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The Question Nobody's Answering · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:04
  Edwin, we've covered sponsorship and measurable goals.
• 0:07
  Today I want to start with a line from the piece that reframed something for me.
• 0:11
  Leadership tends to communicate the what and the why, but employees are silently
• 0:16
  asking something else entirely.
• 0:18
  They're asking what changes in my day, and what happens if I don't get it right.
• 0:23
  That's it, Claire.
• 0:24
  Not the strategic rationale, the personal stakes.
• 0:28
  And most change communication fails because it answers a question nobody actually
• 0:32
  asked.
• 0:33
  So engagement isn't really about making people excited about the change.
• 0:36
  It's about reducing uncertainty.
• 0:39
  Enthusiasm is a nice byproduct, not the goal.
• 0:42
  If someone knows exactly what's changing, what stays the same,
• 0:46
  and what they need to do next, they don't need to be inspired,
• 0:50
  they need to not be confused.
• 0:52
  There's a communication spine in the piece I really liked, five plain lines.
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  What's changing and when.
• 0:57
  What stays the same.
• 0:58
  What I need you to do next.
• 0:59
  Where to get help.
• 1:00
  How we'll measure progress.
• 1:02
  And the trap is thinking more messages equals more clarity.
• 1:06
  It doesn't.
• 1:07
  More vague messages just increases anxiety.
• 1:10
  Finance needs different detail than frontline ops.
• 1:13
  Managers need reinforcement scripts they can actually use in a room,
• 1:17
  not an inspirational email forwarded down the chain.
• 1:20
  That leads into stakeholder mapping, which I think a lot of teams skip because it
• 1:24
  sounds like extra process on top of an already stressful rollout.
• 1:28
  It's the opposite of extra process, it's how you avoid wasting your limited
• 1:32
  attention.
• 1:33
  Segment people by two things.
• 1:36
  Influence, can they accelerate or block adoption for others.
• 1:40
  And impact, how much does their actual work change.
• 1:44
  High influence, high impact, that's where the sponsor's time goes first.
• 1:49
  Everyone else gets triaged from there, who needs training and job aids,
• 1:54
  who needs a watchlist because resistance risk is real.
• 1:57
  And this is where champions come in, but I want to push on something,
• 2:00
  because "change champion" can sound like corporate speak for cheerleader.
• 2:04
  It's the opposite of a cheerleader, and that's an important distinction.
• 2:08
  A real champion translates the change into local context, surfaces real blockers
• 2:13
  early, reinforces new behaviors peer to peer, and gives feedback without it getting
• 2:18
  filtered through five layers of management first.
• 2:21
  You recruit them deliberately, for being trusted and steady under stress,
• 2:25
  not for being enthusiastic in meetings.
• 2:27
  So how do you actually keep a champion network alive past the first month,
• 2:31
  because I've seen these fizzle out fast.
• 2:33
  Short enablement sessions, thirty to forty-five minutes, nothing longer.
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  A weekly feedback pulse, what's confusing, what's breaking,
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  what's improving.
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  Quick resources, scripts and mini job aids they can actually use.
• 2:47
  And recognition tied to outcomes, not popularity.
• 2:51
  Do that well, and champions become your early warning system,
• 2:55
  which means HR isn't the only place blockers surface.
• 2:58
  Okay, so let's say communication and champions are working,
• 3:01
  adoption's happening.
• 3:02
  What actually locks that in for good, because I know initiatives that looked
• 3:05
  successful at launch and quietly reverted six months later.
• 3:08
  That's the fifth element, governance and sustainment, and it's where successful
• 3:13
  change either becomes normal work or dies quietly.
• 3:17
  Governance isn't bureaucracy, it's decision clarity.
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  Who decides what, how tradeoffs get made, how issues escalate,
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  what gets measured and how often.
• 3:28
  And there's a specific stat here that surprised me, sixty-seven percent of
• 3:32
  respondents pointed to clear organization-wide ownership and commitment,
• 3:36
  across every level, as the actual key factor in a successful initiative.
• 3:40
  Which tells you governance isn't a top-down thing alone, it has to be felt at every
• 3:44
  level or it's theater again.
• 3:47
  Practically, that means a named team, an executive sponsor who owns priority and
• 3:52
  resourcing, a change lead who owns the process end to end, functional owners for
• 3:57
  adoption in their areas, an HR partner for role impact and manager support,
• 4:02
  and a project lead for the plan and risk tracking.
• 4:05
  And resourcing is where I think leaders quietly set themselves up to fail,
• 4:09
  they approve the change but not the capacity to actually do it.
• 4:12
  "People will figure it out" is not a resourcing plan, it's scheduling failure.
• 4:17
  What work stops to make room for this.
• 4:20
  How many manager hours a week does rollout actually require.
• 4:24
  What training exists and how will you validate it actually landed,
• 4:28
  not just that someone watched a video.
• 4:30
  And the last piece, sustainment, is really about not letting the old way stay
• 4:34
  comfortable.
• 4:34
  Exactly.
• 4:36
  Update job descriptions to reflect the new process.
• 4:39
  Update performance metrics to match new expectations.
• 4:43
  Remove the workarounds that let the old process limp along.
• 4:46
  If you don't align the systems around people, you're asking them to swim upstream
• 4:50
  permanently, and eventually they'll stop trying.
• 4:53
  If you want real signal on which of your people are steady enough under stress to be
• 4:57
  one of those champions, OAD's free Top Performer Profile surfaces that in about
• 5:02
  seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card.
• 5:05
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 5:08
  Answer the question people are actually asking, and build the governance so the
• 5:12
  answer still holds six months later.
• 5:14
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 5:15
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 5:16
  Always, Claire.