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I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have a special treat for you, an episode of another podcast from The Ted Audio Collective, handpicked for you by us.
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One day I got a call from a hospital that was working on a major change initiative.
A committee of surgeons had identified a customer service problem.
Basically, patients weren't happy.
And after eight months of work, the surgeons were getting ready to roll out a big fix.
They were going to train the entire staff to smile more.
I was appalled. When the surgeons saw that patients were dissatisfied, they immediately went and studied organizations with the happiest customers and picked Disney and the Ritz Carlton.
Not exactly the best fit for a hospital.
There were a bunch of legitimate reasons that patients were miserable, starting with poor quality of care and long wait times, and none of them had anything to do with staff sparkle.
The surgeons didn't just misdiagnose the problem.
They failed to diagnose it at all, which left the health of their patients in peril.
Even the smartest people in the room get stuck on change when they don't look inside their own organizations for answers.
Which is why a change often goes wrong at work.
But wherever you stand in the hierarchy, there's the science of making it go right.
I'm Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective.
I'm an organizational psychologist.
I study how to make work not suck.
In this show, I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead and live.
Today, how to champion change at work, from the bottom up and the top down.
Thanks to UKG for sponsoring this episode.
Organizations are always running change initiatives, and often failing at them.
You've probably seen more than one change crash at work.
A new automated expense tool?
Bust. Your colleagues felt intimidated by the new tech.
No meeting Wednesdays?
Bomb. Your boss was too stuck in his ways to let your team try it.
That new mentoring program?
Burn. Your new manager quit after a few months.
So, people develop change fatigue, then they get cynical, and nothing ever gets better.
The biggest obstacle to a successful change is human resistance.
People have this sort of skepticism about change, and everything you hear about change is pessimistic.
Change is hard. People resist change.
People dread change.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
But it occurred to us very early on that that has to be oversimplified, and it has frankly to be wrong.
Dan Heath is the co -author of Switch.
It's the best book I've ever read on change.
Dan wrote it with his brother Chip, a social psychologist, and they started from the premise that change shouldn't be so difficult.
Because if you look around in your own life, there's change all the time.
You got married. You had kids.
You took a new job.
You moved cities. You made new friends.
You developed a new hobby.
You bought an iPhone.
You got on Facebook.
You stopped using Facebook.
I mean, everything in our lives is change.
For some reason, we code the really difficult things as change, and everything else is just like a choice.
Our realization was, well, hey, wait a second.
It's all change. So why don't we study what the differences between the really painful changes and the really easy ones?
What did you learn about the differences between changes that worked and the ones that were painful?
The good changes, the happy changes in your life, one thing they all have in common is you wanted them.
You wanted to get married.
You wanted to have kids.
You wanted the new iPhone, and so it looks like an open and shut case.
But then you start getting into these more nuanced cases like smokers, they want to quit, but they don't, or they find it really challenging.
Okay, it's all choice change, except addiction is a special case.
That's not quite right either, because there's a lot of people who want to lose 10 pounds and have a really hard time doing it.
And so you start uncovering these kind of middle cases, like what's happening when part of us wants some change very earnestly, and yet we have a difficult time realizing it.
And that's what kind of led us in to think this is a really interesting mystery here.
Dan's research with Chip pointed to three key steps for motivating people to change.
Step one, paint a vivid picture of why change is needed.
Dan's favorite way to illustrate that point is with a story about a finance guy named John Stegner.
Stegner worked for a large manufacturing company that owned lots of factories, and each factory was wasting money buying their own supplies.
So Stegner wanted to streamline their buying habits.
We can have a lot more clout with vendors.
We can strike better deals.
He estimates that they can save on the order of a billion dollars over 10 years.
And so being a good finance guy, he kind of triumphantly unveils his analysis to his colleagues, and then nothing happens.
It's not even that he was opposed so much as they just kind of shrugged their shoulders.
Oh John, yeah, that's interesting.
Stegner realizes he needs a new strategy.
Instead of presenting data, he needs to show the executives how much individual purchasing is actually costing them.
To do that, he hires an intern to visit all the factories and collect one item that every factory is buying.
And that's gloves, work gloves.
Turns out they're buying 424 different kinds of gloves.
The intern then figures out how much each factory paid for the gloves and puts a price tag on every glove.
Stegner brings all these gloves back to headquarters, dumps all these gloves on the boardroom table, and then invites his colleagues to come behold this glove shrine that he's created for them.
The executives quickly notice that although the gloves look identical, the one from the Oklahoma factory costs $10 a pair and the one from the Ohio factory costs $19 a pair.
And they say, John, we're really paying radically different prices for the same pair of gloves.
Yep. They all walk out of the office just shaking their head and saying, John, this is nuts.
This is crazy. We got to fix this.
And within a matter of months, he has the green light to do centralized purchasing that he's wanted to do all along.
The giant shrine to gloves allows the executives to visualize how expensive and ineffective it was to let individual factories purchase their own supplies.
It motivates them to make a rapid change.
That's like the quintessential organizational change story, because it doesn't look like we expect it to look, right?
We think that once he has the spreadsheet, once he has the quote unquote business case, everything is just going to fall in line.
Well, it doesn't usually work that way.
The number one mistake of leading change is that we try to change things with information.
If we just shovel enough information, people, poof, we're going to change.
But the people had to have an emotional response that opened them up to change.
When leaders paint a vivid, emotionally evocative picture of their visions, people are more likely to commit to them.
They can see the future, and they're all inspired by the same image, which has been a theme for a long time in research on change.
John Cotter says, most people think that the way change happens is three steps, analyze, think, change.
He says, no, no, no.
The way it works is see, feel, change.
People see something that makes them feel something motivated, surprised, appalled.
And that sparks the change.
People saw the gloves on the table that made them feel appalled.
And that led to the change.
I love that story. It's a timely indictment of the mistake I make over and over again in my own life.
Which is like, let me just show you more data.
Why are you not coming on board?
Exactly. You can't just recycle the analysis you did to figure out the right way to go as the factor that motivates people to go with you.
You're trying to deliver a dose of reality.
You're trying to find the emotional reason to change.
Once you've painted a vivid picture of the need for change, move to step two.
Don't try to change people's values.
Appeal to the values they already hold.
Which brings us to Texas and one of my all -time favorite change efforts.
Back in the 80s, Texas was having a really bad problem with litter.
The state was spending 25 million bucks a year cleaning up roadside litter.
It was getting worse every year.
They start studying the problem.
They realized that the type of person who tends to litter is between 18 and 35, drives a pickup truck, enjoys country music and sports, and might be a little anti -authority.
So, in other words, what they had found is that if you want to reduce roadside litter, you've got to reach someone that fits this profile, which they lovingly called Bhabha.
You have to reach Bhabha.
Well, how do you get Bhabha to change?
The researchers racked their brains on how to make Bhabha change.
A bigger fine won't help.
Bhabha's anti -authority.
Telling him to stop will just encourage him to litter more.
You can't tell me what to do.
So, what do you do?
You create a campaign called Don't Mess With Texas.
The gist was that if you're a good Texan, if you love your state, you will not defile your state with your litter.
And in this campaign, they had these famous Texan men, Tutall Jones, Mike Scott, Nolan Ryan, Evander Holyfield, Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson.
These classic Texan men role models were making this case in commercials.
And the campaign works.
These litter bugs or litter bubbas would be damned if they went against their role models.
In five years, roadside litter declines 75%.
75%. Think of all the individual instances of rappers kept in pickup trucks and beer cans thrown in the back instead of on the street for that to be possible.
Instead of trying to change their values, the campaign highlighted that littering violated values that were already part of their identity as Texans.
Don't mess with Texas is pure identity.
Think about a change you'd love to see at work.
How can you convince people that trying it will help them live their values or express their identities?
Want to get your colleagues out of their silos?
Appeal to their identities as subject matter experts with knowledge to share.
Hoping your manager will give hybrid work a try?
Remind him of his values of attracting and retaining top talent.
But sometimes the problem just feels too big.
And that's where step three comes in.
Shrink the change. Make it easy for people to find small wins.
If you're trying to change things with an organization and you're not in a position of formal authority, your strategy is to try to figure out how to require less motivation.
A person one time said their strategy had always been to make it easy for the boss to say yes, reducing the amount of motivation you need.
And that's a concept in Switch we call shrinking the change.
One that resonates with me because I'm kind of a messy person.
You know the feeling.
Your whole house is a mess.
You'll never be able to straighten it up.
But what if you shrink the change?
So this woman called the Fly Lady who has an online house cleaning website, she has this trick she calls the five minute room rescue.
So you take a kitchen timer, you wind it up to five minutes, and then you rush into the dirtiest room in your house.
Do whatever you can do in that five minutes.
You can quit with a clear conscience.
But no, of course you don't quit.
Because even in five minutes, you can make a surprising amount of progress.
And three hours later, you kind of snap back to consciousness, having just cleaned the entire place.
That's shrinking the change.
These three techniques paint a vivid picture of why change needs to happen, appeal to values and identity, and shrink the change can motivate people to try new things.
Just ask Emily Dia, who wanted to get her whole grade level at school on board with a radically new approach to teaching.
Emily had been teaching in North Carolina for 18 years when COVID struck.
Suddenly, her whole work life changed.
There were so many systems that we hadn't even thought to create.
What do we do if students can't get online?
How do we get this content to them?
Do we drive things to their homes?
I was working more hours than I'd ever worked in my whole life.
My poor son, who was in third grade at the time, I was like, you're on your own, kid.
Good luck, because I'm trying to stay above water here.
It was just hard. As a last resort, Emily decided to initiate a change of her own.
I Googled, like, what to do in remote learning and found the Modern Classrooms Project.
The Modern Classrooms Project is a different way of teaching.
Instead of lecturing students all at once from the front of the classroom, teachers create their own instructional videos for lessons.
Students can then access the videos from anywhere, anytime, to work through the lessons at their own pace.
And since teachers aren't busy lecturing, they're free to support students one -on -one.
This was the biggest revelation of my teaching career, because it freed me up to be truly responsive to every individual human in my classroom.
Emily wanted to bring the model to other classrooms, but it was a major change to the way things had always been done in schools.
And there was plenty of resistance.
Teachers were skeptical.
Parents were skeptical.
Even her own students were skeptical.
To convince them, Emily applied the three steps.
First, she created an emotional image of why change had to happen.
Teachers were exhausted.
Teacher burnout and teacher attrition was huge for me and my messaging to them.
Coming out of COVID, teachers were tired.
If we don't change something, we're all gonna quit.
We won't be healthy humans if something doesn't shift.
It wasn't just the teachers who needed change.
Students needed it desperately, too.
They were zoning out in some classes and missing others altogether.
I probably had about half of the students actually show up.
Live, quote unquote.
You know, the learning gaps that occurred in the last two and a half years are really significant.
What we need is a model that will help us fill in those gaps and really prevent them from getting larger.
So that was kind of how I framed it.
Second, Emily got students and parents on board by appealing to their existing values, their sense of pride and educational excellence, and their desire for more personalized instruction.
Yes, I thought through very carefully what our students and our parents would want.
I think this is a tool that our students need, that our parents need, because, you know, they don't want their students to get behind.
In a traditional class, after I delivered content, I would confer with like three or four students on a good day.
You just kind of hope that they're getting it and you might not know until the end.
With the Modern Classrooms Project, you check in with kids daily to see their progress.
When I actually used a designated portion of my class time to give feedback in real time to students as they were submitting work, I could confer with 15 or 16 kids in a class period.
My ability to really personalize my instruction for them, it takes that unknown out of it and makes you so much more confident in their growth as humans in their course.
The new approach was also eye -opening and empowering for students.
I had this student, he said, Miss Dia, I always thought I was terrible at English, but I just realized like no one had ever told me explicitly what it was I was supposed to be doing.
And now I see what I could get better at.
Now that Emily had seen the impact in her own classroom, she was ready to make the case for change to the principal.
That's when she made her third move, to shrink the change.
I know that I as an administrator really enjoyed tangible, concrete, small asks at a time that was really busy.
My initial ask was, can you make five and a half minutes to watch this video and tell me what you think?
She used what psychologists call the foot in the door technique.
You start with a small initial ask that's likely to get a yes.
Then you follow up with a bigger ask that raises the stakes.
Having made a commitment to supporting you, people are more likely to agree to the bigger request.
The second ask was, would you let me present what I've tried in my classroom?
And then the third ask was, will you pay for a bunch of us to take this training this summer so that we can learn how to do this?
The principal bought in.
And after getting so many teachers on board, Emily decided to spread it to other schools.
She now works for the Modern Classrooms Project to help other teachers adopt the program at their schools and get buy -in from administrators.
As a coach, I want to make the lift light for teachers.
They don't have to design the system.
Let me offer you the system.
And then you can bring your brilliance into the model.
The model is super adaptable to any content area, any grade level.
I'm here to support you to figure out what that looks like in practicality.
What advice would you give to people who want to make a change but they don't have power?
Figure out a way to make a small change within your locus of control.
I knew I had pretty good control over what I was delivering to my students during COVID.
Well, I can change instructional videos.
I don't really have to ask permission to that.
I'm still delivering the content I'm expected to deliver.
It's not hurting anybody.
Shrinking the change can break a meaningful goal into manageable pieces.
But what if the change you're trying to champion is impossibly big?
More on that after the break.
When you're the head honcho, it should be easier to implement change.
What you say goes. But I constantly hear from leaders that change is the hardest thing they do.
Not only do you have to figure out what's broken, you have to find the right fix.
And then, the most difficult job of all, you have to convince the people below you, all your 15 or 15 ,000 employees, to run with the change.
Now imagine being ubert jolie.
You're supposed to revive one of America's most recognizable companies.
And you're French. Everybody thought we were going to die.
There was zero buy recommendations on the stock.
Ubert specializes in leading turnarounds.
About a decade ago, he got a call from a headhunter to see if he was interested in a CEO job.
Best Buy had been an amazing company.
But clearly in 2012, the company had become complacent after killing Circuit City.
You had strategic challenges with Amazon, operational challenges with the quality of service having gone down, leadership challenges with my predecessor having been fired for misconduct, and shareholder challenges with the share price.
So this was the all you can eat menu of challenges.
The change required was too overwhelming.
So Ubert told the recruiter, thanks, but no thanks.
I said, Jim, you're crazy, right?
You're crazy. He said, do me a favor, at least study.
So I did a bunch of research, mystery shopping.
I read everything I could.
And I concluded two things.
One, the world needed Best Buy for some of our purchases.
Not all of them, but for some of them.
Think about a TV, right?
Picture quality. The only place in the world where you can see it is in a store.
And also importantly, the vendors needed Best Buy to showcase the fruit of their R &D investment.
And the good news was that all of the problems that Best Buy had were self -inflicted.
Prices were too high.
The online shopping experience was terrible.
The speed of shipping was slow.
The cost structure was bloated.
What's the good news about self -inflicted problem?
We can fix them. I didn't need to call Jeff Bezos and say, stop bothering me.
There was enough there to effectuate a turnaround.
And so I threw my hat in the ring and said, I want this job.
Uber got to work planning a transformation.
Step one of any turnaround is a good diagnosis.
To get that diagnosis, Uber knew he wouldn't find the answers at Best Buy's corporate headquarters.
No, he had to travel to St.
Cloud, Minnesota to work at a Best Buy store as a sales associate.
I had my khakis, my blue shirt.
So this was almost like Undercover Boss, except you weren't Undercover.
I was not Undercover, I had a bad CEO in training.
Were you nervous at all of admitting I'm a CEO in training?
No, that was super easy because I had admired the company for many years.
And I love electronics.
I thought this was so cool.
And how difficult could it be for me to say, I don't know what was broken.
And so I really needed people's help.
And I think that contributed to creating the energy from the beginning that we were going to attack the real problems together.
And I had three questions that I would ask all of the associates and the general management of the store.
What's working? What's not working?
What do you need? They had all of the answers.
They were quick to tell them what was broken.
Uber, it's all well -intentioned, but your team in headquarters giving us 42 key performance indicators to focus on.
I really want to work well for the company.
I wanted the company to win.
I cannot manage 42 KPIs.
42? Right, because every department has their own thing.
If you could do me a big favor, brought it down to a max of five.
And eventually we said we only have two problems at Best Buy.
Revenue is going down.
And the profit margin is going down.
Adam, how high can it be to solve two problems?
Best Buy was in dire straits.
Most leaders would focus on everything that was going wrong.
But Uber also asked, what was going right?
He was familiar with what management researchers have called appreciative inquiry, designing a change effort by building on what's already working.
That gives people a sense of stability and possibility.
In any organization, there are bright spots.
Pockets of excellence, where people are already living a version of the change you want to see.
The larger the organization, the more bright spots there are.
But as our change expert Dan Heath points out, it takes a concerted effort to look for them.
We are wired to obsess about problems and bad things.
When people start thinking about change, their focus immediately goes to the problem.
Let's turn the same analytical engines that we routinely focus on problems.
Let's focus them on solutions.
Say a company is struggling with low sales.
Your first instinct might be to try to understand why sales are low.
But what virtually no one does is say, if we can understand why some sales reps perform better than others, maybe there are practices we can spread to the whole team.
All they had to do to succeed or to improve was to study themselves at their own best moments.
And the secrets were right there.
So, Uber went to find the bright spots at Best Buy.
We were a $50 billion company.
That means there were a few customers that were still buying from us.
We had 1 ,000 stores in the US, and 70 % of the US population was within 10 or 15 minutes of a Best Buy store.
That's a huge advantage.
We had these amazing relationships with all of the world's foremost tech companies.
It was important for us to remember that, because we were going to leverage that.
We had amazing momentum in our mobile phone business.
We also had great capabilities around the Geek Squad.
I did not invent the Geek Squad, but oh my God, what a gift, right?
And then, of course, the people.
There were 125 ,000 people who were passionate about helping customers.
Again, the culture had deteriorated, but the heart of the company, the soul of the company was still there.
One particular bright spot was in Denver, where a manager, Chris Schmidt, was fed up with standardized training.
He said, imagine that you and Roger Federer have the same coach.
It's not true, Adam.
I wish it was based on true.
I can guarantee that your coach would say different things to Roger and to you, because you have different needs.
So he had created a program of individualized coaching for all of the associates in the stores in the Denver market to help the associates get better based on where they were.
And it changed not only the results, but also the culture, because it became a very human, individualized culture.
When we saw that, I was blown away, and we rolled this out, and it helped us along the way.
One of the virtues of being in a huge company is, there is probably a subculture that's figured it out already, and you just need to study it and scale it.
It was important to start with the strengths, because when everybody thought we were going to die, we had to remind ourselves and people that we had some unique strengths.
And there was a few areas where we had this positive momentum.
So I have the bicycle theory.
You know, if you're trying to direct a bicycle at standstill, you can't, it falls, right?
But if you get on the bicycle and you start moving, it doesn't matter if it's not moving exactly in the right direction, because you can course correct.
The plan didn't need to be perfect.
It just needed to be good enough so that we could get going.
Things started rolling at Best Buy, but it wasn't a smooth ride.
I made a mistake. I've made many mistakes in the journey.
One of the mistakes I made at that time is that I was expecting the same people running the organization to reinvent the organization, and that couldn't be done.
That was too big of a change.
I love this point that the people who are effectively running the organization aren't always the ones with the skills or the motivation to change it.
And it's also, the people who are running the organization may not have the capacity to reinvent it.
Maybe, Adam, the most important decision we make as leaders is who do we put in positions of power?
A mistake I made for too many years was putting too much emphasis on expertise and experience when recruiting somebody.
Over time, I spent more and more emphasis on who is this person and being clear about our leadership expectations.
And they had to be non -negotiable.
I told the officers at Best Buy, if you don't agree with these principles, that's okay, except, oh, you cannot work here.
And instead of trying to change everyone's values, Uber worked to close the gap between their existing values and their daily behaviors.
When the ship is sinking, you need to plug the holes, get the ship back in shape, and get going.
The interim team had wanted to rewrite the values.
I said, no, we're going to stop that.
Because I read the values, they're fine.
What we need to do is change our behaviors as opposed to rewriting the values.
Oftentimes, people are threatened by a leader coming in and telling them, wait, what we always thought was important, our heart and soul, our DNA, that's not you anymore.
So say goodbye to that.
And I think part of what you're saying you did is you allowed people to stay attached to who they were and what was important to them.
That's such an important point, right?
So I took the time to understand the DNA of the company, respect it and love it, honor it, and make it more current.
And so that way, we didn't need to be divided between the old guard and the new guard.
We just needed to get back into the game and refresh for the new age.
Sure enough, research reveals that people are more willing to embrace change when you give them a sense of continuity.
They're happy to try something new.
As long as you're clear, they won't have to give up everything old that they love.
Consider a change that you want to see happen in your workplace.
What won't change? How can you reassure people that they'll still be able to hold on to some core values and identities?
With that approach, things started to change at Best Buy.
They scored some early wins.
The first one was in January of 2013, four or five months after I started.
People expected us to be way down, but we reported flat, comparable sales during holiday.
Now, you could say that flat is not great, but we had proven that we were not destined to extinction.
But for evidence of real change, Uber had to look to the stores for more bright spots.
Uber says many of the company's 125 ,000 employees were already great at customer service.
They didn't need to smile more.
And now he saw them take that to a whole new level.
They retrained salespeople to be electronics experts to better advise customers deciding between products.
Best Buy also rolled out house calls, where technicians would travel to customers' homes to help them in person with their tech problems.
But perhaps the most significant change was giving employees the autonomy to act on behalf of the company, as they saw fit.
There was a store in Florida where a young boy had a dinosaur toy as a gift from Santa Claus.
Unfortunately, the dinosaur was quite sick.
The head was dismantled from the rest of the body.
A typical sales associate would have exchanged the toy for a new one.
That's not what the little boy wanted.
He wanted a cure for the dinosaur.
And on that day in that Best Buy store, there were two associates who understood what was going on.
They took the dinosaur.
And like a good doctor, they started to perform a surgical procedure on the dinosaur.
Of course, replaced, but gave back to the little boy a cured dinosaur.
And you can imagine the joy of the little boy and his mother.
And so the question is, do you think there was a standard operating procedure at Best Buy on how to cure?
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Are you saying there wasn't a T -Rex squad?
There was not a T -Rex squad.
They found it in their hearts to create that joy.
We are creating an environment where people could be themselves and could do what they felt was the right thing to do.
This was magical. This was human magic.
And the transformation was done, not by changing out everyone at the company, but by allowing everyone to become the best, biggest, most beautiful version of themselves.
Too many people try to force change when they should be looking for ways to unleash it.
Your workplace is full of people with ideas for improvement, and all they're missing is the authority to try them.
Change doesn't have to be about walking away from something good.
It can be about growing and expanding into something better.
Work Life is hosted by me, Adam Grant.
The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media, our team includes Colin Helms, Greta Kohn, Dan O 'Donnell, Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Ben Ban Chiang, and Anna Phelan.
This episode was produced by Joanne Deluna.
Our show is mixed by Ben Chano, our fact checker is Paul Durbin, original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.
Add stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.
Deep gratitude this season to Danielle Ballorazzo, Nicole Bodie, Valentina Bohannini, Sammy Case, Nicole Edine, Jimmy Gutierrez, Will Hennessey, Marie Kim, Sarah Lee, Jen Mahalski, Annie Odell, Julia Ross, Alex Segal, and Sarah Jane Souther.
Special thanks to our sponsors, LinkedIn, Morgan Stanley, ServiceNow, and UKG.
Appreciation of the following researchers and their colleagues, Drew Carton on Blurry Visions, Carl Wyck and Teresa Mabole on Small Winds, Bob Cialdini and Jerry Berger on The Foot in the Door, David Cooperite on Appreciative Inquiry, Don Van Nippenberg on Visions of Continuity, and Steve Kalman on Unleashing Change.
We'll be back in the fall with new weekly conversations.
Have a great summer.
So we can show up upbeat and positive, you know, ready to make a positive difference in the world.
It's not very French of you though.
I will take the fifth on this one.
