Damian Hughes on Leading Change

Transcript

Damian Hughes: There are actually four types of people that work in an organization, and this stems from the work of a psychiatrist called Daniel Canter.

He said, people respond in four distinct ways to a particular change situation. You have your initiators. People that are passionate, that are really enthusiastic. On the other extreme, you have your blockers. People that will resist it for whatever their reasons are.

The third group you have are the people that he describes are the detached. People that are switched off and disengaged. Your fourth group are the ones I often feel are your most powerful, these are your adapters. These are the people that can adapt but they just want to see some evidence of it first.

And one way I'd encourage any leaders looking at this for thinking, "How do we respond to change?" Is to think about those four groups of people and think about where you invest most of your time, energy, and resources. 'Cause if you were to allocate where the most people sit in your organization, my experience tells me that most people say people are inherently good, people are either in the initiator's box or they're in the adapter's box, they want things to be successful, they just want evidence of it.

If you were then to sit down and plot, where do you spend most of your time and energy when you're in change? Most leaders will probably tell you that it's in the other two boxes. Spend most of the time trying to persuade the blockers and the detached to come along with them.

So think there about, if your time was money, would you invest that time and money in those resources to the level that you do? And the answer is you probably wouldn't. Now, I'm not saying that you cut those people off or you refuse to engage with them, but you have to have different strategies, different techniques.

You would never give a blocker, for example, the oxygen of a public environment where they could belittle your ideas or you are forced to argue with them in a very public way. You would deal with them in an individual basis.

So I think the key advice I would give anybody is to think about the four different types of people when it comes to change. Because once you understand that, common sense dictates that you will understand, that you would adopt different strategies and techniques to successfully deal with them.

Use emotion in change. You know, emotion is something that if you want people to embrace with change, learn a lesson from advertisers, right. Advertisers are constantly striving to tap into the right part of our brain where emotion gets stored. People will respond when their emotions are involved.

Donald Kuhn, a neurosurgeon, says, "If you want people to debate things, use logic. "If you want people to actually do things, use emotion." As a leader or a change catalyst, that position can often be exhausting, tiring, lonely and dispirited. So we all need somewhere we can go to plug ourselves in and recharge ourselves because otherwise your impact diminishes as your energy levels do.

So I'd really encourage change catalysts in the organization to make sure that they go somewhere where they can do that.

About Damian Hughes

Professor Damian Hughes has a practical and academic background in sport, organization and change psychology. He acts as an advisor to the business, education and sporting elite, specializing in the creation of high-performing cultures.

Hughes is the author of "Liquid Thinking," "Liquid Leadership," "How to Change Absolutely Anything," and "How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson."