#003 Dr. Barbra Trautline | Change Intelligence (CQ)

Barbra Trautline, guest · [02:43]Actually, I am, like you, I had not intended to have quote-unquote change management as my career. I started off in a, by obtaining my PhD in organizational psychology, and when I was in my graduate program, I got a part-time job at a consulting firm. And in the consulting firm, we were actually, my first project was working with a steel mill in bankruptcy. And it was back in the mid-eighties, and, at that time in the United States, we were undergoing a recession, a lot of automotive plants were shut down or in danger of shutting down, and therefore their suppliers, like steel companies, were really hit hard. So as I mentioned, I was working as part of a consulting team in the steel mill in bankruptcy, and of course our job was to attempt to help them emerge from bankruptcy, return to solvency. So of course that's a huge change. So, so from my very early career, that's what I had been doing, is helping leaders, teams, and organizations manage big change projects. And I remember distinctly my first day on the job, standing up, introducing myself to a room full of about thirty or forty steel workers, and I get up as a twenty-five-year-old woman. And I, introduce myself and I talk about all the changes that we were going to implement, high-performance teams, total quality management, Lean Six Sigma, and a gentleman gets up, a steel worker, he's a huge guy, six foot five inch, 250 pounds, he comes right to the middle of the room, right in front of me, and says, we're steel workers and we don't listen to girls. So right from the start of my career, I was both helping companies manage change in order to be competitive and survive and thrive, and also to some degree, I guess I was a big change just for the, for the folks that I was working with, a woman in steel.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [04:52]So from there ensued twenty years of helping companies in steel and other industries manage change. So in the beginning, again, it was a difficult economy, so a lot of our changes were, turnarounds, helping companies change to survive. Then I started doing more in terms of helping new startup facilities build. I've done a lot with IT implementations, mergers and acquisitions, so a lot with, again, helping companies deal with and be successful through major transformations. In almost all of those projects, there has been a component of leadership development, so developing leaders with new skills in order to lead in these changing times. About seven years ago now, I put those two ideas together, managing change and leadership development, and came up with the idea that what we really need to focus on more and more is leading change. Because from the time I started in business in the mid-eighties, we've known that the failure rate of major organizational changes like turnarounds, like startups, like mergers and acquisitions, like new technology implementations, has been around seventy percent. John Carter and his colleagues at Harvard did research in the mid-eighties, came out with that statistic, seventy percent of major organizational changes fail, and we all know the carnage that results from that. And then right around the time I came up with the concept of Change Intelligence, McKinsey and Consulting, the global consulting firm, did a similar study and came out with a similar statistic. So that meant that in a span of about twenty years, we hadn't moved a needle on our ability to design and implement changes that stick. So I was looking at what's the gap. And again, that's what I came up with, that we have lots of tools and methods for managing change, for change management. We have lots of tools and methods for developing various kinds of leadership capabilities. What was missing is our ability to really lead change, and that's what CQ, or Change Intelligence, is all about.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [10:17]So the next question people tend to ask me is just what you did. If Change Intelligence is, you know, the awareness of your style of leading change, what are those styles? And so what I've distinguished in almost thirty years now working with leaders at all levels, and by the way, I consider us all leaders, regardless of if we're the CEO, if we have manager in our title, if we're an individual contributor, I believe we're all leaders of change. So that's how I use that expression. So anyway, so the different change leader styles are people tend to lead from the heart. That's, and people who lead from the heart, they focus on the people that are involved in change. So they, they engage, they collaborate, they communicate. And this is a strength-based model, so that's a strength. However, sometimes a strength can be overdone. So for example, high heart leaders, sometimes they can be on the side of the bell curve that wants ninety, ninety-five percent of the people on board before they move forward, and sometimes the business case, the sense of urgency, might necessitate us to move faster. The second style of leading change leads from the head, and that's the style that always wants to move very quickly because what they're focused on is the purpose, is the change goal. They, they understand the business objectives and they want to move very quickly, rapidly to, to get there. They're, so therefore they're visionary, they're strategic, they focus on the big picture, they're systems thinkers. That's all great, that's a strength, but sometimes what can they drop out? Well, sometimes what they drop out is giving people the plan to get from current state to future state. And that's the third style of leading change, leading from the hands. Those are the folks who love to plan the change, they're very process-oriented, detail-oriented, and they like to focus on how to make this happen, how to get it done. What can they drop out? Sometimes they can focus on change by checklist and be more efficient than effective, and they can get frustrated with the people that they're partnering with in change. So those are the three main styles leading from the hard hat hands. And the other reason I Like this analogy is because just like we each have a heart and a head, and most of us have two hands, we have all those styles in our tool bag. We can do any of them.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [18:57]Well, that's actually one of the bottom lines of Change Intelligence, that I say what looks like resistance in other people is an opportunity for us as change leaders. So often I think that change leaders, people who lead change, they start off with the best intentions. They want to do the right thing for other people and their organization. However, at some point, it often starts feeling like they're pushing the string, right? They're pushing the string and they're getting what looks like and feels like resistance from other people, right? And so, and what I say is that what can we control, and this is a Viktor Frankl message from Man's Search for Meaning, we can only control ourselves, our mindsets and our behaviors. So I say that when we, you know, when we feel like we're starting to transition from doing something with and for others, and we start feeling like we're doing something against or to or even in spite of other people, turn the mirror back on ourselves, right? And see what we can do differently as change leaders, because so often what is resistance? Either people don't get Get it, right? They don't get the reason for the change, which is the head. So therefore, as change leaders, what can we do? We can explain the change better, right? We can tell the story. Second, people don't want it. They don't want it. They have an emotional level resistance to it. So therefore, what can a change leader do? Leverage the heart, communicate, engage, listen, build trust. Or three, they might get it intellectually, they might want it emotionally, but sometimes people just can't do it behaviorally. They can't do it. They haven't had the training, they don't have the tools, or there's barriers standing in the way in the organization of good people behaving consistently with the change. So therefore, what can we do? We can add hands. We can add the hands, the process, the tools, the, and the help that people need. So that's what I say that what looks like resistance in other people, as leaders, we can reframe that From enemy to ally. We can reframe what looks like resistance to a powerful source of information that we can use to, to change the only thing that we really can, which is ourself.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [32:06]So the other project I would share is actually in the healthcare industry. So something very different. And as I mentioned, I have a certification program, and so organizations will bring me in to certify their internal people, so they can then leverage Change Intelligence throughout their organization. So this particular client Is a, a healthcare system that operates across the state of Ohio. And for those of you who may not know what's going on in healthcare in the United States, there's all kinds of legislative changes, and that's causing smaller community hospitals to merge together. It's causing a lot of new technologies to be implemented in hospitals. It's causing very different relationships between patients and providers and insurance plans. So it's just an industry that is going, undergoing massive change. So this particular client, University Hospitals, they brought me in to train all of their learning and development people in Change Intelligence, and then internally, they trained almost all their leaders, people leaders, so from the C-suite to frontline nursing staff in Change Intelligence. They trained about thirteen hundred. They have a few hundred more to go in these concepts. And what's really exciting to me is because of the results that they're achieving. And so, for example, they are reporting that building their Change Intelligence, their ability to lead change, has had bottom line impacts, for example, on patient satisfaction. Now, I think that is truly fascinating because again, how do you get from here to there? How does leading change help you satisfy patients? And we're exploring that more, but one thought I have on the subject is that people are just bombarded with so much change. If you're a nursing supervisor on the floor, you have to, again, integrate new processes because your hospital just got acquired. There's new technologies to be compliant with new government regulations. There's so much distractions that are keep away from patients and their families. If you can build your capacity to smooth out these changes, then that just gives you so much more bandwidth to be able to really do your core job.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [35:36]I think I see two things. One of them is that, actually three things. So one of them is that change management, as we know, really hasn't been considered or wasn't kind of recognized or distinguished as a profession until maybe a decade ago. And so one thing that's definitely happening is, you know, I'm a member, for example, of the Association of Change Management Professionals, and the mission of that association is to create the discipline or, or support further the discipline of change management. So defining a, a standard for change management, defining, a certification process for change management, a code of ethics for, ethics for change management. So I think that's one change that's occurring is just like the Project Management Institute did for project managers or the International Coach Federation did for coaching. You know, we're looking at emerging as a recognizable Discipline that we can actually talk about, explain. So that's, that's one that I see. The second thing that I see is that we're definitely augmenting, we're learning that we still have a very high failure rate of change. And so we're recognizing that, as I mentioned before, change management skills and tools and toolkits are baseline. We need those in our profession. We need to know them, we need to use them. However, we need much more of a focus on change leadership, on the leadership skills, competencies, capacities, that self-awareness, that building our capabilities around leading change is so mission critical. So that's two. And I think the third one is just the interdisciplinary nature of what we do. I think that, and maybe this is something I want to see versus that I'm actually seeing, I think that I know that we as change management professionals, change agents, we need to bring so many disciplines to bear. As you mentioned, People bring their emotions to work, and I think we need to understand coaching tools and strategies. so often what we do is we work in teams. I think we need team building, capabilities. A lot of what we do affects the structure and process of organizations. I think we need to know a lot about the organizational development world. We need to manage projects, and we need to understand about project management. So I think that, again, whether it's something that I see evolving or something that we as change agents need to be constantly aware of is continuing to develop ourselves as change agents and also remembering that we can leverage insights from allied disciplines to get the job done.

Barbra Trautline, guest · [38:29]I can just share one other insight from my Change Intelligence database that might be of interest to your listeners, and that is that when I talk about the differences by level, but when I look at the prevalence of the change leader styles overall, About forty-two percent of change leaders lead from the heart, and about forty percent lead from the head. Only about eighteen percent of change leaders lead primarily from the hand. And I think that has some serious implications. We know that strategy is sexy, right? So we focus on the head. There's so much research about the bottom line benefits and importance of employee engagement. So I think we know that we need to focus on the head, we know we need to focus on the heart. What gets dropped out and I think is undervalued is the hands. And I think that's one of the critical reasons we have so much failed change is because we don't take the time to implement and evaluate and sustain the change. We don't install wedges to prevent backsliding. And we really don't look at all the different tentacles of what's going on in an organization, what are all the barriers, systemic barriers in the way of really having the change stick. So I would just leave your listeners with that. And, and to think about, am I really as a change agent doing what I need to do to really effectively implement the change and really effectively enable its execution?