Leading in Harmony with Human Nature

Why we fear change and reframing for success!

Human nature causes us to fear change and oppose it, but humans are also hardwired to fight for survival using more and more novel ways of competing for resources. The popular author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek says that in order to get the best from employees, leaders need to make them feel safe. However, research suggests this is only partially true. Nigel Nicholson, professor of organizational behavior, says our ancestors weren’t big risk takers. A status quo was favored in most cases as change in ancient times meant an increase in uncertainty and the possibility of basic needs being unfulfilled such as lack of food, shelter or even worse threat from predators, natural disaster or other human beings. However, this doesn’t mean humans weren’t curious about the world or never explored. Nicholson says when circumstances felt safe that’s very likely just what we did and we see this behavior in children; they can be quite adventurous when confident an adult will protect them from harm.

In today’s world of advanced tools and mass cooperation, even though change receives a great deal of publicity, behavioral psychologists are not surprised by the fact that almost everyone still resists it. Nicholson summarizes this fear of change by saying that most people avoid loss when they are comfortable in life but fight furiously when survival requires them to do so. Reaching adulthood means there’s no one watching over our shoulder anymore but equally we’re not fighting for survival in the way our ancestors were. The result is a bell curve where most people avoid risk except when threatened.

So as business leaders, how do we ensure employees embrace change and work together for the survival of our companies? How do we make employees feel safe internally whilst at the same time motivate them to explore new possibilities, manifest their ideas, achieve beneficial outcomes and generally contribute to the company’s external prospects? Nicholson suggests finding a balance between framing the situation as threatening (e.g. ‘the business is struggling for survival’) and safe (e.g. ‘the business is very successful’). He emphasizes how effective managers need to be adept at framing challenges in a way that neither threatens nor tranquilizes team members.

Getting the balance right between managers and team members is far from easy. Getting it right organizationally is vastly more challenging. Success depends on the collective awareness and actions of any employees who have leadership responsibilities, be it small teams or the entire organization in the case of the executive board. However, the board and senior managers have to take more responsibility as they have more power and control over the selection and flow of information within the company. Business Leaders can learn a great deal from the valuable insights behavioral psychologists gain from their research. But effective Change Leaders need to know how to take this one step further.

Reframing change as the need to improve the company’s chances of survival through learning, evolving, creating new tools, finding new resources and competing with rivals can be easier for employees to accept than trying to sell them ‘change’, forcing them to ‘transform’ or moving away from the status quo.

This requires an outward-in looking framework and approach where leaders ensure employees are aware of the macro-environment, their competitors and other products and services. This is a challenge for large organizations. There comes a point in a company’s growth when employees unavoidably become pre-occupied with internal activities and less interested in or aware of external factors affecting their motivation and productivity. Furthermore, business leaders inevitably become detached from employees as increasing layers of management stifle the top-down flow of information regarding external factors. Growing companies attempt to offset this effect by creating vision and mission statements emphasizing their primary objectives and raison d’être to promote a sense of common purpose in working towards external goals. They also define or highlight the company’s values to foster a sense of belonging through shared ethics and principles whilst working towards aligning these values throughout the company by targeted employee recruitment, partner selection and marketing to customers with similar values. Such techniques can be likened to brand-building and they fall under a general area of study called Organizational Identification (OI).

However, a more intrinsic and dynamic method of communicating business objectives and progress against them is necessary. Although vision and mission statements are fundamental to any successful organization, they only have limited short-lasting effect in motivating employees. They are almost entirely static (the message never changes) and employees rarely think of them in their daily activities. Values are more powerful as they make-up the fabric of organizational culture and are often manifest in both inter-employee conduct and community outreach programs. However they don’t directly relate to productivity and like vision and mission statements they only have limited effect in motivating employees, even when used in conjunction with reward systems (e.g. salaries, financial rewards, status / promotions).

Of course strengthening conventional motivating factors such as OI and reward systems is still necessary. Rewarding employees is powerful and still essential to solving the problem of motivating change; success depends on a multifaceted approach using a combination of factors whose aggregate effect is greater than the sum of their parts. However, current reward systems are highly personal and internal whereas OI interventions are largely symbolic and static in nature. Getting employees to embrace change requires additional components that use information more dynamically than OI and motivate employees to think more collaboratively about organizational challenges than reward systems.

External Factors & Information Flow

Business Leaders need to create frameworks and processes that ensure employees are constantly updated and aware of external factors that affect the forward progress and ongoing success of the company, particularly such things as competing products/services, competing companies, success stories of major suppliers / partners / collaborators and general headlines regarding the macro-environment and market movements.

They also need to focus on making this flow of information through the company both consistent and efficient by placing specific, relevant, topical content and ‘news items’ in the attention of employees through their daily activities. The idea is that once equipped with this knowledge, the productivity of employees will increase as their awareness of the company’s progress in the context of external factors gives them a sense of being personally responsible for the company’s survival and long term success (however small relative to other more senior employees).

Response to External Factors

Business Leaders need to highlight the reason for the company’s response to external factors whenever the company or the leadership makes a significant change, for example moving into a new market, launching a new product or implementing new tools or technologies that make the company more competitive. In other words, be sure to clearly communicate the ‘why’ in all major decisions concerning business strategy (first to employees) and always link the reasons for the change to external factors, particular for internal initiatives such as new product development or technology implementations. Often, messages regarding change place too much emphasis on ‘how’ the company is going to change rather than ‘why’ the company needs to change or the rationale behind the leadership making such decisions.

Position for Incremental Change

Business Leaders are encouraged to prioritize incremental change over business transformation or ‘big bang’ implementations. Such initiatives go against our nature to avoid risk at all costs unless our lives are threatened in some way. In our stone age minds, change = risk. Therefore, leaders need to introduce a new way of developing the company that is incremental and evolutionary rather than monumental and revolutionary. This approach is in direct harmony with our guiding intuition as human beings. Although this approach isn’t always possible (for example office moves or mergers), leaders can improve the reach, scope and quality of their strategies and plans to lessen the need for tactical reactions or emergency initiatives when responding to external factors, thereby ensuring there are no surprises down the line.

Progressive Decision-Making

Business Leaders can also change their decision-making criteria for daily leadership decisions to ensure that strategies are acted-out in a more predictable, progressive, less disruptive manner. Of course this has to be balanced with the need for agility. With customer sentiment and market dynamics changing more rapidly than ever before, leaders need to be highly in-tune with external factors that inform both tactical and strategic decision-making. They need to ensure businesses are agile enough to respond and quickly reconfigure when external factors threaten survival or present new opportunities. That means finding ways to ensure the company is dynamic, flexible and able to respond to external disruptions without sacrificing employee moral, productivity and collective purpose by introducing broad-sweeping internal disruptions or ‘panicking’.

Leading a Culture of Change

Last but not least, where change was once seen as something that could be managed by interim change managers as a temporary intervention, now there’s a desperate need for dedicated change experts to assume senior leadership positions working closely with executive boards. Furthermore, business leaders need to become change leaders too. Under the guidance of change experts, business leaders need to embrace constant change as part of their normal operations but they must also acquire the skills necessary to manage change effectively in collaboration with dedicated change managers in order to achieve desirable outcomes.

The above components, if deployed successfully, should result in employees not only embracing change but also effecting change as a necessary reaction to external factors threatening the organization’s survival or competitiveness in the market.

Organizational change has never been so important as it is today. Technology is driving the next revolution…the fourth industrial revolution…the rapid acceleration of progress through the fusion of advanced technologies. The increasing frequency with which macro-environments, markets and customer expectations are changing necessitates a new approach to change delivery. An exponential growth in the cumulative knowledge of our species demands that organizations find ever-more valuable ways of collecting and manipulating data in order to remain competitive and pass on that value by way of better products and services. We all need to participate in leading and embracing change. That may mean overcoming our natural instincts, but by leading change we set up the conditions necessary for a change in our own limiting mindset. As we become comfortable with change we become empowered and inspired to take action. And our potential as human beings is realized through our collective progress, both organizationally and as a species. As president John F. Kennedy once said, “Change is the Law of Life”.

References:

Ashforth, Blake E. et al. (2008). Identification in Organizations: An Examination of Four Fundamental Questions. Journal of Management. 34(3), pp.325-374.

Nicholson, Nigel. (1998). How Hardwired is Human Behaviour? Harvard Business Review, July-Aug, p.16.

Schwab, Klaus. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond. [Online]. [Accessed 13 March 2020]. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/

Sinek, Simon. (2014). Why good leaders make you feel safe. TED Talks.