9.1. Identifying Change Agents
Who influences you the most—a peer with whom you work on a day-to-day basis (and whose opinion you respect and friendship you value) or a superior you often do not see for days, weeks, and sometimes months at a time? The answer for most of us is both. We can never ignore that our boss maintains some degree of control over our destiny. However, it is also clear that accessible and valued peers have a considerable effect on our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Formal leaders and those in certain workflow positions are of course crucial to culture change. These individuals must be on board and engaged in any change program to signal its strategic importance and increase its visibility. People who are influential within the organization's informal networks are also crucial. Organizational network analysis can be used to identify several kinds of change agents—opinion leaders, culture carriers, and relationship brokers—through which leaders can drive effective narrative techniques.
9.1.1. Opinion Leaders
Change programs can benefit from the active involvement of employees in two information network positions: central connectors and brokers. Central connectors are people who have a large number of direct relationships and tend to be in the know in certain pockets of the organization. They are often highly central within a given unit or location and can have a good perspective on what will work in that corner of the organization. Brokers are those who have ties across subgroups in a network and are critical for change initiatives that cross organizational boundaries such as functional lines, physical distance, technical capabilities, and cultural values. Unfortunately, despite their influence, brokers tend to live in the white space of an organization and often are unrecognized and underused.
In most change programs, if leaders consider informal networks at all in deciding who should be on the design or implementation teams, they tend to think only of very popular employees or those with whom they have contact. As a result, teams end up being staffed heavily with people who are wed to the perspectives and motivations of one function or location and not necessarily with those who have effective ties across the organization.
Brokers provide this perspective. Because they tend to know what will work in various subpockets of a network, they can be valuable contributors to design and implementation teams. And because they have credibility across groups, they can be effective ambassadors for initiatives that span functional or geographic lines.
9.1.2. Culture Carriers
Another category of people who can be leveraged for a culture change effort are those who are influential by virtue of their network position and either embrace or shun certain beliefs or ways of working. Again, these so-called culture carriers often remain invisible, but a combination of standard culture assessments and ONA can help reveal them and show how various components of culture are distributed throughout the network. Standard assessments reveal who holds certain beliefs (and how strongly), whereas the ONA demonstrates the relative influence of these people within the network (see Exhibit 9.1). This combined analysis can help change leaders ensure that the people most influential in the network are on board and communicating the change to others in an effective and engaging manner.
It often turns out that people who believe an organization's culture is positive on some dimension and those who believe it is not are both central players. As a result, the positive players are undermined or countered by the negative employees, who dogmatically persist in believing that things will never change. Figuring out the network positions of these culture carriers is important and can inform various approaches toward them: negative culture carriers who are highly central are prime candidates for coaching or other developmental experiences. As odd as it may seem, we have seen that turning these people into mentors can give them a greater sense of purpose and have a positive impact on their behaviors.
Measuring Culture in Networks
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Of course, positive culture carriers are also very important to unearth and engage in a change process. We have seen organizations achieve great success by identifying positive culture carriers and reinforcing their behaviors through stories and formal mechanisms such as performance assessments. Another easy and high-impact approach is to bring these people together in a workshop, like the one we sketch out later in this chapter, to assess network results and brainstorm opportunities to promote more effective collaboration.
9.1.3. Relationship Brokers
Culture, of course, has a deeply emotional component, so a third category of people to tap for a culture change effort refers to those people whose ties with others go beyond the exchange of knowledge and information. Put simply, we tend to share the opinions and views of the people we enjoy being around, trust, or consider to be friends. These emotion-laden ties turn out to be much more important in shifting cultural perceptions than those whom we turn to for work-related information.
Again, ONA can reveal the people who engage others on an emotional level. We often find these people with a simple network question:
Please indicate the people whom you consider to be an important source of energy and enthusiasm for you at work. In other words, the people who make you feel enthusiastic about your work and leave you with a heightened sense that what you do at your organization matters.
Engaging those who are a source of enthusiasm for a great many others can have a substantial impact in generating commitment to a new way of working.
Consider Table 9.1. This simple visual reveals the key opinion leaders in an organization across multiple network dimensions. We have selected the 21 most-connected people in the information network; their number of incoming ties (that is, how often they are sought for information) ranges from 34 to 52. Clearly these are all important people in the network, but some—such as Josh and Ivana—stand out. A high proportion of people in their network find them to be energizing and seek them out for problem-solving interactions. As a result, these two would be valuable change agents because they are more likely to capture the passion of others as well as engage in interactions that can inspire people to change their minds.
After they are identified, informal opinion leaders can have a dramatic impact on culture change efforts. Engaging them in narrative-building workshops, such as the one we will describe, helps them to better communicate a change initiative and builds energy and enthusiasm for it.
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