The trouble is, leaders often don’t do what is needed to implement change, even if they agree it should happen. You may think, If only they would (fill in the blank), you would be able to make some real progress.

This lack of proper leadership support is the top challenge for most change agents.  It frequently stays that way because change agents get stuck by the following traps.

1.  “It’s not my place.”

Allison was a supervisor who had been given a special assignment to implement the recommendations that resulted from an employee survey.  The biggest roadblock to improvement, she decided, was her boss’s boss, the very person who had commissioned the survey.  Allison’s boss agreed but would not do anything about it.  “What can I do?” Allison asked, “It’s not my place to address the issues with my boss’s boss.”

The organizational hierarchy can seem like an insurmountable hurdle over which to affect change.  When the person whose support you need is outside of one degree of authority, it can seem like political suicide to attempt to do something about it.  From this position of helplessness, it is easy to get stuck hoping he will figure it out on his own.

2.  “That’s just the way they are.”

Dan was a senior manager who worked directly for the CEO.  Dan’s key initiative to improve the company was to develop and solidify accountability to procedures.  The CEO, while supporting the initiative verbally, did not want to abide by procedures himself.  It was the CEO who had embodied the previously lackadaisical culture.  “I can’t do anything about it.  That’s just the way he is,” Dan lamented.

We often assume that the behaviors of others reflect an inner character trait.  This assumption is so common that psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.  When you consider that someone will not support you because it is part of his DNA, of course you would automatically chalk it up as a lost cause.  You get trapped knowing it is impossible to change someone else.

3.  “He just doesn’t like me.”

John was a project manager who needed key data from the manager of another department.  However, John’s phone calls and e-mails requesting the information were repeatedly ignored.  John asked his boss to request the same information, and it was immediately handed over.  “Maybe she just doesn’t like me,” was John’s reasoning.

This trap is the mirror image of the fundamental attribution error.  Instead of thinking the lack of support is caused by her character, you think the lack of support is your own fault.  Whenever you interpret her behavior as a personal slight – she doesn’t respect you, she doesn’t like you, she doesn’t trust you – it traps you with self-doubt.  Insecurity is a lousy place from which to exert influence as a change agent.

Allison, Dan and John are composites of real change agents who were stuck.  But none of their traps were inherently real.  The traps were assumptions they made about the leaders and the organization.

The first step in getting out of a trap is to recognize that you may be in one.   Separate the facts from your assumptions about them.  From there, you can select a new point of view and step out of the trap, so you can find new ways to get the support you need to implement change.

You can get the support you need to make a difference!

Join me for The Proper Care and Feeding of Leaders webinar series on May 20 & 27.  I’ll be sharing practical ways to get unstuck from these common traps.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Leaders

So They Help You Implement Change

Dates: Thursday, May 20 & 27, 2010

Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern

Cost: $149 (The first 5 tickets are only $99!)

Maximum attendees: 20

Align measures and objectives

Most measures by themselves are meaningless.  A measure is only a proxy for what you actually want to happen – the objective.  For example, when you measure employee turnover, your end goal is not to know how many people are leaving the company.  You want to know how effective the company is at retaining talent.  Turnover is just one way to estimate employee satisfaction.

The alignment between objective and measure is a critical factor in the effectiveness of the measure.  Good alignment means that when the measure moves in the direction you want, you are making progress toward your objective.  Just because employee turnover goes down doesn’t explicitly mean that satisfaction has gone up; it just means employees aren’t leaving at the same rate as they were before.  It is important to know the relationship between your measure and your objective.

When an objective and its measure are misaligned, one of two things happens.  Either people will ignore it altogether because they see that there is no real connection, or you will end up with unintended consequences because people go after a measure that is unrelated to the objective.  It is better to have a subjective measure that is aligned with its objective than to have a concrete measure that doesn’t really tell you what you want to know.

Make reports meaningful

A giant spreadsheet with rows of measures, although concise, does not impart as much information as detailed, visual measure reports.  At the risk of using more paper, ink and time, provide people with an interesting graphic that tells a story and helps them make decisions.  Best practice measure reports include the following information on one page per measure:

• Objective
• Chart of the measure’s progress over time
• Arrow on the chart indicating which way is good
• Target line on the chart
• Status indicator (Color coding in red/yellow/green, smiley faces, etc.)
• Measure owner
• Data source
• Frequency of measurement
• A brief explanation of what is being measured and its link to the objective
• An interpretation of what the current status indicates is happening
• The current status of initiatives underway or planned to make progress

Great measure reports make it easy for people to quickly understand what is going on.  Instead of having meetings that spend time explaining the measure and its status, focus meetings on making decisions about what should be done to achieve the objective.

Focus on action

A measure tells you whether an objective needs attention and what its priority is.  It will rarely tell you what action to take; it will only tell you that action should be taken.  Still, many teams get bogged down in the accuracy and derivation of the measure itself instead of taking action with the information that they do have.

Focus on the initiatives that will move the dial even if you don’t yet know exactly where the dial is located.  As better information becomes available, you can adjust your report to show what is truly happening.  If better information is too difficult to collect, decide what is good enough or get a new measure.  A team that only talks about measures without taking action toward objectives is a team that will quickly lose interest in measurement.

It may be true that “What gets measured gets done.”  But only if you help it along will what gets done match your objective.

A similar phenomenon happens in organizations.  Consider that the equivalent to verbal communication in organizations are the formal words that come to employees in the form of official documents:  values and mission statements, strategy, policies, newsletters, websites, announcements, press releases, and other communication devices. The rest of internal communication comes from everything else employees experience.  Similar to a conversation, the vast majority of meaning and understanding is generated by “non-verbal” communication.

The following are examples of “non-verbal” communication in organizations that speak louder than words:

Accountability

Employees assess which policies count and which ones are merely guidelines based on how consistently they are enforced.  Processes and procedures are generally followed to the extent that they are required.

“Everyone must contact the IT helpdesk to resolve computer issues”
(unless you know who to call to avoid waiting).

Rewards

Rewards in all their forms tell employees how to be successful.  Traditional incentive programs signal expectations but may conflict with stated values or even inadvertently motivate a different behavior than what is desired.  Furthermore, who gets promoted and what behaviors elicit praise send powerful messages about what is expected.

“Safety first!”
(Here’s your efficiency bonus.)

Decisions

How managers spend resources speaks volumes about what they truly value and prioritize.  The decisions they make about how to allocate funds and how they spend their own time demonstrates what they believe will lead to success.

“Strategic initiatives are important”
(until we need to cut something out of the budget).

Management behavior

More than anything, employees look at the behavior modeled by management to see if it matches what is officially communicated.  The most influential person in this regard is an employee’s own boss.  The attitudes and behaviors displayed by people in authority tell the real story of what is expected.

“We value employees’ ideas”
(but not the terrible one you just shared).

Employees will rely on “non-verbal” communication to understand what is expected and to decide appropriate action in the midst of uncertainty. When introduced to news of change, many employees will take the stance, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  It is not enough for them to hear it or read it.   It is imperative to monitor your organization’s “non-verbal” communication to ensure that actions and behaviors are consistent with your official change message.

1.  Change Knowledge

Change agents are the people in their organizations who understand how change works – or at least how it is supposed to work.  Your own change knowledge helps you know what to expect and understand what is really happening.  When the initiative is stuck in a rut, your knowledge helps you generate ideas for what to do next.

2.  Clarity

A lot is said about the importance of a clear vision.  In addition to making sure leadership has a vision and that it is clear, change agents also assess current reality and identify the barriers that stand in the way of achieving the vision.

3.  Your Role

When used correctly, your role as change agent can be a powerful tool.  As trusted advisor, you help leaders fill in the gaps to ensure that change happens.  It is necessary to strike a balance of ownership of the initiative and to manage relationships.

4.  Power

People who have power are able to take action, make decisions that affect other people, model behavior and open minds.  Since change agents don’t have direct authority, they need to build up indirect authority to influence others.

5.  Leadership Support

Also, since you don’t have direct authority as a change agent, you need to gain a partner who does have it.  When you have leadership support, you need to make sure it manifests as behaviors and activities that drive the change forward.  If you don’t have support, you will eventually need to get it.

6.  Conversations

The one-on-one conversations you have as a change agent will help get beyond fear and develop mutual understanding.  Conversations are a means of providing feedback and preserving relationships.  The most important conversations are the ones you don’t really want to have.

7.  Meetings

Most meetings are seen as drudgery, or necessary evils; however, when effective they can be a key means of moving a change initiative forward.  Whether you are meeting with a project team, a leadership team, or a work group or a steering committee, your job as the change agent is to make sure people are collaborating for results.

8.  Accountability

Without having direct authority, you will most likely not hold people accountable yourself.  As a change agent, your responsibility is to make sure a system of accountability is in place.

9.  Incentives

Although incentives can be tricky because they frequently have unintended consequences, effective change agents find ways to motivate desired behaviors or results.  The best motivation techniques are not external rewards but psychology-based nudges in the right direction.

10.  Communication

Some say the first law of change is communicate, communicate, communicate.  To be more specific, the key activity for change agents is to get the appropriate message to the right person and to have them do something about it.

Whether you are executing strategy, implementing technology, designing process improvements, or transforming culture, your role as change agent is fraught with challenges.  Use these ten tools to help navigate them successfully.

For a more in-depth look at the 10 Essential Tools, check out:

• The 10 Essential Tools webinar
• The INflux Change Agent Network

Myth #1:  The goal is change.

Perhaps we are victims of language.  Organizational change practitioners commonly talk as though the end goal is change itself.  It is common to say “implement change” as if the change itself is the goal.  It’s not!  Change is the process of bringing about the desired future state.

One of the first to study organization development, Kurt Lewin described the change process as Unfreeze > Change > Freeze.  It is commonly misinterpreted that the thing you are freezing is the change itself.  That is, you permanently affix the initiative you are implementing.  In fact, it means that the state you freeze is the true desired future that continues as “normal” after the initiative ends.

To see this myth in action, ask yourself this:  How does what you really want to happen differ from how you are accomplishing it?

Myth #2:  Change must start at the top.

No one will deny the importance of leadership driving and reinforcing the change process throughout the organization.

But does change need to start with leadership?  The answer is a definite “no.”  There are numerous examples of large-scale organizational changes that started as either grass-roots efforts or small trials without much leadership involvement.  Plus, ideas for change initiatives frequently come from people lower on the org chart who are more directly affected by the problems and challenges of the organization.

When we believe that change only starts at the top, any lack of leadership commitment can make us feel like our efforts are fruitless.  The truth is that change can start with you.  Your job is to help the leaders to drive and reinforce the change process.

Myth #3:  People behave rationally.

You knew this was a myth already, didn’t you?  And yet as change agents we frequently assume that we can predict what the reaction will be to our initiative based on what we think a rational human being would do.

We believe that if we provide a monetary incentive to accomplish something, it will motivate people to do it.  We assume that if we list all the benefits of the initiative, people will get on board.  We think that if we put a group in a room together with a goal they will work as a team to get it done.

The good news is that although people do not always behave rationally, their irrational behavior is actually fairly predictable.  When you think through the impact of your initiative, consider whether your plan is based on the assumption that people will behave the way you want them to behave or that people will behave as they will actually behave.

If you feel like your change initiative is getting stuck, challenge these myths and look at change from a new perspective.

Follow these five rules to increase the productivity of your leadership team meetings, and thus make progress on your change initiative.

1. Know the goal. What do you need the leadership team to do by the end of their limited time together? What are the key decisions that need to be made, and what issues should be discussed? Design the meeting with the required steps and final outcome in mind.

2. Prepare in advance. At a bare minimum, create and distribute the agenda and any review materials beforehand. To be most effective, meet with individual team members before the meeting to prepare them for what is expected of them. Leave only the key items that need to be done together for the meeting agenda. Everything else should be done in advance to the extent possible.

3. Build, don’t create. If your initiative requires that the leadership team develop something new (like a strategy, scorecard, new product, etc.), do not start with a blank sheet of paper at the meeting. To quote Jeff Lebow of Alignment at Work, LLC, “It’s easier to criticize than to create.” Although it can be tempting to have the team create something from scratch as a means to build buy-in to the final product, the process can be frustrating, takes longer, and is unnecessary. Build a draft from the input you receive during the pre-meetings, and point out where the group agreed and disagreed as a starting point for a more meaningful conversation.

4. Separate the important from the urgent. If the team starts discussing the latest fire, the meeting will be derailed. Unfortunately, as a team that probably meets infrequently, they might use your meeting as an opportunity to catch up on the latest news and updates. As much as possible, keep the focus on the important topic at hand. Use a “parking lot,” a separate flip-chart where extraneous topics can be captured and discussed at a later time.

5. Integrate fun. Stodgy boardrooms need a jolt of energy to break its inhabitants out of their normal habits. Sometimes the air is thick with politics when leaders get in the same room. Play and humor are great equalizers. Use creativity toys, games and role-playing to break the tension, kick leaders out of their comfort zones and get your point across. When you take charge as a facilitator, you’ll be surprised what people will do if you tell them to, regardless of their title.

One way to increase support for your change initiative is to not make key leaders dread getting together to talk about it. When you follow these rules, meetings will start to be meaningful and productive, and even enjoyable.

The following tips are compiled from my many years as an industrial engineer, when one of my key responsibilities was to justify both capital and human capital projects to gain approval by the leadership team.

Know the decision makers. Within your organization, find out who makes decisions and how similar decisions are made.  Who has the spending authority for a project your size?  Who needs to say “yes”?  What is the typical process for vetting and approval?

Speak the language. Find out what the decision makers believe is important, including both what they value and how they like to receive information. In my experience, for most projects I calculated payback (cost of the project divided by annual savings equals the number of years it takes to pay back cost).  Other organizations might use net present value (NPV), return on investment (ROI), or other calculations.  Also, find out if there is a threshold your project needs to hit to avoid automatic dismissal.  At the same company few projects with more than two years payback would be approved.

Befriend someone from accounting. (Or engineering.)  Enlist the help and support of someone in your organization whose blessing of your calculations and logic will give your credibility a boost. They will also be able to help you navigate the approval process.

Determine the competition for resources. Is this an either/or decision (they will choose either your project or another one)?  Is it budget season?  Would it be considered discretionary spending?  Is it capital or expense?

Include the negative aspects. Although most likely you want the project to be approved, if you approach the process from the point of view of someone who just wants to know the truth, your justification will be more credible to decision makers. Don’t just load your analysis with the pros of the project.  Include the cons as well to show that you’ve thought through all the implications – and how to overcome them or compensate for them.

Consider everything. Sometimes the small things add up.  Occasionally when you reach beyond the obvious implications you’ll find something significant that can make or break the project.  You may not want to nickel and dime the final presentation of your analysis, but you don’t want to leave out anything important that might otherwise be hiding.  Consider the following (which could be benefits or costs depending on your project):

• Labor and material expenses
• Energy and other utilities or resources
• Environmental impact
• Safety and health effects
• Cycle time or other process improvements
• Inventory levels
• Maintenance, equipment and supplies
• Customer service impact
• Management capability and decision making ability
• Quality implications, error rates
• Employee impact, satisfaction, etc.
• Interest or cost of capital
• Installation and start-up efficiency, learning curves
• Training or hiring costs
• Regulatory compliance

Make the analysis dynamic. Since many calculations depend on assumptions of future events or forecasts, provide the ability to test scenarios for variable inputs, like labor or material prices (i.e. the price of gasoline) or volume changes (i.e. number of phone calls received).  Also calculate the breakeven point for different variables – at what volume or price does the cost equal the savings?  Showing what happens when assumptions change provide a feeling for the risk of the project.  The ability to mitigate risk by demonstrating the robustness of the project will help leaders feel comfortable saying “yes.”

Conduct a trial. Especially for initiatives whose benefits are more intangible, conduct a trial to try to measure the improvements, which you can then quantify and forecast when the scope of the project expands.  As an alternative, share the success stories of other companies or departments who have already implemented a similar project.

The first step toward implementation of your initiative is gaining the initial buy-in, approval and funding.  Start with a sensible, well-informed analysis with the ability to demonstrate risk to help you get to “yes.”

If you found this post useful, you may also like:

• How to Get Beyond Leadership Buy-in
• Eight Fundamental Ingredients of a Successful Change Initiative

For an inanimate object resilience is like elasticity: the ability to return to its original form after being bent, compressed, or stretched.  A rubber band is resilient; a coffee cup that is dropped, spilled and broken is not.

Similarly, for a person resilience is the ability to grasp, assimilate and move forward from a disruption or change.  Instead of returning to the original form like the rubber band, a resilient person is his same self but with the new information incorporated into the way he is and works.   

The place you bounce back to when you are resilient is called your “Center.”  Similar to a center of gravity, the Center is grounded and balanced.  It is a state of calmness and clear thought that influences how you handle change, emotionally and behaviorally.  Getting back to Center can occur naturally over time, but is achieved more rapidly when taken on as a deliberate activity.

The speed at which this re-centering occurs is the measure of resilience. Developing this ability and speed is the critical factor in bouncing back after a downturn or setback.

Your personal resilience determines how well you handle changes in your life and also how well you yourself change.  The greater your resilience, the higher your threshold for ambiguity and stress. As you increase your resilience you are able to handle more and more change at the same time.

Growing resilience in others and in your organization will determine the organization’s ability to handle change, and the employees’ ability to take on your change initiative. As a change agent, the ability to cope with change yourself is crucial.  Once you have mastered resilience, you can help those around you build their capacity to re-center and improve their own resilience.

There are five avenues for mastering resilience that you can develop:

Mental Resilience includes the psychology of perception and reactions.  One way to build mental resilience is by shifting your thoughts from non-productive thinking patterns to patterns that generate success.

Physical Resilience is a little used resource in the workplace.  Like a dashboard on a car, the body gives you information and data about what’s happening in your environment. It can also be used as a guidance system, or you can reprogram this guidance system for a different outcome. There are also certain body positions, as used in martial arts, that produce and make available certain thoughts and feelings.

Emotional Resilience means building your capacity to manage your emotions as well as the emotions of others.  Since fear and other strong emotions are common in uncertain situations, emotional resilience is key to being effective in managing and influencing change.

Social Resilience includes your ability to build and utilize your support systems, networks and relationships as a resource.  One of the greatest challenges facing change agents is having high-stakes conversations that move change forward.

Talents and Skills Resilience means knowing your own unique talents and skills and how they complement other skills sets.  With talents and skills resilience, you are able to confidently describe your talents, to recognize those who need them and to share your value with tact and effectiveness.

Mastering these five avenues for building your resilience to handle and manage change will not only set you apart, it will allow you to be more influential and seen as a resource for others who are experiencing change.  You will become invaluable in supporting the fulfillment of the change initiative.

For more on resilience, check out:

• The Mastering Resilience episode on The Change Agent’s Dilemma radio show
• The Mastering Resilience Workshop coming up in October:  www.masteringresilience.com

However, not all surveys will improve the situation.  The following are four warning signs that conducting a survey may do more harm than good.

1.  The leaders don’t really want to know what people think.

The people who hold the top spots in an organization are usually out of the feedback loop.  As they move up the ladder, they are increasingly unaware of the pulse of the organization.  When the intent to conduct an employee survey is proposed, leaders who understand this phenomenon will jump at the chance to collect information that they have gradually been phased out of.  These leaders will want more details about what will be asked, and might even propose other questions that they would like to ask.

On the flip side of the coin are leaders who think they already know, or worse, don’t really care what the employees think or how they feel.  If you propose an employee survey and receive a resounding, “Sure, go ahead” without any curiosity or concerns, beware.  They probably don’t really want to know what people think.

2.  The leaders won’t believe the results.

Sometimes leaders will dismiss the results of the survey, even if it seems they wanted to know.  I once conducted an employee satisfaction survey that I created in-house due to lack of funds for the project.  Once I presented the results, the leaders wanted benchmarks to compare against to see if the results were “normal.”  Of course, having created the survey in-house, there was no other data to compare them against.

Before conducting a survey, watch for signs that the leaders commonly deflect accountability by picking apart the validity of numbers in other settings.  One way to combat this scenario ahead of time is to discuss the output that will be generated from the survey.  Discuss hypothetical results with the leadership team to determine up front what else they will want to know, so you can build it into your analysis.

3.  The leaders won’t do anything about it.

Even leaders who want to know and believe the results still may not do anything about it.  If employees give their opinion and then nothing is done, the integrity of the leaders and you as the surveyor drops, and future surveys will not be taken as seriously.

When discussing hypothetical results, gauge the interest of leaders in taking action.  For example, if the survey says that people don’t know the direction the company is going, are the leaders willing to share strategic information?  If the answer is no, then don’t bother asking.

To combat the first three reasons not to conduct an employee survey, make sure leaders know the questions you are asking and what you are actually measuring with the questions.  Discuss ahead of time what the implications and actions might be based on hypothetical responses you think they might have trouble absorbing.

4.  You don’t want to say what you already know.

The fourth reason not to conduct an employee survey, instead of being directed at the leadership team, is directed at the surveyor.  Are you conducting the survey because you don’t know the answers, or are you conducting the survey because you don’t want to say what you already know?  Is fear getting in the way of you speaking up and sharing the problems you see in the organization?  Is the survey actually a cop-out?

If any of that rings true, here’s an idea for you:  Include your point of view in the proposal for the survey.  State your hypothesis – what you believe to be true – and say you would like to conduct a survey to test it.  Share the implications and the action plan for improving the situation if you are right.  Then offer the option to skip the survey if they agree – they just might.  If they don’t agree with your hypothesis, then you will still conduct the survey.  Not only will you get more involvement from people who disagree with you, it will also be more scientific and objective than if you were just using the to communicate for you.

Yes, surveys can be very useful tools to help direct a change initiative.  That is, of course, if the leaders want to know what employees think, will believe the results, and will do something with the opportunities that are revealed.

Not only do organizational leaders have the power to make or break your project on their own, but it is impossible to bypass them to change the organization below.  Individuals experiencing change will look to those in power for confirmation that they are committed to the new way of doing things.  It is under intense scrutiny that leaders are watched to see if their actions match their intentions.  If not, the change initiative will be dismissed as “flavor of the month” and not taken seriously.

Amid all this doom and gloom, there is a bright side.  You don’t have to settle for the level of leadership support you currently have.  As fellow human beings, leaders are capable of being informed and influenced.

Take the following steps to determine how to best garner the support of the most influential people in your organization.

1) Identify “Leadership”
When we use the term “leadership,” it typically means the group of people whose titles reside at the top of the org chart.  However, the list may be different for the transformation you are trying to achieve.  Start by identifying all individuals who might have a strong impact on the success of your initiative, including decision makers and influential employees who do not have leadership titles.

The key is to decouple the nebulous term “Leadership” from the names of individuals who can impact your project.  Since each leader has her own opinions, knowledge and motivations, it is important to treat leaders as individuals, and not as a faceless leadership group.

2) Assign Levels of Support
Before you can garner support for your initiative from your leadership list, consider that there are different levels of support.  Buy-in is the minimum amount of support required to be called support at all.  There are two other levels that rise beyond buy-in on the support continuum.

• Ownership:  An initiative owner takes personal responsibility for the success or failure of the initiative.  He plans, communicates and holds people accountable for task completion.
• Commitment:  Leaders who are committed to your initiative demonstrate it by taking action in favor of it.  They do not own the project per se, but they do their part to make it happen.
• Buy-in:  In the game of poker, “buy-in” is the amount you pay just to join the game.  When you have someone’s buy-in, it means she may agree with you, but may not act on it.
• Neutral:  These are the people who don’t really care about your initiative either way.  They either are not affected or are just along for the ride.
• Opposition:  Unfortunately, there will be people who don’t agree with your initiative.  There are different levels of opposition, from relatively benign disagreement to downright belligerent and argumentative.

Identify where on this support spectrum each leader is currently and where he needs to be in order for your initiative to succeed.  Then prioritize which leaders have the most support to raise, and thus which leaders need the most attention from you.

3) Specify Requirements
Different levels of support require different roles from leaders.  Determine what is required of individual leaders and in what ways each must change in order to demonstrate the support you need.

Each leader is in a unique position in the organization.  They make decisions, talk to others, and influence followers.  Your initiative would be more successful if they performed specific activities, exhibited certain behaviors, and conveyed and ideally held key attitudes.  These facets reflect the desired level of support for each individual.

To further define support for each leader, identify what you need her to start doing differently.  Also list what you want her to keep doing, and what you need her to stop doing.  In this fashion, you will specify a gap between her current activities, behaviors and attitudes and the desired ones.

4) Diagnose The Gap
Based on the requirements you determine, identify what factors are standing in the way of the full support you need.
The reasons leaders do not show support generally fall into six categories.

• Information:  The leader may lack knowledge of the details of the project, such as benefits.  Also, he may not know what is expected of him.
• Skills:  Some change initiatives require leaders to learn new skills and abilities.
• Motivation:  The project or the necessary behaviors may not be aligned with what the leader considers to be her best interests, or to the interests of what is important to her.
• Power:  When a leader is not allowed (real or perceived) to show the desired support there is a power gap.  Culture and feared repercussions are examples of power factors to explore.
• Fear:  Change involves an inherent risk.  Leaders may experience a number of different fears related to your initiative, which they may or may not express directly to you.
• Resources:  A frequent excuse or complaint is that leaders don’t have enough time or resources to take on or become involved in another project.  While this may be true, lack of resources is an easy excuse that may also hide any of the above reasons.

5) Design Action Steps
The last step is to make an action plan by closing the gaps you identified in the fourth step.

Provide information and training where necessary.  Develop incentives and work with leaders to understand how to reframe the project to fit with their personal motivation.  Map power gaps to the source and develop interventions to close them.  To reduce fear, reduce the real or perceived risk.  By clarifying your requirements and expectations you will pinpoint the appropriate steps to raise leadership support for your change initiative.

If you like this approach, you might also be interested in:

• Four Ways to Boost Your Organizational Power
• Tips for Leading a Successful Transformation
• The Beyond Buy-in Workbook