Writing at Harvard Business Review, Morten Hansen offers Ten Ways to Get People to Change. As I’ve heard for many years, it is less a matter of forcing change and more a matter of creating the environment to encourage change.
Some of his ideas I found particularly appealing:
Embrace the power of one
He worked with a company that had 8 values and 12 competencies. With 20 priorities nothing happens.
Putting 10 core values on a poster in every office is a waste of paper. That’s too many things to focus on, so you just ignore it.
Mobilize the crowd.
Change will really take hold after the tipping point, which is the inflection point where lots of people get on board. Malcolm Gladwell described as in his book, The Tipping Point.
Get a few early adopters to adopt a behavior, then find and convince the influencers, and then sit back and watch as it goes viral (hopefully).
One more cool idea:
Subtract, not just add
We usually think about adding something, creating a new program, or writing a new policy. Perhaps the way to encourage changes to remove something.
Change behaviors by removing enablers, triggers and barriers.
Check out the full article for more ideas you hadn’t thought of before.