In today’s minisode, we continue the Think Like a CEO series and we’re going to cover how to overcome resistance to change.

This is one of the most difficult and stressful parts of running a business. If you're in a senior leadership role of a significant business, you're under pressure to deliver and there's going to be some resistance by different people in different parts of the business. And just getting them on the train, getting them to play nice with others, to try new things and not slow momentum down can be an incredibly difficult journey.

I've been involved in a lot of transformations now, and I've seen every mistake under the sun. And what I've learned is that the CEOs and the senior leaders who successfully drive change happen to do a few things that others seem to skip.

So I want to share with you five things that I know have worked for me and others in the past, and if you apply them properly, it will make an immediate, tangible difference to the momentum you are getting in leading change in your organisation.

1. Understand the business context

This is actually the very first step we do on the Chief Maker MiniMBA. We stop and pause and we understand the context of the business and the team and where it's operating. We ask questions like, “How is the business performing?” This is really important because if you're leading change in a business that's shooting the lights out, it's a very different process to someone who's leading change in a business that is flat or losing money. The business performance actually adjusts your style of leadership required.

If the business is not performing well, it's much more directive, command and control style leadership, because a lot of people are really struggling and unsure what to do. And if you don't move fast, the business faces closure.

However, when you've got an amazing business that's shooting the lights out, leading change becomes about purpose, inspiration and vision, and achieving your greatness, leaving a legacy. It’s a very different kind of journey.

You need to understand the history of the business and how much change the business has undergone over time. If the senior leadership team has been changing and rotating almost constantly, you're going to find the level of trust within the business is low and you're going to have to earn the right to make the change.

I remember the first time we turned up in Africa to lead a big turnaround of the mine site. I'll never forget the looks on people's faces. They hated us because we were just another bunch of expats, imperialists, turning up to take all the gold or whatever we were mining out of the ground. We were probably the 20th set of leaders that have turned up there and all these expats keep coming in thinking they know better.

So when we actually stuck around and started to make a difference and were the first ones to ever do that and actually care about them, they still didn't trust us for some time. And that was understandable. It was expected. We had to stop and really think about the context and what had gone before us, and that we actually had to go a little bit slower, and build a bit more trust first.

2. People have their own change curve

Never forget how different people go through change. Everyone is going along their own change curve, from full resistance through to some level of compliance, through to completely aligned and thinking, “This is the way we do things around here.”

So your people will be spread along a bell curve of how fast they respond. That is normal. If you bring to work an expectation that everyone is going to shift at the same speed, you'll only be disappointed and will end up applying pressure on people that take a bit more time in a way that's actually not fair and doesn't look after and respect their diversity.

A better approach is to appreciate different personalities and lead each of them accordingly. Their resistance might also be due to a lack of trust or because they don't know how to make the change you want them to make (see the previous episode on confidence, which discusses mindset, process, skill). So situational leadership for every person is required.

On the other end of the spectrum are the champions of change and you absolutely want to leverage them. But a lot of leaders end up creating cliques with these people and then get into a toxic relationship with the laggards. However, the resistant ones are very often the key to leading change. A lot of them have great wisdom and have real, justifiable reasons to be cautious and question the speed or the quality of the way you're going about something, and you want to actually tap  into that. It is better to go and seek to understand what's happening for them and spend a little bit more time helping them move along at a nice, steady pace.

3. Always remember your role

Recently, I was on a Chief Maker MiniMBA call and one of the leaders put up this graphic of how to lead. It was a picture of a pack of wolves going through a forest and the alphas were at the back protecting the weak while the rest of the team moved forward.

And this leader said, “I really love this analogy of leadership.” And what struck me about it was it's actually a reasonably poor analogy for leadership in business because in that situation, everybody knows the way. They're in territory they know.

However, when you're dealing with change, leaders must lead and you must show the way. You've got to get up there and show the vision and be the Chief Energy Officer. That’s when you’ve got to look after the ‘weaker’ people. That’s when you've got to bring them along the journey and keep looking up and help them grow.

All the best leaders of change I've noticed, bring their people with them. They celebrate the successes of everyone, they take responsibility for the failures and all these wonderful things. But I just see too many times people not standing up, being the bold version of their personality and leading properly.

Furthermore, as a leader, you've got to manage your process and be clear what is a priority and what is not. This is something we cover in depth in our programs. You should be tracking the changes and demonstrate the momentum and the journey you've been on as that creates a sense of energy in a group. And when you do that, it stops or slows down the resistance. This is all about understanding your role, Chief, and that is that leaders lead.

4. Manage yourself

I remember my last role in a leadership position before I went into coaching. I was leading a big rollout of IT Service Management across the state of Queensland for a very large government department with 1, 300 sites. I was only a young guy, around 27 at the time. And I was very much out of my depth from a leadership skillset.

What happened was, over time, I got overwhelmed by the amount of work and the number of emails. I'll never forget this, as one day I started having a conversation with a senior member of staff, which turned into a bit of a debate, and it became a bit of an argument. And I really just lost my cool. I gave it to him both barrels. I realised afterwards that I just dropped the ball and that nothing was gained from that interaction at all. And it was because I hadn't managed myself. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, I got more and more overwhelmed and stressed to the point when it would have been him or anyone who crossed me that day. I was fed up, frustrated, and had no energy left to fight the good fight.

So you have to manage yourself and keep yourself in good fitness, health and mental health.

These days I look after myself physically and mentally. I work out regularly, meditate, journal and in general, I keep on top of my own self. Without that, I would not be able to maintain the pace we maintain. We work on bigger things that make a real difference, as opposed to insignificant things underneath.

When you're focusing on the minor stuff, people around you lose hope and lose energy and that’s where you get resistance to change.

5. Removing fixed mindsets

This is definitely one of the most uncommon tricks I've ever seen used by CEOs, but equally the most effective.

The work of Norman Doidge around brain plasticity is an important piece of context here. When people have a fixed mindset, they cannot see the road ahead or will not change. And when the brain has stopped learning, all those neural pathways actually lock in and get a bit stuck. And it runs this really unhelpful, unresourceful pattern.

However, when the brain is learning anything, we start to evolve as a person. You might learn one thing over here and it will generalise into your understanding of something over there. For example, you might listen to a podcast on parenting and discover a new way to manage boundaries. And then that triggers a thought around how you can manage that in a work context. Or, conversely, you might listen to an Inner Chief episode about managing difficult stakeholders. Next thing you know, you've got something for parenting your resistant kids.

So what you want to do here is break the fixed mindset pattern and here's some examples of this.

I was working with a major retailer once and they had a particular group of leaders that were involved in the design of the products that were in shops. They had been through a lot of change over a long period of time and they were over it, justifiably, and so they became stuck and it stunted growth.

What we did was give these leaders $250 each and said to them that they weren’t allowed in the office that day. They were to go to all of their competitors' shops and just buy the stuff that would be directly competing with what they designed. Once they had completed the task, they were to meet at the local pub, bring all the items they purchased and just talk about them.

Firstly, that immediately got them out of their stale environment and it got them having a bit of fun. Secondly, they would actually touch, feel and experience their competitors' products. And what this did was immediately interrupt their mindset and got them thinking and growing again.

Another activity I ran for a group that was stuck was doing a weekly learning process where we went around the group in their team meeting and one person shared something they're learning, work-related or not, but it had to be about personal growth. It might be a podcast, a YouTube video, a book, an article and they had to spend five to 10 minutes talking about it.

What emerged was that this group had done no learning for 12 to 18 months. They were stuck and stalled and their mindset was locked in. And what this did was it just started to create the right kind of conversation and the movement in those neural pathways. Creativity started to come back as they started to generalise these lessons into different parts of their life.

So, Chief, they're the top five tips from a CEO’s perspective about overcoming resistance to change. As I said, we cover a lot of this in the Chief Maker MiniMBA in leading high performance teams. It's for senior leaders of mid to large organisations, so if you want to join us, we’d love to have you on board.

Deal hope,

Greg