Nobody minds the change. They mind not knowing when it ends.
Hi y’all,
A few weeks back we talked about spotting the system you’ve outgrown. This week, the harder half: making the change stick. I asked our CEO Andrew Garcia how he does it, and I’ll let him take it from here.
Mallory Mullen
Goodshuffle
Hey everyone,
You’ve probably sat in a meeting where everyone agreed to a new process. The reasoning was sound, heads nodded. Six weeks later the team is quietly back to the old way, and it looks like they didn’t want to change.
I don’t buy that the team didn’t want change; people change constantly. What some owners forget is that going 90 miles an hour is a lot less scary when you’re the one holding the steering wheel. What sets them off is a change they don’t feel any control over.
I get into the whole thing here:
Three things I do every time we change how we work:
Watch the reaction, not the argument. Simon Sinek’s rule: if feedback hits you harder than a seven out of ten, something underneath needs a conversation. Same with process. When someone on your team gets frustrated or blindsided, that’s oil under the car. You’ll only notice if you know your people well enough to tell a bad day from a broken process.
Give it an end date, and run it exactly. What I tell our team is “we’re running it this way, exactly this way, for forty-five days, then we all sit down for a retro.” Run a watered-down version and when it fails, you’ve learned nothing about the idea, only about the compromise.
Put up mile markers. Marathon runners without them go to a dark place. Say what “working” looks like at two weeks, not only at the end, and say up front when you’ll ask for their feedback.
Your team is already asking three questions, whether or not they’ve brought them to you: How long is this going to last? Why is it happening? When do we get a say?
Think about the last change you rolled out. Could your team have answered those three on day one?
Andrew Garcia
CEO & Co-founder, Goodshuffle
