Chapter 5
Craft Messaging That Motivates
Almost all change management methodologies teach that messaging first begins with a leader's vision. He or she needs to communicate the vision. Vision is important, but this up-front emphasis on it creates a trap. You can become so impressed with your own words and ideas that you forget that your first job is to meet people where they are. You have to understand how people are feeling before you can create a shared vision. Feelings, not visions, are where communication and messaging begin. As I learned from my grandmother, “Feel it first in your heart, then pursue it with your mind.” Once you create a shared feeling, you can begin to develop it into a shared mission and vision.
Remember first that what we think of as messaging—mantras, slogans, talking points, and so on—is only part of the story. A leader communicates nonverbally as well, through actions and behaviors. When I first joined Medtronic, people were wary. I was an outsider being asked to make big changes in a company with a well-defined culture and deep internal pride. My first task had to be building trust. Before I could talk about change, I needed to make it clear that I intended to become a real part of the team, not be the “hatchet guy” who zooms in and backs out just as quickly.
The message started with words. At our first town hall meeting, people asked if I was moving to Minnesota from Atlanta. I not only told them we had bought a house rather than leasing one, I also mentioned we had sold our home in “Hotlanta” and bought a snowblower and full wardrobes of winter clothes. These were all signs I wasn't blowing through town. I was committed. People's heads were nodding.
But it was my actions that really changed people's attitude toward me. I spent most of my first weeks on the job traveling to meet with the heads of every business unit in the company and their leadership teams. I attended surgeries so that I understood how everything we sold was used in the field. I was learning, but I was also sending a message with every meeting I took. My tour created a lot of buzz and won me the trust I needed to get to the real work of helping the organization increase its leadership position in a changing industry.
Finally, your behaviors send a message. This is the “how” in your actions. There are three behaviors that I believe every leader needs to model if he or she wants to be trusted and followed. First, be genuine. Don't act one way with executives and a different way with managers, the front line, and others. Second, be calm and level-headed. I always used to say, “Be cool, it's not brain surgery”—but then I joined Medtronic and in some cases it actually was brain surgery that our devices supported. Surgery or not, losing your cool is never okay. If anything, that's even more the case in emergencies and high-pressure situations.
Finally, be compassionate. Never forget that you're not just changing a company, you're pulling levers that affect people's daily lives; sometimes, you're messing with their paychecks. Change can be uncomfortable, and while you can't let that stop you, you can always be compassionate and respectful of the underlying feelings involved.
These may or may not be the exact three behaviors you focus on. What's important is that you recognize that your actions and behaviors are a core part of your messaging. You need to be intentional about them. In just about every company I've seen, the entire organization reflects the behavior of the people at the top. What you do matters as much or more than what you say.
Become an Amateur Anthropologist
To create messaging that motivates, you need to study and incorporate the culture of your audience. I learned the secrets of workplace culture from a very successful change leader whose focus was acquisition integrations. Over 75 percent of them fail because integrating assets on paper is a lot easier than integrating working environments. Nevertheless, his integrations were always successful, and I'll tell you why: His degree wasn't in business. It was in anthropology. Thanks to that background, he understood how to identify and unify disparate cultures. That allowed him to turn two workforces into one smoothly functioning whole, again and again.
From him I learned that three critical aspects define a culture: language, heroes, and celebrations.
- Language, both formal languages and local dialects (i.e., jargon), allows people to recognize each other as part of the same tribe and speeds mutual understanding and alignment. Industries have languages, but so do companies and functional groups within them.
- Heroes are the people whose actions model the values and beliefs that are important to the culture. Heroes inspire others to want to be like them.
- Celebrations are opportunities to reinforce shared values and strengthen community through ritual and relaxation.
If you want to learn a company's values, look to its heroes. Medtronic's “Superman,” for example, is its founder, Earl Bakken. He saved millions of lives by inventing and selling the external, battery-operated pacemaker. He is the most humble billionaire you will ever meet, soft-spoken and always insightful. His mantra for Medtronic was to focus on patients' care above all. And though he's been retired more than a decade now, that's still Medtronic's culture in a nutshell. Employees share pride in emphasizing mission above profit and making cutting-edge products that innovate medicine and save lives.
Given that culture, it was inevitable that they would be initially suspicious of a guy (me) who was specifically hired to cut costs. But because I took the time to learn and understand their values up front, I was able to show people right away that not only did I share those values, but also that the work I was doing would enable us to better deliver on them. Bakken himself saw the need for the change I was leading, and he embraced me immediately. Even in his 80s, and in declining health, he made two visits to headquarters each year.
As for celebrations, Medtronic's most important was the annual holiday party. It was attended in person or remotely by every employee. Every year, five or six patients were invited to come before the group to share how Medtronic's therapies had changed their lives. This annual ritual was so moving that there was rarely a dry eye in the place. The patients' experiences were being celebrated first and foremost, with the innovation of the devices that helped them close behind. Their stories were the living fulfillment of the company's mission statement: “Alleviate Pain, Restore Health, and Extend Life.”
Of course, companies don't just have one culture. Just as people recognize and find safety within many different boundaries within a company, they create many different cultures. When leading companywide change, it becomes important to identify which language, heroes, and celebrations cross those boundaries. These are the keys to developing messaging that resonates broadly. At the same time, look for and respect the subcultures within the whole—plant A versus plant B, for example. Learn to speak their dialects and join their celebrations, and you will win a deeper level of trust than you ever could with one-size-fits-all messaging.
Speak in Sync with Core Values
Underlying language, heroes, and celebrations are core values. To be effective, change messaging needs to support those values, or at least address them while introducing new values. That's how you show people that they're safe. While tasks, schedules, and roles may change, respecting people's values tells them that what's essential about their company and what makes their work meaningful will endure. When messaging matches their values, people are motivated. When the two are mismatched, fear escalates and people resist.
That explains why the messaging that I saw fly high at Georgia-Pacific crash-landed at Medtronic, despite having the exact same tagline.
George-Pacific had two core values. One was value itself—we prided ourselves on operating at the lowest cost. The other was safety. When I became CIO, I knew we needed to unify and streamline IT. As I mentioned before, the leadership team helped me develop the tagline “One IT,” along with the mantra “Simplify, Standardize, Automate.” Both the tagline and the mantra were very well received because they jived with people's desire to support the company by doing more with less.
Note that a successful mantra is more than just a few pretty words strung together. Done right, it conveys the essence of the change that's needed. Mantras are a simple but effective means of keeping desired behavior or process changes constantly top-of-mind. Moreover, repeating them to people creates a kind of linguistic shorthand to an entire change initiative.
Fast forward to Medtronic. As you now know, the company's core value is patient care: contributing to human welfare by alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life. It is anchored on innovation. But at the time, the company desperately needed to cut costs and become more efficient. For several years running, expenses had grown faster than revenues. The CEO, one of the industry's most knowledgeable leaders, recognized this and knew change had to happen, and could happen, without sacrificing quality or innovation. The trouble was he launched his initiative with the slogan “One Medtronic.”
This slogan cut against the culture in two ways. First, it screamed “standardization” to people, which they saw as the opposite of innovation—seemingly confirming the false notion that lowering costs means lowering quality. And second, it threatened the company's subcultures, which were its business units. The company had grown through acquisition and the business units took tremendous pride in their autonomy. This was obvious when I met with the business unit heads when I first started, and one by one they told me that they believed in “state's rights.” It was their way of saying, “We are one when it comes to the mission, but individuals when it comes to how we achieve it” (i.e., “no way are we One Medtronic”).
In the short term, people were unhappy and the dysfunction was high. And yet, it was a cultural change that needed to occur; in that sense, the mantra was the correct one. Ultimately, the initiative was a success. We reduced costs by 25 percent, or more than $1.5 billion. Moreover, the hard line taken by the CEO created room for his successor to give the business unit heads more autonomy within the new unified culture, get more buy-in, and reduce costs even further. Together, the two CEOs had delivered a one-two punch.
What's in It for Them?
Slogans, heroes, values, celebrations—these high-minded aspects of messaging are all incredibly important drivers of behavior. But there's a more practical need that cannot be ignored: People need to understand how the coming change will impact their daily lives. Again, don't get so caught up in your big, bold vision that you forget to put yourself in their shoes.
I did that once. In the early 2000s, I traveled to India to visit several of the large IT consulting companies there. I was amazed by their operations. They had come so far so fast, having moved rapidly from year 2000 bug work to system support to new system programming, and at a much lower cost than we were doing it in the United States. The speed of Westernization in these businesses was equally astounding.
The visit was a major wake-up call for me. I knew our IT organization would have to change in order to be competitive. I was so on fire with ideas and urgency that I barely slept during the 20 hours of flight time to get home. When I landed in the States, I immediately drafted an e-mail to all of IT telling them what I'd seen. We would need to transform the way we worked in order to stay competitive, I wrote.
Now in my head, I had seen where things were going and was giving the team the thumbs-up that I was enthused and prepared to lead them into the future. I was sharing an opportunity. Well, that's not how the e-mail was received. They read it and concluded that I was going to outsource everything and put their jobs on the chopping block.
I had made a fatal error. I delivered the vision without also sharing the road map I had in mind. In this case, that road map was skills training in project management, system design, consulting, and leadership. Continuing education would make everyone in IT more valuable within the company and to the marketplace as a whole.
The storm my e-mail had created didn't dissipate until I brought everyone together and shared those details, which very clearly outlined the individual benefits wrapped up in the coming change.
Rest assured, I had a mantra that cut right to it: “Employed and Employable” was the phrase, removing the fear that their jobs were threatened while emphasizing the value of broadening their skill sets.
In that situation, I was fortunate in that I had time to develop the “what's in it for them” before I assembled the group. There will be times that you won't have that luxury. In fact, that's usually the case these days. In an era of global, 24-hour connectivity, news travels fast. Leaders sometimes think that if they wait to communicate until they have everything worked out, they'll ease the disruption and save people from worry. Since nothing goes viral faster than bad news, that never turns out to be the case; instead, employees get news that's often inaccurate, and they cease to trust the leaders who are keeping them from “the truth.”
When you can't yet sketch out the future for people, do the next best thing: Make it clear that you will share everything you know as soon as you know it throughout the process. Acknowledge that something is going to happen. Give as many details as you can about the process to come, and always let them know when they'll get the next update. There were many times that I took this approach and found that people who weren't even in my organization were coming to my town hall meetings because their own leaders weren't communicating. Frequent communications help build trust and provide a sense of control. People may not know the future, but at least they know when they'll get their next update.
Two Words to Avoid at All Costs
Language can have a powerful and immediate effect on people's emotions and, therefore, their gut responses to a change initiative. Leaders need to choose their words carefully. There are two words that I've found raise more fear (and stubborn intransigence) in the hearts of employees than any others. They are to be avoided at all costs at the outset of a new initiative. These words are transformation and standardization.
Executives and consultants love to use the word transformation. I guess it sounds glamorous and revolutionary and career-making to our ears. Unfortunately, it scares the hell out of middle management and front-line people, who will have to execute the transformation. Transforming is one thing; being transformed is another. That's how people hear it when it comes as a mandate from above. They think they're being transformed out of their jobs. Their security, significance, and control are jeopardized. As a result, they immediately go into defense mode and start thinking of rationales and ways to resist the change.
It's fine to use this word, but not until after you have taken the time to show what the change means to them—both their day-to-day concerns and their deeper values. At that point you can transform together.
The next word to avoid above all costs in initial messaging is standardization. People don't like the word because it diminishes their significance; they want to be unique and, therefore, irreplaceable. They also fear that their autonomy will be taken away because someone will be designing and controlling everything from afar.
I know what you're thinking: “Wait a minute! Wasn't ‘Simplify, Standardize, and Automate’ one of your successful mantras at GP?” Yes, it was, but before we used the mantra, we took the time to let people know exactly what was going to be standardized and what it meant for them. In sharing the details, we stripped the word of its negative connotation.
Now here's the bad news. There will be times that you've done everything right. Your messaging is perfectly in sync with the company's values, you've learned the local lingo, you've shared the road map, and you've even avoided the two danger words. And yet, some people still resist because they've been shown redrawn boundaries, and they don't like them. How to deal with these folks is the subject of the next chapter.
Coaching Moments
All “no” answers need to be addressed.
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