whether you can afford it—it’s also a question of how well the cultures will mesh.

ALEX: That makes sense to me—but how am I going to figure that out?

KATZ: You just stay the course of what you’re doing.

ALEX: But now I have this much more urgent deadline.

How can I accelerate my understanding of Intrepid’s culture?

KATZ: Let’s back up a little bit. I want to remind you of something we discussed the last time we were here, over lunch in January. Remember that you told me you were spending more time walking around all the offices and the distribution centers, just having casual conversations. Are you still making time to do that?

ALEX: [Looking pleased] Absolutely. Why do you ask?

KATZ: I was thinking about that guy you mentioned who came up and told you that no one says thank you.

ALEX: Michael, yes; he’s a real character. I’ve made a point of circling back and talking to him a couple more times since then.

KATZ: What have you learned?

ALEX: Michael is in the real estate management group, and he’s a bit of an odd fellow. His role involves negotiating terms of leases and land purchases. Considering how slow our growth has been in the last few years, he hasn’t been involved in anything that has caught the attention of senior leadership, but he seems to be a genius in terms of how things get done. People turn to him from other departments, even outside real estate. I ran into this new buyer the other day and was asking her how her first few months have been. She told me a story about how she was looking for an expert on forecasting to help her plan for Black Friday, and of course it was Michael who had made the introduction.

KATZ: Is he a name everyone knows at the leadership team level, like Calvin?

ALEX: Absolutely not. I imagine only one or two of the top team would know who he is. Maybe Ross would because he’s been here forever and ever. [Looks thoughtful] That’s probably also true about a lot of the people I’ve been having lengthy conversations with—they aren’t the names we all know. But they are definitely the people who go the extra mile, every day, to get things done.

KATZ: Who else do you put in this category? Anyone else in real estate?

ALEX: No, they’re all over the map. We have some in marketing, under Avery, who are doing outstanding work with our online presence. There’s an e-commerce guy called Varun who’s been making a case that we shouldn’t have separate design departments for online and stores. He took it upon himself to set up an informal working group between his team and the store designers. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I wish more people would do.

There are also store managers who talk to me, and it’s usually the stores with good sales. But not always. There was one store manager, Theo, who everyone said I had to meet. His numbers were pretty poor, but when I talked to him about his territory, I realized that, given the circumstances, he was actually pulling off phenomenal sales—a local employer had just closed its doors, and the whole area was struggling.

KATZ: We have a name for this kind of individual: an authentic informal leader, or AIL. They’re the people who are already, in their daily lives and jobs, demonstrating just the kind of behaviors that you want to encourage and promote. And their influence on the feelings and behaviors of those around them is not just a function of their formal role. In addition, many of them are also excellent at sensing and articulating the mood and opinions and emotions of others, so we refer to them as “emotional sensors” as well.

ALEX: Calvin must be an authentic informal leader, right?

That’s why the whole leadership team is thrilled he’s returning.

KATZ: He might be. But to be able to tell, you’d need to validate your impression with the frank opinion of peers and people who work under him. Many leaders presume that their favorites, the so-called high potentials, are the highest-influence people all across the organization. That isn’t always the case. Some high performers are also highly influential with people at all levels—but others are more focused on promotion than they are on understanding what motivates their peers. Most leaders don’t think to engage AILs who are off the radar of senior management. And they are shortsighted not to do so.

ALEX: I like this AIL idea very much. And I might even be starting to think like you, Katz. So let me tell you what I think you’re going to say next.

KATZ: [Laughing] I can’t wait.

ALEX: These AILs should be my “change champions,” right? If we do acquire this startup, I should get them on board and get them to use their influence to help bring the organization on board, right?

KATZ: Not quite. I actually want you to engage this population much sooner—in fact, I want you to start right away. Before you ask these AILs to do anything for you, I want you to listen to them because they understand how things really work at Intrepid. And the good news is, if you are rigorous about finding those with unique emotional capabilities, you can make an excellent start with no more than a double handful. As the momentum builds, the AIL groups will flourish and multiply. They constitute an invaluable “secret weapon” in every successful cultural realignment effort. Remember how I pressed you to move from behaviors to traits? The AILs will help you do that. If you choose the right authentic informal leaders and investigate what it is that makes them special, you will likely see that they exhibit the behaviors that, if more people did more of them every day, would be key to helping Intrepid accomplish its goals.

ALEX: Like Varun, the e-commerce guy who set up the working group with the design team.

KATZ: Exactly. Then, as you develop this behaviors list, you continue to refine it with these AILs, just like you did with focus groups when you defined Intrepid’s traits. But this time, you can set up an ongoing two-way dialogue instead of a one-off opportunity to be heard. Monitor the discussion topics, and follow through on action items— really let these people know that their input matters.

ALEX: And doing this would be useful, you think—regardless of whether or not we decide to go through with the acquisition?

KATZ: Absolutely. If you are going to join forces with another company, you will want to go into that new relationship with a very clear understanding of what it is that makes Intrepid special, what motivates people, and what gets in their way. Imagine yourself in this same restaurant with that other CEO—envision how powerful it would be to be able to say clearly to that other leader, “This is how our culture works, and here’s how we can tap what’s best in it to take full opportunity of this integration.”

ALEX: And should the integration not take place after all?

KATZ: Then you’re right back at the same questions that we ended our meeting with today—what are the core traits of Intrepid’s culture, and what do we want people to do more of and less of to accomplish our strategic and operating goals? What are the critical few behaviors—and what will it look like, here at Intrepid, if more people exhibit more of these behaviors more of the time?

ALEX: And how will we know if this is working? How would we measure it when these critical behaviors take hold?

KATZ: I absolutely promise you, if you engage the right authentic informal leaders and you connect those behaviors and emotions that help tie human motivation to rational elements of business performance, the way to measure it will be totally clear—you are going to measure what matters to employees as well as customers and shareholders.

ALEX: I’m persuaded—and committed to moving forward. And I think that hostess is now exhibiting the behavior of “eyeing us and wondering when we’re finally going to order.” Are you ready?

KATZ: Well, one of my personal critical few behaviors is that I always order lamb chops if they’re on the menu! Let’s eat.

THE POWER OF AUTHENTIC INFORMAL LEADERS

In Katz’s decades of work in this field, one of his formative client experiences was his opportunity to advise General Motors as it climbed out of severe financial distress following its declaration of Chapter 11 in June 2009. For CEO Fritz Henderson, harnessing emotional energy to drive GM’s change priorities was not an option—it was an imperative. Katz’s recollection of early conversations with Henderson are vivid. “Everyone is telling us to change our culture,” Henderson lamented. “And people are going to expect to see it happen right away. In fact, they want it to have happened yesterday. Here’s the trouble: I know that simply isn’t possible. A culture takes shape over decades. This is true anywhere; it is especially true at GM. Our culture is global, complex. It is a challenge just to understand it, let alone to replace it or guide it toward change.”

Henderson; GM’s head of leadership and culture, Chris Oster; and Katz all agreed on a core premise: General Motors’ leaders must work “with and within,” rather than against, the strong prevailing culture. The leadership team decided to identify and execute on four top behavior change priorities: speed of execution, sensible risk, clear accountability, and customer service.

To address the speed of execution, Henderson slashed layers of bureaucracy and dismantled multiple product and strategy boards. In their place, he established a single eight-person executive committee that reported to him directly, twice a week. He also established a senior culture council. This council included manufacturing executive Mary Barra, who later became the head of HR and then, eventually, CEO— the first woman to hold that role in US automotive history. One of the culture council’s tasks was to find out more about how and where these four priorities were already prevalent across the organization. In other words, just as described in the chapters on traits and behaviors, Henderson took a pragmatic approach. He did not try to change the complex GM cultural situation in its entirety toward some ideal defined by an external framework. Instead, he directed his attention to finding answers within the organization.

Henderson believed that steering GM through turbulent waters required a deep, intuitive understanding of culture. His culture council formed a strategy council of very well-respected informal leaders from the front line and middle management to serve as a sounding board and voice of the people: “Fritz’s 50.” Members of this group were not the high potentials on a clear path to senior leadership; rather, they were solid citizens, many of long tenure, most at the front line or lower middle management. To find them, the council consulted traditional sources such as HR records and annual reviews. They also sought stories and anecdotes and relied on their own experience and intuition. They cross-checked their list against the opinions of others who had worked directly with the candidates. When the list was narrowed to the initial fifty, the culture council felt confident that they had found a group who represented, and could articulate, the way that people across General Motors were thinking and feeling.

Throughout GM’s storied turnaround, Fritz’s 50 played a crucial role. They expanded to include other configurations. These groups gave the CEO and other senior leaders a ground-level, authentic view of the day-to-day challenges that stood in the way of achieving their cultural and behavioral priorities. They were also able to translate the leaders’ core messages about GM’s need to transform into plain language and emotionally appealing stories that were crystal clear to their peers. This helped generate the kind of emotional support that Henderson and subsequent senior leaders across GM needed to be successful.

At the time of this writing, General Motors is considered one of the great turnaround stories of the last few decades. Sales in 2016 broke records, and the company is currently known for dramatically improved product quality and customer service. While multiple factors were involved in this transformation, Henderson’s commitment to focusing on culture as an accelerant to accomplishing goals played an important role. He made a bold choice to activate and empower a group of frontline folks to help make it happen.

Mary Barra, GM’s current CEO, has made a commitment to GM’s culture a platform of her leadership. In an interview featured at Fortune’s 2013 Most Powerful Women Summit, Barra discussed the radical effect that the focus on targeted cultural change following the bankruptcy had on GM’s ways of doing business, by reducing policies and slashing bureaucracy. She also made it clear that she believes employee engagement is the key to making sure that GM’s recovery continues: “If we win the hearts and minds of employees,” she said, “we’re going to have better business success.”

Every organization has individuals within it whose social capital and emotional intuition set them apart from their peers. Furthermore, these special individuals can play a powerful role in driving positive change. When organizations are undergoing major challenges, such as strategic or operational transformation, engaging authentic informal leaders can help the greater organization accomplish what would otherwise be considered impossible. This is one of this book’s most profound and simple truths and a through-line that connects most of Jon Katzenbach’s work and writings, from the early 2000s until today.

In the previous chapters, we have referenced these authentic informal leaders several times—they are the kinds of trusted individuals whose opinions and advice should guide you at every stage of your cultural journey. In this chapter, we turn our full focus on AILs: how to recognize them, how to mobilize them, and what impact they can and will have on your effort to transform your organization’s culture. Katz loves to describe AILs as akin to special forces in the military, such as the Green Berets and Navy SEALs. Like these elite military units, AILs are subsets of an organization whose rel atively small numbers belie their position of influence, thanks not to their formal leadership role but to their total dedication to that organization’s mission and purpose. They reflect something strong about the overall traits of the larger whole and are capable of extraordinary acts that could not be managed through the formal organization. And significantly, their special accomplishments open windows that allow the rest of us to see the light, to reconsider what we believe to be possible.

What might AILs look like in your organization? How can you find them, and what might you do with them to help you engage your overall culture evolution goals?

DEFINING AN AUTHENTIC INFORMAL LEADER

Let’s start with what they are not: authentic informal leaders are not on your executive team or in any other highly placed position on your organization chart. Formal leaders play a role in any effort to evolve a culture, but their influence and position mean that they are already empowered to do so. By convening AILs, you are seeking to add a new dimension of insight to formal lines of authority, rather than recreate them. Therefore, you want to engage those for whom cultural legitimacy, emotional intuition, and relationship capital are far stronger than they are for others in similar positions.

AILs also aren’t your high potentials, the superstar performers who are next in line for formal leadership roles. Most of them do not harbor those aspirations; their basic motivations go well beyond money and position. This is precisely the reason they can add a dimension of influence that complements formal programmatic efforts. In a 2016 strategy+business blog post, “How to Find and Engage Authentic Informal Leaders,” Reid Carpenter describes how AILs are often especially strong in areas that traditional performance criteria overlook, such as emotional intelligence (more on this term later in the chapter). For example, an AIL might prioritize building relationship networks over self-promotion.

An AIL also plays a broader role than the change agents or ambassadors whom organizations enlist to help distribute the cascaded communications messages in conventional change programs. This is not to diminish the role that these conventional ambassadors play in a change effort—much praise is due to those individuals who receive the binder, learn the key points, and get the message out. But a conventional ambassador role presumes that the communication flow is mostly one way; ambassadors are executing on the messages that are issued from on high. An engaged group of AILs is a lot more—how shall we say it?—mouthy. They aren’t just there to channel a message—they are there to translate it if they believe in it and also to call foul if they do not and push the leadership to try harder! We believe, based on our work and our research, that a gap often exists between how leaders view their own culture initiatives and how they are viewed by the rest of the organization. According to our recent global survey, 71 percent of CEOs or board members believe that culture is a high priority for leadership, while only 48 percent of those in nonmanagement roles share this point of view. AILs can help leaders understand (and get to the root cause of) the skepticism that lurks in the lower ranks. Their talent for sensing and responding to what others think and feel means that they will choose a way of communicating key ideas that will strike a chord at all levels of the organization.

Given that, an AIL’s role can and should be much more reciprocal than that of a traditional change ambassador. As with Fritz’s 50, AILs can be an unfiltered voice, giving valuable perspective on how the messages that senior leaders develop in the top boardrooms will (or won’t) resonate for those in middle management and frontline roles. They can articulate what appeals to their coworkers on an emotional level. Ideally, you can work with them to codesign specific sets of practices and experiences that will encourage others to explore how their own collective and individual behaviors play a part in moving the organization closer to its overall goal.

At a mining company James worked with in the Middle East, the selected AILs participated in full-day workshops to brainstorm ideas for how the organization-wide behaviors that had been identified by leaders could be enacted and measured. Some of the ideas they developed led to one of the best examples in our work of how a shift in culture can be perceived and even measured over time. This example will be explored in depth in the next chapter, as it’s an excellent illustration of how the evolution of behaviors can be measured.

Another crucial difference between AILs and traditional change ambassadors is that the latter are presumed to be willing advocates for the leadership’s stated positions. By contrast, AILs might appear, at first glance, to be skeptics or resisters. This does not necessarily reflect a passive-resistant fear of change (although routinely, it is perceived as such by management). On closer investigation, AILs who raise concerns and objections aren’t trying to stand in the way. They are trying to move the organization closer to its potential and to protect and fight for what they understand to be important to people. If you can learn to tell the difference between AILs and malcontents and hear what the former have to say, you will add fuel to your arsenal of ideas and opportunities for how to work with your culture’s existing emotional strengths.

A powerful example of a leader who actively engaged the perspective of AILs is Aetna’s CEO, Mark Bertolini. Since assuming the CEO role in 2010, Bertolini has navigated the organization through a market of great complexity, including the company’s response to the Affordable Care Act and the lead-up to the integration with CVS announced in December 2017. In 2015, in a move that presaged similar moves among other CEOs, Bertolini raised the minimum wage at Aetna for all 5,700 employees to $16 per hour, more than double the federal baseline. This represented an 11 percent pay hike across all 5,700 employees; for some populations, the raise was as high as 33 percent. Simultaneously, Aetna enriched medical benefits for these same workers. Interestingly, in an interview that Katz, Art Kleiner, and Gretchen conducted with Bertolini shortly after this announcement, he credited this decision to the strong (and often critical) voices of front-line employees that he’d solicited across his organization, both through face-to-face conversations and through social media. At the time, Bertolini told us with pride that he was one of the few Fortune 100 CEOs who kept a personal presence on Twitter and said that one of his primary goals as a leader was to have a style that was “approachable, real, and tangible.” From his AILs, Bertolini heard a clear message: they were struggling, health care was not affordable to them, and income inequality was a real constraint for them. “After we looked at a number of options to help our lowest-paid employees, I finally said, ‘How about we just pay them more?’” he explained.

Certainly, this is an extreme example; not every organization can provide generous raises to all its lowest-paid staff. What’s significant is how Bertolini arrived at this formal compensation decision specifically by accessing and listening to voices from across the organization. He was relentless about not just probing the people congratulating and agreeing with him but also seeking out those who dared to speak tough truths. Through his accessible social media presence and his walk-the-halls personal style, he was able to encourage, directly respond to, and give credence to these diversely credible voices. And then, by being articulate in the press about how his own employees’ critiques and complaints had spurred him to take this notable, press-worthy decision, he got a surprisingly powerful cultural boost—a burst of positive energy across the organization, a series of integrated moments when employees at all levels felt positive energy connections about their affiliation with the organization. In Bertolini’s own telling of the story, it’s clear that he was conscious of and cultivated the emotional impact that this announcement would have on his frontline workforce. So initially he broke the news not to shareholders or the press but at a town hall in Jacksonville, Florida, at Aetna’s largest call center. “The place exploded,” he told us. “I had known that people would be happy, but I wasn’t ready for the raw emotion. There were people saying, ‘Praise the Lord, my prayers have been answered.’”

This is also a beautiful example of a symbolic act, as we discussed in chapter 3. It was deliberate and purposeful. Everyone in the room who witnessed it came away with a story to tell. And most important, what Bertolini said and how he said it were coherent with the overall message he wanted to convey about the organization’s continued commitment to caring for its employees—a force Jon Katzenbach has long watched and written about over the years as the power of “Mother Aetna.”

AIL TYPES

All AILs are able to interpret and harness the emotional tides present in any organization. This idea is premised on Daniel Goleman’s concept of EQ, as popularized in his 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman focuses on high EQ as a leadership trait, arguing that EQ matters twice as much to the success of top leaders as pure intellect or technical expertise. When we describe AILs as “emotional sensors,” we are referencing their ability to sense not just the feelings of other specific individuals but the collective feelings of the organization as a whole. This gives AILs the power to anticipate and understand how and why a “rational” leadership decision, like eliminating a flextime arrangement that few employees had taken advantage of, might trigger a negative and unexpected emotional response. (People like to believe that their work is flexible, even if they personally find it more effective to work side by side with their colleagues in the office.) AILs have a sense of what emotions will likely be lurking just below the surface, and how and why a leadership decision might stir them up. They can help explain and articulate the elements in an organization that require particular attention.

Some organizations find it useful to categorize specific types of AILs. In our research and experience, we have seen the following:

• Pride builders. These are people who can help you design ways to motivate others. They’re often frontline leaders or middle managers. Although not often recognized by the formal elements of the organization, these individuals are natural energizers of the system around them. They bring out the best in others. They can make people feel good about the work itself—no matter how boring, grungy, or stressful it may be—by connecting it to something larger than themselves.

• Exemplars. Exemplars model effective behaviors. Their actions appeal to others and drive results because these people exhibit behaviors that resonate with the goals of the enterprise. This doesn’t necessarily mean following written rules. It means working above and beyond the rules to attain business results. In a hotel or office complex, for example, a front-desk staffer who takes the time to understand incoming customers and identify who in the organization could best answer their questions becomes an example to others—particularly in an organization seeking to promote excellent customer service.

• Networkers. These AILs cultivate and nourish informal social connections, enabling important and productive work outside the lines of the formal hierarchy. They are high in what economists and sociologists call “social capital.” Networkers, like pride builders, positively influence the overall performance of those around them; also like pride builders, they do not rely on formal position or authority. Networkers know how to accomplish strategically important tasks within the existing culture, even when others find roadblocks. They are often already the hubs of informal networks and therefore stand out easily in well-designed network analysis surveys.

FINDING YOUR AILs

You can find the most effective subpopulations of authentic informal leaders using a variety of methods, ranging from informal conversations to more digitally enabled methods of surfacing patterns of relationships and affiliations such as social network analysis. All these methods have a crucial factor in common: they differ from the formal HR mechanisms used to identify the top candidates for strategic moves or promotions.

In recent years, we have been supporting a complex global banking firm through an ambitious culture evolution. This firm has selected three organization-wide behaviors. The culture team designed a sample ten-question survey. It includes questions about the behaviors themselves (“Do you see these behaviors in action?”), as well as about people who tend to manifest them (“Whom do you know who embodies these behaviors?”). The survey was distributed to more than fifty thousand employees across multiple countries. The how questions will be a pulse survey, repeated over time, which will allow the company to trace how and whether these desired behaviors increase as time goes on. The who questions reveal the AILs, a subgroup of individuals who, through this survey, have been nominated by their peers. Five percent of the population of the bank scored highly on this survey; the culture team validated that list through interviews and comparisons with performance evaluation data. Through this “pressure testing,” they gained confidence that the survey had produced an accurate snapshot of the informal leaders across the organization. We then worked directly with these AILs to develop the interventions that will help support and enable the critical behaviors organization-wide.

This bank created a customized survey to unearth the AILs and intends to keep using this survey as a dashboard to track and measure the evolution of the culture. Other organizations have used preexisting data to select AILs. As part of a broad culture transformation effort we engaged in at a technology company, we worked with the vice presidents of HR and global employee engagement to identify and engage a cadre of informal leaders across the full company population. At the time, the employees numbered several hundred thousand, so it was an ambitious goal. The company deployed an annual employee survey called Voice of the Workforce (VoW), which was broader in scope than a traditional engagement survey. Most surveys of this type we’ve encountered are fully anonymous. This company’s VoW was not. But it did not ask respondents to identify themselves; rather, they were asked to identify their direct manager prior to answering any questions about that manager’s interactions with them.

By narrowing our focus to just a handful of statements that struck us as behavioral, such as “my manager encourages me to speak openly and honestly even when the news is bad,” we were able to produce a list that, we hypothesized, captured the same type of individuals who would have emerged if we’d taken a fully qualitative, interview-based approach. This approach was highly successful; after a first round where we took random samples of the identified individuals and used our customary interviews to test the result, we ended up moving forward with this data-driven approach, allowing the program to scale quickly across continents.

Using tools such as social network analyses or engagement surveys to find your AILs isn’t always necessary. (In fact, what we like best about the technology company example is its inherent thrift: the data that the culture team used was already being captured by the organization.) Leaders from the organizations in the examples above found these solutions effective because they wanted to locate and catalyze their networks quickly at a global scale. Depending on size, geographical composition/diffusion of your organization, and countless other factors, you might choose an approach based wholly on thoughtful dialogues with your leadership team, supplemented by targeted interviews.

Exhibit 4.1 lists interview questions that might be useful, based on the qualities you’re seeking in your AILs.

Any process or method should help you organize, synthesize, and pressure-test the collective intuition of a range of people from across your organization. This helps you get to an accurate answer, of course. It also helps the process itself send a message that you, like Mark Bertolini in the Aetna example above, are open and willing to listen to a multiplicity of voices and are working hard to get to an answer that’s best for your whole company.

Below are some pointers to help you begin.

1. Use your networks to seek recommendations—and encourage others to do the same. Start with your direct team. You might hear another leader say, “I’ve got somebody on my team who seems to demonstrate what we’re doing with this critical few.” Send emails to colleagues, describing the kind of person you’re looking for, and ask for suggestions. Ask your team to do the same. Like Alex, you can also walk the halls and ask people about who energizes them, whom they turn to for information.

2. Consider your critical few behaviors as a starting point. In describing the AILs you want to recruit, keep your desired behaviors in mind. You’re looking for the informal leaders who “see it” (recognize the value of change), “get it” (understand the reasons), “want it” (are committed to change), and, in most cases, already “breathe it.” People who have these qualities tend to be recognized by their colleagues as credible, trustworthy, and effective leaders. Then, don’t forget about the behaviors when it comes time to announce and recognize the individuals. Reference the behaviors they exemplify, including telling stories about exceptional things they’ve done and how these acts were manifestations of the behaviors. This is true coherence: when a leader makes use of every step and stage in the culture evolution process to underscore, emphasize, and recognize specific behaviors.

3. Seek and explore the pockets where expectations are being exceeded. Remember the telecom example in the previous chapter? The leaders pinpointed call centers with customer service results that exceeded expectations. They then observed those specific centers and came to understand how the keystone behavior of teaming drove high customer satisfaction. Seek your company’s pockets of excellence—especially those where success defies logic, like Alex’s example of the store that was located in a community that had experienced layoffs but nevertheless managed respectable sales. It’s likely that AILs are driving this performance.

4. Start with “ideal” candidates. To establish an effective initial group, you must carefully select, develop, and test your informal leaders. Begin with the best of the best. Even if initial efforts turn up only a dozen people who meet the criteria you’ve defined, that’s enough to start. Resist the temptation to rush to a decision here for the sake of expedience. If that first group isn’t carefully composed, the effort will rarely be sustainable over time. The initial group can sharpen your insights about the critical few culture traits to build on and the critical few behaviors needed to go forward.

5. Start subtle and then celebrate. Keep the selection process under the radar, but announce the selection with appropriate fanfare and acknowledgment. At a recent client engagement, the selected AILs were all notified not by an email but through a face-to-face meeting with their manager. Then, they were invited to a celebratory breakfast with leaders of both their business unit and the culture program. These extra efforts on the part of the culture program leaders ensured that the AILs understood their selection as a real honor. And because they were, by definition, highly networked people whom others trusted, their pride at being acknowledged became a viral force that commanded the attention of others. By the “second wave” of AIL identification, other people were clamoring to be included.

6. Encourage viral spread. After several meetings, the first group can expand. They should enlist the next informal leaders. At James’s mining client in the Middle East, the first wave of identified AILs all identified and invited the second wave of participants, which gave the evolving network a communal feel. The best informal leaders usually have a strong instinct for recognizing others who meet similar criteria and can follow their lead.

MOVING AIL NETWORKS TO ACTION

Work with AILs should be ongoing throughout your culture evolution process, taking the form of a series of discussions. You will ask for AILs’ feedback on leaders’ ideas. You will also ask them how they achieve their goals. Working with the energy of AILs is the best place to dig into cultural obstacles and to determine how you can align strategy, operating model, and culture. AILs are also the very best source of ideas for how to attach the high-minded aspirations of any culture program to real, tangible business results.

The days we convene AILs are always the most satisfying days. These are rollicking, enjoyable sessions. The emotional energy is palpable and contagious. Gathering AILs to gether amplifies their knowledge and emotional reach—to one another, to senior leaders, and to the wider organization. Participants take renewed energy back to the front line.

These don’t sound like conventional change management meetings, do they? The agendas for these sessions tend to be loose; the participants are not expected to walk out of the room and parrot a message from the leaders. Instead, critical issues come to the surface on their own, often with far-reaching consequences. Sincere interest in people’s dayto-day work reveals emotionally compelling issues and emotionally charged values, and people tend to find them bracing, thought-provoking, and memorable.