Ambition Should Be Made of Sterner Stuffchange management process change management plan As any manager knows, implementing change doesn't come easily. Introducing new roles and functions in a work process, creating new client handoffs between groups, installing new ways of communicating-all of these, and, of course, many more-are chances to trot out tools learned in Change Management 101. Describe the vision. Sell the benefits. Accentuate the positive. Coach the cynical and hold people accountable. These practices coax and cajole people into a new direction. And yet in our consulting practice, we find over and over again that often these tactics aren't enough.
The problem is people don't engage with the same level of commitment to the change as the leaders do. Something is always missing; enthusiasm is so often curbed by reluctance, holding back and skepticism. We've seen too many people shake their heads in agreement about a new way of working, then engage in ongoing rear-guard criticism of why the new way doesn't work, makes more problems, has been f orced on them, often blaming others for not complying and the like.
And yet, there are those leaders who have driven organizations from the status quo into "infinity and beyond". What can a mid-level manager in any organization learn about change from these gamer-changing CEOs like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, IBM's Lou Gerstner, GE's Jack Welch, Intel's Larry Ellison and Apple's Steve Jobs?
It appears that when the leader of an organization is out to create a new space in the market and change the rules of the game, then pushing people beyond their self-limitations has to be a combination of matchless, inspiring rhetoric passionately describing a shining vision paired with an audacious, relentless-sometimes sharply worded pressure to perform (1).
The perfect case to explore this phenomenon is Steve Jobs and the development of the Macintosh.
Steve Jobs: Beyond Brash
I had often heard Steve Jobs described as "brash" and "difficult" befor e I read Walter Isaacson's new authorized biography (2) of the late Silicone Valley sorcerer. Half-way through the text, it becomes clear that brash is a colossal understatement.
As reported by Isaacson's many personal and business interviewees, the Steve Jobs who drove the Macintosh development team in the early 1980s was obnoxious, manipulative, back-stabbing, lying, self-serving, relentless, prone to tantrums and crying jags when he didn't get his way, and totally ungrateful for the efforts of engineers working 100-hour weeks to create a new world of computing. His reactions to almost all ideas was "This is sh*t", leaving no clue what was amiss. He would go into the Mac building at eleven at night, and his engineers would bring him code. He would take it and literally throw it back at them. "How can you turn it down without even looking at it?" his astonished manager would ask. "I know they can do better."
One of his senior executives from the time said, "Stev e would have made an excellent King of France."
On the other hand, he was also a charmer, catching people up in his "weirdly charismatic" way with words. One top Pixar team member said, "You almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him." In his late 20s, he was able to recruit John Sculley from Pepsi, a middle-aged, establishment CEO who he challenged with this now famous closing line: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Sculley was hooked.
Through this combination of uncompromising unreasonableness and the seduction of greatness, he was able to create groundbreaking products, marrying technology with art, shattering long-held models of how computers were designed, built and used, and opening up the world to entirely new, fresh and overwhelmingly successful concepts that were "insanely great".
If you are student of leadership and life in organizations, you have to wonder how on earth Steve Jobs could achieve a total renaissance in technology in two decades -computing, desk-top publishing, movies, music, phones, tablets, apps-with a personal style that was demoralizing, demeaning and yet passionately committed to a vision that, at the time, was revolutionary? Does it take in-your-face leadership produce game-changing, iconoclastic outcomes?
Building the Macintosh: How to Be a Pirate
The Macintosh team was working on an idea that was bigger than big-a rule-breaking computer with a new graphic interface that was also an aesthetic masterpiece-that they knew would literally uplift, expand, and energize the industry and, yes, the world.
What Jobs-the Jobs who had charm and a way with words-sold over and over again was the challenge that he put in front of his team, and the core idea that it would take completely new thinking to become free of what they thought was possible. The team knew it was working with a cre ative genius at the edge of a revolution, and most of them bought it and, more importantly, they believed it and wanted to be part of it. To get through the ambiguity and confusion of invention and innovation, they had to get out of their mental boxes and assumptions and be willing to fail over and over again. Their path was to "Think Different." The good Jobs gave them a reason to go into the unknown, and the bad Jobs drove them beyond their self-imposed limitations. "It can be done" was a mantra.
The good Jobs gave the team a brand and a role to play out. He said, "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy." It was a masterful play to the achievement-oriented engineers and designers who knew the "Navy" at the time was Microsoft and IBM, the buttoned-down Big Brothers of the industry. As pirates, they could run over convention, upset the status quo with permission to be bold, inventive and iconoclastic. Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher-the Iron Lady-also v iewed herself as "the rebel head of an establishment government."(3) Pirates and rebels don't have to follow the rules; that's what defines them and gives them their advantage, especially in designing breakthrough technology.
Of course, it wasn't easy to be at Apple in the mid-1980s, even as a bold pirate, mostly because of the bad Jobs' abrasiveness. He had a low tolerance for engineers and designers who said things couldn't be done, firing them sometimes on the spot. He insisted on perfection, and he drove a lot of talented, but frustrated people away. I think he was continually convincing people that this effort was going to be built on trial and error in the pursuit of perfection. "By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things," said Steve Jobs.
Those who stayed at Apple probably stuck it out for "the esteem of their peers," said industry veteran Jim Starkey (4), a software wizard who has been in high tech since the early 80s. "Bei ng known as a member of the Mac team means being a rock star, having a Wikipedia page, being introduced at conferences as a legend." In short, people put up with Jobs for the glory of going down in history as the highest-level A-players in a competitive profession at the exact moment everything changed.
In the end, the "pirates" won and eventually even learned to work with "The Navy" when Apple and Microsoft partnered on software for the Mac.
What Can We Learn From Jobs As Leader of Change?
We certainly aren't encouraging leaders to become abrasive, abusive, insensitive martinets with no empathy for the struggle people naturally have with change. What we are saying is that a change agent has to show passion and commitment to the new idea, along the way demonstrating an emotional edge that will get people's attention and send an insistent message that change must happen.
As we mentioned, one of the problems in leading change is getting people to commit to it with fervor and genuine engagement. Describing direction and the benefits-the "Vision Thing"-can lead to understanding, an important component of commitment. However, intellectually understanding direction is not nearly enough to motivate exceptional performance. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of change programs stop in their attempt to capture people's imagination. Talking at people in rationale terms about the results of analysis and new ideas and even exciting new direction doesn't do it. The emotional hook is missing.
When the leader and his/her immediate management team demonstrates personal commitment through tough and risky decisions, holding people accountable, making sacrifices and upholding high and new standards of performance, then people begin to believe that this leader is serious. Being a committed role model is surely instrumental in showing that the change is real. However, that still isn't enough to viscerally grab people in the organization and move them to achieve great things.
It is the pushing, driving, insisting and occasional voice-raising and desk-pounding that moves complacent, skeptical, and even cynical souls into action. When Jobs saw mediocrity, he pushed back, demanding more again and again. Perhaps some people need to be pressured like that to go beyond. Perhaps the show of emotion by a leader is a wake-up call they might not have ever experienced before from a leader, serving as the convincer that the vision is, in fact, real, serious and worth it. But this kind of emotional pressure without the challenge of achieving a magnificent payoff just leads to exhaustion.
Of course, the pay off for the Mac team was glory and, for some, celebrity. On the other hand, if the changes you and your organization are facing are more pedestrian, like moving from a multiple point of contact with a client-for example-to a single "relationship manager" model, the reward ce rtainly isn't going to be industry acclaim. And yet, even in these prosaic changes, we constantly see the need to artfully position and repeat the vision-the purpose, the benefits-and insist, sometimes loudly, on seeing action because inertia and human nature need to be overcome.
The Role of Leader's Emotional Edge in Change
Michael Maccoby, in his article Narcissistic Leaders, points out that great leaders-productive narcissists, as he calls them, understand the vision thing because they are typically big picture people. They also are masters at describing the new direction with passionate eloquence that "can move mountains." While not every mid-manager is, nor should, strive to be a narcissist-there are dark, even pathological, downsides to this personality profile-every manager should learn that instilling change requires an emotional edge that reaches into and challenges each person's sense of complacency. To ignore the role of emotion i n the change process is to fail to deploy change's greatest lever.
1. Maccoby, Michael Narcissistic Leaders, The Incredible Pros, The Inevitable Cons, Harvard Business Review, January 2004.
2. Isaacson, Walter, Steve Jobs, Simon and Schuster, 2011
3. Yergin, Daniel, The Commanding Heights, NY, Simon & Shuster, 1998
4. Email, February 24, 2012
Michael D. Maginn has been working with and studying selling for over 25 years. He has interviewed hundreds of sales people in many different lines of business in developing custom sales training programs, always searching for the behaviors that define high performers. As Vice President, Research and Development for The Forum Corporation, he completed one of a number of landmark sales competency studies and subsequent best-selling sales programs. Since then, as the president of Singularity Group, Hamilton, MA., he has worked with many sales organizations in defining how the sales process can add value to the customer's experience. He is the designer of C-Lens Index, a sales assessment tool which gathers data on the customer's view of the sales process as well as the author of 5 Skills of Master Salespeople, available from Amazon.com.
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