Lockdown 2020 series: Not ready for change, but I'll have a go (maybe)
Photo by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash
This week, I’m focusing on working with people who are in a Participant state in your team. This piece is about how you set up to meet them at that Participant state, then walk that pace with them while affirming the value they bring.
As a reminder, we’re asking two questions:
How ready are your people (or you) for this new way of working we are experiencing? and
How visible are your people (or you) in bringing this way of working to life?
And, of course, all four roles in this matrix are valid. They all have needs, they contribute in slightly different ways, and they have limits to their effectiveness. People move into different states depending on what’s going on around them, including the support they are getting from their leader.
Participants aren’t sure about this, but they’ll give it a go and see what happens
While Participants might not be totally ready for this change, they’ve got enough of a sense of belonging in this team to be willing to give it a try. Past history tells them that being part of this team means supporting each other to try new approaches. And that, when things go awry, the team rallies together to get everyone back on track.
This lockdown change is completely new and unknown though. Participants aren’t totally convinced that what we’re trying will work, but they are willing to try it out. You’ll see them taking visible action, and if you get enough Participants in your group, you’ll create momentum for the shift you need right now.
Being a Participant is a highly vulnerable state. A whiff of danger (in the form of things like punishment for mistakes or effort being dismissed) can close down any further effort. Think of Participants like a cork on the ocean. They’ll go in the direction of the strongest current, so it’s important that that current is one of encouragement, recognition and feedback.
Participants need to know it’s safe to try and fail
“If I try and get it wrong, will I be okay?” That’s the question Participants are asking and constantly scanning for the answer to. Participants are taking the daring step of trying things differently. They need to know that when they make the mistakes that are inherent in learning new ways of doing things, they’ll be fully supported and have a leader who backs them to keep going,
I once worked with a group who were seriously transforming the way they engaged with their clients, moving from being well-meaning cheerleaders to critical advisors and coaches. If you were a relationship manager, that meant a massive change. What might have been a feel-good, encouragement coffee meeting with a client was moving to more challenging conversations about what might be holding their business back from growth. At times, it was distinctly uncomfortable for both the organisation and the clients they served. They were parking the short-term, warm fuzzies factor for a focus on high impact advice that led to long term, sustainable growth. For this change to be successful, it needed people to give it a go – to be Participants. I remember the story of one relationship manager – we’ll call him Alex – who tried this new approach with a customer. Alex’s advice included some things the customer needed to hear, but didn’t want to thanks. The response was cold, the discomfort was high. At that point, it’s easy to lose heart and opt out. At the next team meeting, Alex’s leader, Karen, related the story, then shared that she’d had a call from the customer that morning to pass on their thanks, having reflected on the conversation over the weekend. That was great recognition of effort from Karen. Even better though – she went on to underline that:
this change in approach was proving really tough and needed courage;
along the way we’d make some mistakes;
when people tried out this new way of relating with clients then, regardless of the outcome, we’d all learn something and Karen had your back.
This is what Timothy Clark, in his book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety calls learner safety: the assurance that if you try something and it doesn’t work, it’s safe for you to report it and take lessons from it; the knowledge that, during change, we are guaranteed to make mistakes and those mistakes – in this group – will help us learn what works.
Create safe space for your Participants to try out new approaches
Participants are actively trying out things to discover what works. Their willingness to make an attempt that might fail provides highly valuable real-world learning for you and the rest of the team. The lessons they learn along the way from trying things out and succeeding or failing will help you more quickly and sustainably refine the new way of working you are creating.
One great way of creating that space for learning is to use experiments as your way of working. In the programmes I run with emerging and early in career leaders, I get them to run experiments in their workplaces. These are all about trying out what might be a new way of working for them with the aim of learning something new and firming up their own leadership identity. Of the 12 experiments they run, nobody has ever adopted all 12 as their way of leading – some experiments work for them, others don’t. The point is not to get things perfect; it’s to try out new approaches so that, successful or not, the leaders learn something that will help them refine their leadership style.
Participants rely on recognition, feedback, encouragement
Any of the states in this model has its limits. While Participants might be up for giving things a go, they are also putting themselves in a vulnerable space that needs active support. They’re not yet in a state where they firmly ‘enrolled’ to the new way of working. Participants are taking a psychological risk and it means they aren’t yet standing independently and with the self-assuredness that comes with other states later in the model. To keep going, they need recognition for their courage and effort, feedback about the impact they are having and encouragement to keep going. Remember – they’ll move with the current, and will be easily influenced by the tide of opinion around them.
Enrolling Participants – help them build good habits
Participants are trying things out that are the seeds of new norms for your team. If they try something in isolation, and without feedback or recognition, that something will be doomed to a one-off. Recognise effort and give feedback about the impact they are having, then encourage them to keep going. Your job is to help them build habits that support this new way of working. Over time, they become enrolled in this new way of working rather than ‘once and done’.
Given that Participants are up for trying things out, you might challenge them to do things like:
Come up with three different ways we can try a new team process during lockdown
Challenge an existing norm they think is getting in the way, and offer an option the team can try out to replace it
Connect with people outside the team to find out what’s working well for others
Share a success and a fail in your team meetings (you’ll need to go all-in on a safe learning environment for this)
Punishment for mistakes will extinguish your Participant group
One last thing about Participants. Remember, they need assurance and affirmation that their efforts are noticed and making a difference. If we know they’ll make mistakes along the way, and that progress through this model is not simple and linear, let’s be accepting and supportive of that. One piece of behavioural change research by Wendy Wood and David Neal backs this up and shows the old adage of three steps forward, two steps back playing out (the authors call this the triangular relapse pattern). It’s normal human behaviour: we start out with motivation and determination, achieve quick wins, and then our efforts wane over time. Leaders who ignore, downplay or dismiss effort, or who punish mistakes through shaming, withdrawing future opportunity or lack of support for learning, will create the unsafe environment that leads to effort tailing off and - eventually - destroys Participant progress. Be the other leader - the one who recognises courage, calls out effort and makes it safe to learn.