Balloons:  Each player starts with 3 balloons attached to their cars.  The goal of the battle is to protect your balloons from being popped while trying to pop as many balloons as possible on the opposing team.

Coins:  Each player starts without coins.  The goal of the coin battle is to collect as many coins as possible.

It turns out I detest the balloon battle option.  I started thinking about why this is the case, and determined it is a matter of personal motivation preference.  The goal of gaining points by reducing the other team’s number of balloons does not appeal to me at all.  In contrast, seeing the number of coins I’ve collected and making the number go up up up is much more motivating to me.

The same is not true of everyone; my son on the other hand, prefers the balloon battle.  He likes to watch the balloons pop.

We can expand the learning outside of MarioKart Wii.  Understanding what games someone enjoys can tell you a lot about their motivation preferences.  Among my favorites are Trivial Pursuit, Clue, Blokus, Jeopardy, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  Clearly, if you want to motivate me, find ways to let me show you how smart I am and challenge me with a puzzle to solve.  The conclusion might be different for someone who enjoyed playing Scrabble and watching Wheel of Fortune.

Consider the board games, video games, game shows and sports that you like to play and watch.  What do they say about your motivation preferences?  Do you like to win, or beat your own high score?  Do you prefer to play solo, or would you rather play a team sport?  Do you like to take risks?  Would you rather play for fun or for the challenge of it?

Perhaps organizations should have game closets to assess what types of achievements fuel their employees.

Based on your favorite games, what are your motivation preferences?

The trouble started when inevitably, her favorite pink shoes became too small – or rather her feet grew too large.  I took her to the store to pick out some new ones.  She chose the purple ones with flowers on them.

Given her love of shoes, I was surprised when she refused to wear them.  Even though she had picked them out, she would run away whenever we even picked them up.  If we were able to put them on, she would immediately pull them off her feet and toss them as far as she could.  She would then scurry around to find her shiny pink shoes that by now were scrunching her toes.

This morning we hid the pink shoes.  I fully expected the morning to end with tears and a barefoot daughter on the way to school.

Then her Daddy had a stroke of genius.  “Let’s put on your FANCY shoes!” he said.

Every night at bedtime my daughter insists that we read Fancy Nancy, a story about a girl who enhances everything she wears and owns with accessories.  It’s a fairly long book for someone who’s not quite two, but she follows along with the story intently.

Catching on to his idea, I pointed out how the flowers made her new shoes fancy, like Nancy’s.

With a little bit of a struggle (but not the usual all-out wrestling match), she let him put them on.  And then they stayed on her feet.

Tonight, before leaving for dinner, she fussed a bit when he tried to put her shoes on again.  This time, it was because she wanted to put them on by herself.

When faced with resistance, how might you make the change “fancy?”

Considering all the challenges they face, that might seem ironic.  But, perhaps hope is the only reason to keep pushing the boulder up the hill, even when it doesn’t seem to be budging.

Hope that the organization has the potential to be better.

The belief that we can bring more meaning to the enterprise.

Knowing that financial success and doing well at the “soft stuff” are not mutually exclusive.

The belief that it’s possible to engage a large group in a collective purpose.

Hope that there is something good on the other side of the hill.

…And that there is truly another side to get to.

…And that it is possible to get there.

When the going gets rough, sometimes all a change agent has is hope, and their willingness to take action toward it.

After all, no one ever moves forward from a place of futility.

What is your hope?

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

Many people, including myself, raised their hands sheepishly, but were willing to play along. The professor asked a few of us to say where we would rather be. (I said home in bed.  I did not have kids yet, and sleeping in was still an option.)  He went around the room and collected responses on the whiteboard.

Then he told us we were all wrong! That if we would rather be somewhere else, then that is where we would be.  Our priorities, preferences and motivations were reflected in our choice to get up and go to class that morning.  If I would really rather be sleeping in, then I would still be in bed.  But instead, my priority of learning how to negotiate, or my motivation to get a good grade in the class made me choose to set the alarm in the morning and drive an hour to get to the class in downtown Chicago.  The fact that I was there proved that I would rather be in class than in bed sleeping.  Whoa!

Ultimately, what we choose to do is a reflection of our real priorities, our actual preferences, and our true motivations.  It’s not what we would rather do, or what is on our to-do list, or what we say we want.

Obviously, this lesson struck a chord, since I remember it 7 years later.  Every now and then I remember that morning and ask myself:   What does my current activity say about my priorities?  Why is it that I choose to do this and not something else that might better reflect my values and goals?  As you can imagine, this thought usually arises when I’m procrastinating or avoiding taking action or making a decision.  Taking a look at how you spend your time through this lens can be eye-opening and push you toward taking a step in the right direction.

Taking this lesson to its logical conclusion then, there is nothing that you would rather be doing than reading this blog post.  If there were something that better fit with your true priorities, preferences and motivations in this moment, you would be doing that instead.

So, now that you’re done reading, let me ask this:

What will you do next?

I would like to talk about the difference between fair and equal.

Fair:  Getting something of equal value to the effort expended, relative to everyone else.

Equal:  Getting the same reward as everyone else regardless of input.

Equal incentives are frequently used for team rewards – a group of people working toward a common goal, and everyone will receive the same reward if the team succeeds.  Equal rewards often seem unfair, since every person contributes individually to the effort – especially if the target is missed.  On the other hand, equal rewards do engender mutual accountability and collaboration, if the culture allows.

Fair incentives can be tricky, because not everyone associates the same value with the same reward.  Besides money, rewards for individual performance might be promotions, time off, more responsibility, parking spaces and other perks.  Not only is perceived value different, but the criteria for determining who gets what is often subjective, or at least apples and oranges.  At the same time, people like being recognized for their own contributions.

When possible, it’s best to use intrinsic motivation and exclude incentive programs altogether.  The recent McKinsey article, “The Irrational Side of Change Management,” lists five different forms of motivation, in terms of impact of the change initiative:

• Impact on Society
• Impact on the Customer
• Impact on the Company
• Impact on the Team
• Impact on Me

If the company and your change initiative can tap into each of these sources of motivation, then each person will select which one is most fulfilling to them.  Now that would be fair and equal!

Whether you are just getting started or your quest for change is well underway, if you need the leadership of your organization to show more support for your initiative through words and actions, this workbook is for you.

Newsletter subscribers have already received the accompanying article entitled “Beyond Buy-in:  Raise Leadership Support for Your Change Initiative,” which features five steps to gaining leadership support.  The same exclusive article is also free for new subscribers.  Sign up to read a preview of the Beyond Buy-in methodology.

The survey was developed based on a model for increasing employee involvement*, which includes four elements:

1. Power: For employees to become involved, they need to have the power to do so.  In the case of submitting ideas, employees need to feel that their ideas will be considered, will be valued, and will be implemented.
2. Information: Employees need timely access to relevant information in order to know best how to focus their creative efforts.
3. Knowledge/Skills: Employees can only contribute to the level of their knowledge and skills.
4. Rewards: In order to be motivated to contribute, employees need incentives, either internal or external.

The results of the survey helped design an improved suggestion box program, which increased the number of ideas suggested by a factor of nine.  See the post “Case Study: A Roundabout Path to Increasing Employee Suggestions.”

• Download the survey
• Download the analysis key

Given the chance to redesign the survey, I would have mixed up the categories more so they would not be grouped together.  Also, it would have been a good practice to make more questions inverted, to reduce bias in the questionnaire.  Overall, the survey provided us with good information from which we were able to take action and make a measurable improvement.

* Source:  Cummings and Worley, Essentials of Organization Development and Change, South-Western College Publishing, 2001, pg 172-173.

1. Leadership buy-in - how do we get the leadership team, especially the CEO, to take on ownership of the changes?
2. Communication – how do we move beyond the prescribed speeches by leadership and get everyday managers and employees talking about this every day?
3. Motivation – what are the best incentives to use to motivate people to change?
4. Overcoming skepticism – how do we make people understand this is not “flavor of the month?”
5. Project justification – how can we quantify intangibles so we can justify key change projects?
6. Subjugating the urgent – how do we keep transformation from taking a back seat to firefighting?
7. Longevity - once we build momentum and change starts to happen, how do we ensure it survives turnover in key positions (especially the chief executive)?

What are other challenges you face?

When Catucci took over as CEO of Unitel, re-branded as AT&T Canada LDS, the company was losing one million dollars per day. Employee morale was low, its products were inferior to competitors, and top managers had all jumped ship. Catucci was the fifth CEO in five years to take on the challenge of bringing the second-largest telecommunications provider in Canada sustainable, profitable growth.

Three Key Drivers of Change
According to Catucci, while there were a number of activities involved in changing the organization, there were three key drivers of success: the strategy management system, strategy councils, and shared compensation.

The strategy management system, with the Balanced Scorecard as the foundation, was a set of increasingly specific instruments to drive action from the vision to the budget. The trilogy of vision, mission and values defined where the organization was going, what its purpose was, and what was important. The strategy defined at a high level what the company was going to do in order to provide sustained profitable growth, and achieve the vision. The business plan further detailed the steps necessary to implement the strategy, and the budget filled its financial role, aligned through the strategy all the way back to the vision. The strategy management system communicated direction at varying levels of detail, all aligned to the primary goal of sustained profitable growth.

Catucci quickly realized that the traditional hierarchy and silos that he had successfully navigated over the course of 30 years was not useful in running the company. Instead, he came up with the second key driver, a plan for better management. Setting up four strategy councils, he eliminated all other leadership team meetings — and excuses. To drive growth, he set up the Business Development Council; for productivity, the Business Process Council; for people, the Professional Development council; and for linking it all together, the Balanced Scorecard Council. Attendance was mandatory, and meetings started and ended on time. Since all other meetings were discontinued, even individual meetings with Catucci, all business was taken care of together in one of the councils.

The third key driver, shared compensation for executives, ensured that everyone on the leadership team was on the same page. Instead of receiving a bonus based on individual performance, the team was given a bonus out of the same pot based on overall company performance.

Deliberate Leadership
Beyond the three key drivers of the transformation, it is clear that there was more to the successful change effort than the mechanics of the key drivers. Effective leadership surely played a part. Within a short time of knowing Bill Catucci, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that he is a natural born leader. Articulate, intelligent and funny, he’s the picture of the charismatic leader. When accused of this, Catucci is quick to reply, “If I’m a natural born leader, then that was an awful waste of training.”

Catucci’s leadership training started at the age of 17, as part of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Learning leadership strategies from military science continued as an Infantry Platoon Leader in Korea. As he held jobs in operations and legal at AT&T in the U.S., he continually read books, attended leadership programs, and learned about successful leaders. Catucci says, “I had so many years of leadership training that if I didn’t become a leader, something was wrong with me.” Perhaps a more apt characterization would be that Bill Catucci became a leader ultimately because he wanted to be one.

Still, he had a few things to learn upon taking over the CEO role. At the top of the list was his personal time management. “It’s easy to think you’re spending time on important things when you’re not,” he warns. Catucci made the effort to be disciplined in his level of involvement in the operation. He struck a conscious balance between knowing what was going on without micro-managing.

As someone who believes that leadership is learned and not inherent, Bill Catucci has advice for how to become a transformational leader. The key to making organizational change happen, according to him, is being deliberate. “If it’s serious enough, make it serious,” he advises. For example, when he started the leadership councils, he made a point of being on time and staying until the end, not always an easy task for a busy CEO. While some members were tardy for the first couple of meetings, they quickly caught on that if he was there on time, they’d better be on time too.

Another important role for a leader is constant communication. “I considered myself to be the CEO: Chief Education Officer,” Catucci asserts. “You can’t assume people know everything.” It’s important for everyone to know the basics and to get people on the same page. The strategy management system helped — on one page, Catucci could explain an individual’s role in achieving the corporate goals.

The Results
In his three-year tenure as CEO, Bill Catucci led what has been considered one of the most successful turnarounds in Canadian business history. When AT&T Canada LDS was sold in 1999, its market value was four times what it had been in 1995 when Catucci took over the reins. Even more telling: employee morale moved from well below average to being in the Top 10% of North American companies according to Hay Associates.

Remarkably, Catucci moved on to prove that the results are repeatable. After leaving AT&T Canada LDS, he headed up global operations at Equifax and implemented the same three key drivers. From 2000 to 2002, shareholder value increased by $3.3 billion and Equifax had nine consecutive quarters of share price growth.

For Catucci, long-lasting satisfaction is from doing an important job and doing it well, and in sharing the success with the people who contributed to it. Clearly, as members of the AT&T Canada LDS class of 1999 demonstrate in their annual celebration, the success of the transformation fulfilled those criteria.

Additional Reading
“Bringing a Company Back to Life,” At Work, May/June 1999.
“AT&T Canada: A New Strategic Governance System Quadruples Market Value,” Balanced Scorecard Report, v2 #1.
“10 Lessons for Implementing the Balanced Scorecard,” Balanced Scorecard Report, v5 #1.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:

• Case Study:  A Fizzled Balanced Scorecard Implementation
• Eight Fundamental Ingredients for a Successful Change Initiative
• How to Get Beyond Leadership Buy-in