People want to change. If only.....!!

Everyone wants to progress, wants to be better and if one wants to be better, then logically one wants to change to become better. All rational human beings change if they see the reason and benefit in it. Simon Sinek in his path breaking discovery has shared with us the secret of world class marketing and it a single word “Why”, if we share “Why” with people, they are willing to listen and ultimately change.

In the past one year, the organisations I have touched more or less do not want to spend time on sharing the reason or “Why” of change, but are more than willing to spend million of rupees on deciding “What” to change and “How” to change. They want to share the new direction, strategy and plans with people and expect them to follow the same quickly, often wondering as to why others can not see the reason for change as clearly as they can. We miss the point, as management we have spent countless days to look at scenarios, mull them in our heads over and over, looked at various perspectives, spent may be 2-3 months to arrive at that crisp 1 pager explaining the strategy and plan. We are clear and our mind fails to believe that others can not see what we are able to see, ‘it is not possible’ we think and yet others are not able to see things the way we are seeing, it is all very ‘perplexing’ is  what we think. We fail to communicate the “Why”, the more we want to explain “What” the more people want to know the “Why”, the forces are acting against one another and since we are “in” the situation, we fail to see “Why”.

I have experienced the magic of people willing to walk the hard path with you provided you make them your partner in the hard path (and explain the “Why”). Please do not pretend that you are leading  but  walk shoulder to shoulder with them.

Often management  does not explain the “Why” of change and expect people to walk along, they will, but the minute something catches their fancy or they find the path Hard, they will slip and walk off. Most of us in top management think it is a waste of time to align people to the “Why”, we think it is the job of management to think and provide direction and job of employees to follow. We can not be farther from reality, employees are rationale beings, explaining your rationale helps people appreciate your point of view and once they see what you see, they understand and then they trust. Once trust builds, one can move mountains, literally.

Next time you want to start that change effort in your company, start with the “Why” and be amazed with how quickly things gain momentum.