Pull the Personal LEVERS
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Motivate change through strategies that tap into people’s values.
- Use strategies that provide the necessary skills and information for change.
As you consider your organization’s goals, review the following personal engagement strategies and choose those that make sense for your company. You might also find that a blend of values and enablement can work best for your change initiative.
Tap into Values
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to motivate others to change. But if you show people the connection between the change and what they already value, they’ll bring themselves along the change path. Find the relationship between the change and your audience’s existing values, motivations, and sense of purpose to engage the Values lever. Here are a few ways to do so.
Identify the WIIFMs
WIIFM stands for “What’s in it for me?” Try to understand how the change positively impacts your audience. Does the change make their lives easier? Does it help them reach their quota? Will it improve their daily work? Will it help them achieve their mission? Will it help them be the person they’d like to be?
Explicitly stating how the change benefits your audience builds the personal motivation people need to change. Consider the following strategies as you think about connecting the change to what people care about.
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Try empathy mapping (See this post from the Salesforce Blog for more on the topic!) |
Identify who will be impacted by the change. Discover their priorities and how adoption will help them. |
Broadcast the WIIFMs |
Incorporate the WIIFMs into the leadership, stakeholder, training, and communication strategies. |
Tell stories and create experiences |
Sometimes telling people about the WIIFMs just isn’t enough. Give people a direct experience with the change so they see its impact. Methods include success stories, hands-on demos, and shadowing an influencer. |
Enable People to Succeed
People can be motivated to adopt a new behavior, but that doesn’t always mean they have the ability to do so. When people have the information, skills, and know-how, they tend to be more motivated to change as well. Here are some strategies to engage the Enablement lever to make change easier.
Build a Communication Strategy and Plan
Leading through change requires that you consistently deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. In order to do this, you need an approach for developing clear, deliberate messaging at every stage.
Change commitment curves show the stages that people go through when adjusting to a change—from first learning about it to buying in to eventually internalizing it as a normal part of their work. Effective communication guides people along the change commitment curve, as they build a deeper understanding and sense of personal commitment to making the change successful.
Use the change commitment curve as a rule of thumb to ensure that, as your change effort progresses, the messages you deliver help move people incrementally up the curve.
Consider the following as you build a communication strategy that moves your stakeholders toward change ownership.
Lead with the why |
Don’t assume everyone understands why the change must happen. Develop a compelling change vision statement that articulates what is gained by changing and explains the risks of maintaining the status quo. Enlist the help of key leaders and change agents throughout the organization to craft and share the change vision. |
Tailor your message |
Different stakeholder groups have different information needs and communication preferences. Use the insight gathered from stakeholder mapping/assessment activities to tailor your messaging and delivery for various groups. Generative AI tools can help you quickly adapt communication assets to different audiences while maintaining a consistent core message. |
Use existing channels where possible |
Channel fatigue is real! Avoid diluting your message by bombarding people from every possible communication avenue. Inventory existing communication channels and how they’re used to identify the few key channels best suited for reaching your targeted audience(s). Use those first. |
Tap into opinion leaders |
Sometimes a message is most powerful when delivered by a trusted peer. Identify highly regarded, socially connected individuals across the organization to disseminate key messages to others on their teams. |
Develop and Roll Out Training
While sharing information and building awareness about the change is great, people also need access to resources and training to build the skills they need to be successful once it’s introduced. Keep in mind, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to training. Consider a variety of modalities like online self-paced learning, formal classroom training, or practical, on-the-job experience. And select the one(s) that best fit the needs and learning styles of those who will be impacted.
Conduct a training needs analysis |
Identify the skills needed to be successful after the change has been introduced. Conduct an assessment to highlight key capability gaps between current skills and future needs. |
Design training content |
Develop role-based training content to close the identified capability gaps. Work with subject matter experts to tailor training content for each role. |
Incorporate deliberate practice |
While classroom training and self-paced learning are helpful for building new skills, there’s no substitute for focused, hands-on practice. Create a virtual training practice environment like a sandbox instance or physical space like an innovation or practice lab to give team members hands-on practice with realistic scenarios that put the training into context. |
Recruit superusers |
Identify superusers and prepare them to field questions, provide peer coaching, or deliver end-user training. This is a great way to scale the efforts of a small project team. |
The key thing to remember is that people change when motivated to do so. Use the Values and Enablement lever strategies to help individuals along their path to change.