Elsbeth Johnson
June 13, 2017
A former colleague liked to remind leaders of their impact by telling them,
There are children you ve never met who know your name. The point was simple:
Their followers were also moms or dads who were going home and talking about
their day in front of their children. And you, their leader, had a starring
role in that story. As leaders, we are far more visible than we realize, and we
are sending signals to followers all the time even when we don t realize it.
And while sending the right signals to our followers is important at any time,
it is especially important during times of strategic change, when followers are
trying to make sense of a new ask from the organization, in the context of
all the existing asks they are grappling with.
Why, then, is it so hard for leaders to send clear, effective signals to
followers?
In my experience of working with leaders, and in my research asking followers
what they need during times of strategic change, there are three main ways in
which leaders too often send confusing signals to their organizations. Get them
right, and you can signal clearly and effectively; fail to pay attention to how
and what you are signaling in these three modes, and you will have confusion at
best and at worst, the opposite of the strategic changes you ve asked for.
Signal No. 1: Telling your organization what you want
You d think this would be the easy bit, but the evidence suggests that this is
where leaders most shortchange their organizations. Too many followers tasked
with delivering strategic change report that their leaders weren t clear enough
about what they wanted the change to achieve or about what it would entail.
It seems the reasons for this are twofold: Leaders too often express what they
want in terms not of outcomes, but of tasks, and they rarely, if ever, make
clear the full extent of the change they are asking for.
One client I worked with recently let s call it Sales and Product Co. was
trying to make its business more customer-centric. Its leaders had expressed
what they wanted as a list of activities that their middle managers would be
asked to work on. There were nine projects. The list gave middle managers
clarity about what to do, certainly, but it told them nothing about why they
were doing it, or how their myriad activities might fit together to create a
cohesive program. So we worked with them to re-express what they wanted as
outcome-level targets. Conduct exit interviews with all departing customers
became reduce the customer attrition rate, for example. A target to improve
cross-selling rates through more outbound calls per month became, simply,
improve profit per customer.
And because the middle managers now knew the targets outcomes leaders wanted,
within months they were able to identify better, smarter, and cheaper ways to
deliver them. Instead of nine projects, they settled on just two, which drove
alignment across activities as well as accountability for them. And because the
two were chosen by people close to the business, who understood the
interactions of customer data and processes far better than the senior
management team could (or should), the projects had a far better chance of
delivering their outcomes. When asked why they knew it was these particular two
projects they should work on, the middle managers said, Well, we knew what the
outcomes had to be. And we know how the business works, so it s not that hard.
The importance of specifying outcomes for followers, rather than choosing
activities for them, was clear.
Why is this signal so hard to get right? Leadership teams I ve worked with have
an almost primal urge to give their middle managers a list of activities. It
makes them feel like action is being taken and that they are helping their
hard-pressed middle managers by telling them exactly what to do. It s also much
easier to jump from We need to change to Here s what to do than it is to
thrash out the difficult trade-offs involved.
Left to their own devices, many leadership teams shortchange the questions of
what they want the change to achieve, and why. When we work with leaders, we
often have to push them to continue thinking about these questions and to
answer them with sufficient clarity. But even as we do, we regularly have
someone in the leadership team come up to us in a coffee break and say
something along the lines of, So, all this is great, but when are we going to
get down to it? You know, talk about what we re actually going to do. It
usually takes several conversations, and stubbornness, to help them see that
this is what they as leaders needed to get down to and, conversely, that
until this is done, any scoping out of activities is premature.
In particular, there are four questions that senior teams often skate through
too quickly:
Why do we need to change, and why now? What are the imperatives driving this
change? Why is the previous strategy no longer good enough? Where on the P&L
are we feeling, or anticipating, pain? Are you sure you want X to change, even
if it means you can t have Y anymore?
What is the full extent of the change we need? Don t underestimate the extent
of the change you need, either privately or publicly. However tempting it is to
tell people that this is just an incremental change when it is nothing of the
sort or however politically expedient it seems to underplay the extent of the
change required, a lack of clarity about the extent of the change required will
make subsequent conversations about resources and priorities much harder.
If we figure out 1 and 2, what should improve as a result? How will we measure
the improvement we ve been targeting ? And perhaps most overlooked of all:
How does this new strategy or change link to previous strategies? Answering
this question is critical if leaders are to reduce the confusion that a
cumulative overload of strategic or change initiatives another year, another
strategy and their potentially conflicting targets can cause. If leaders
can t explain these links clearly, then you need to revisit the need for this
change (Questions 1 3) or phase out some of the existing initiatives.
Once you have sufficiently clear answers to these four questions, you have the
first ingredient for successful signaling.
Signal No. 2: Personally living the change you ve asked for
Living the change you want to see means much more than modeling any behaviors
you ve asked for; it also means making a myriad of decisions that support the
change. It is what David Nadler and Michael Tushman, in their 1990 exploration
of how change becomes institutionalized, called mundane behaviors. It means
changing how you spend your time. How you choose to use your most precious,
finite resource (your own diary) is a critically important signal you send as a
leader. If you re not giving time to the change you ve asked for, followers
will interpret this as the latest change not really being important, and will
act accordingly. For Sales and Product Co, this meant the C-suite routinely
scheduling time to discuss progress, and leaving enough space in their diaries
to be available to discuss issues and blockages as the need arose.
It also means changing the agenda of senior team meetings and board
discussions. For Sales and Product Co, this meant putting customers literally
at the top of the agenda for every senior team meeting. Before the seemingly
tiny change, the C-suite had talked about customer issues after sales,
products, and regulation, and just ahead of any other business. This order
had often meant that customer issues didn t get discussed at all, or were
rushed through by tired execs eager to close the meeting. In an organization
that sought to become more customer-focused, this couldn t go on. Talking about
customers early in every meeting gave them the priority, and attention, they
deserved. It also meant that never again would followers ask their C-suite
exec, What did you discuss at the board meeting? to hear the answer We didn
t get to the customer stuff.
Why is this signal so hard to get right? Two reasons. It s partly because
carving out time, and making sure you always have spare time in your diary for
strategic issues as they arise, is so much easier than it sounds. You may also
have to make this time available for years on end, given how long strategic
change takes to embed. That means having to say no to a lot of other people and
their priorities, if you are to keep time available for this priority.
And there will be many times when your old, usual issues will feel like such
urgent priorities that you will be tempted to get them out of the way first,
before turning your attention to the more important strategic stuff. This is
a trap. Sort out the most important issue first and sort it properly. Your
business will then be in fundamentally better shape on the urgent issues.
But the second reason why personally living the change is a hard signal to send
is that sending this signal effectively is a full-time job. Managing yourself
day in and day out, even when you don t feel like it is hard. One of the
leaders I ve worked with describes this as an out-of-body experience, where
he is trying to be simultaneously in the moment with someone, listening to them
and thinking about the issue, and also external to himself, deliberate about
how he is showing up and conscious of the impact he is having on those around
him. Like all mundane behaviors, it is very easy to not notice that you are not
doing them and that, of course, is precisely when your followers are looking
most closely at you.
Signal No. 3: Resourcing and measuring the change you ve asked for
How your organization spends its resources (capital, people, capabilities) and
what it chooses to measure are the final critical ways it signals what is
important. As a leader, you disproportionately shape these decisions, and
therefore the clarity of these signals. This means finding the resources needed
to deliver the change you ve asked for. It doesn t just mean money though
that is important. It also means allocating the right people, with the right
level of seniority, experience, and political connections, to work on the
change. These are all ways you can signal to the organization that the change
is important.
It also means making changes to what you measure, and making these changes
early on in the change. All too often, a new change spends its first few
quarters being undermeasured because the existing suite of metrics the
organization uses haven t been overhauled to reflect the new priorities. If
what gets measured is what gets managed, give the change its best chance by
signaling as early as possible that new metrics will be introduced to measure,
and therefore embed, the change you ve asked for.
Why is this signal so hard to send? Part of the problem is that reallocating
resources and changing metrics aren t the glamorous work of strategic change.
Rarely are mundane, instrumental, transactional leadership endeavors (such as
resourcing or measurement) given much air time in popular management literature
or airport books. The result is that these more mundane aspects of leading
change are still regarded as less important by leaders although they remain
some of the most critical signals for followers.
And, of course, making changes to resourcing and metrics takes time. The
announcement of the strategic change might have missed the annual planning and
budgeting round. While it s painful to face up to, announcing a major change
might mean asking people to redo this grunt work. And while those asked to do
it may not be immediately enamored with the request, they know the alternative
is that they, and everyone else in the organization, will be second-guessing
the change until this grunt work is done.
Now, it may take several months to define, agree, baseline, and then measure
these new metrics, so start this work early (and just as important, talk about
the fact that you re doing it), that way you signal to the organization what s
coming and that the change is not a passing fad. Put your money where your
mouth is, and send the signal that this change is your priority and that it
will be resourced and measured accordingly.
Signals matter to followers, so signaling needs to matter to you. Followers are
looking for signals to help them make sense of what they should do. As a
leader, you have disproportionate power to shape these signals or not. And
that s especially important when you re asking for change. So supply people
with what they need to make sense of it. And be the story you want their
children to hear.
Elsbeth Johnson, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour at
London Business School and a Visiting Fellow at the LSE.