Ernest Shackleton knew about change. Do you?

Deciding which of your team members are capable of embracing significant change prematurely can have real consequences for your big change initiative. Here’s why:

As leaders, whether you are in a growing organization or a well-established one, you will need to lead your team through significant change at some point. Whether you initiate the change or you are executing change initiated by your leaders, you face a pivotal initial decision that will have a consequential influence on how successful your change implementation will be. In my experience, few leaders take the time to thoroughly consider this choice, and end up with an implementation path that is bumpier than it needs to be.

That choice, quite simply, is whether you are committed to supporting everyone who wants to make the change or you intend to allow some percentage of people to exit as a result of the change. It’s not a simple question. How you answer it will affect the success of your entire project.

Whether your change is an adoption of new technology, a decision to enter a new competitive space, or an organizational restructure, you’ve faced this question. Who are the team members you can count on to embrace the change and make it through, and who are the ones who won’t or can’t.

The metaphor of the school bus plays in here. We all know that one. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. It sounds simple. Except we’re talking about people.

Let’s assume you’ve been managing performance all along, and you have a team that is performing well under the current conditions. How do you decide who can make it through the change process and thrive in the new environment?

In any organization, there is a scale of employee performance. A few at the top, a few at the bottom, and the majority in the middle. The effective leader is continuously managing that equation to optimize her team’s performance. When a major change initiative is imminent, there is a tendency to focus on the bottom group and view those employees with added scrutiny. Can these people really make it through the change or should we replace them with new people who already understand the post change environment?

When this thinking takes hold, the inertia leads to discounting the ability of the bottom group to embrace the change, often before it has even been presented to them as a proposition. Let’s face it, time is of the essence, and you can’t waste time overthinking this part, right? For the leaders of the change, there is a conscious or unconscious decision not to expend any unnecessary energy toward bringing them along. Let’s be honest, transformational projects like these tend to put a huge burden on the leader, who also has to continue running her business and other projects. There is only so much energy available, right?

I subscribe to a different approach to tackling this question at the outset of a major change initiative. You may be familiar with the story of Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. Faced with the reality of his ship the Endurance becoming trapped and crushed by the ice on his quest for the South Pole, he too faced a major change in his strategy. Abandon his ship and attempt to survive an improbable march across the ice to survival.

Shackleton too had a hierarchy of performers in his organization. Some men were stronger and some were weaker. He was also faced with the question of whether to commit to everyone or to accept that only the strong would survive, and that the others could be expendable. Shackleton decided that everyone, from the strongest to the weakest, deserved the opportunity to make the effort to make that change. To try to survive. He fully committed to getting everyone through. Once he committed to that mindset, every decision he made supported that outcome.

It took 2 years. Everyone survived.

My view is that unless you make a full commitment to your team at the outset, a commitment that you’ll do everything you can to bring them through to the other side, your project will suffer. You will struggle with thumbs up or thumbs down judgments on people throughout the project, you won’t have total focus on the execution of the project and you’ll produce less than optimal outcomes. The decisiveness in committing to everyone will sharpen your focus on what really needs to happen to produce excellence in your change project. You will make each decision with a clear outcome in mind, that everyone deserves a fighting chance to make it through.

The next time you are faced with a transformational change initiative, think about Shackleton first. Start there. Walk in his boots. Watch how your team responds to your commitment to them. See how successful your results can be.

It may take a little longer and require more effort. But it will feel satisfying when you accomplish the goal. And that team you fully committed to, will return the favor when you need it most.

Lead well.

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