https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6sMK06djfw

Leading Change with Confidence

Carie Weber:

Welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Weber, and today I'm flying solo. I’m going to give you some thoughts and some interesting considerations as you try, in your very best way possible, to lead change in your practice or in your organization. This is something that we at Jameson have helped practices do for over 30 years, and I'm finding myself teaching and working through this with doctors and leaders more and more this year. I believe a lot of great decisions and refocusing of vision and changes are being made and introduced into practices to help those practices and those doctors and business owners thrive and be healthier and happier in their professional lives, which is what is most important to us to help doctors and practice leaders do. 

So, let's talk today in this episode about change, about why people resist change, and about what we as leaders need to consider as we are leading change in our practices and in our businesses.

I believe we'll find that when we get hit with resistance, when those obstacles come our way, chances are we are at a point where we need to make decisions to pursue and persist, re-clarify, and continue to lead forward even when it's hard. So, how to lead change even when it gets difficult. Let's go. 

Why do People Resist Change?

So first, as we talk about this, we want to think about why do people resist change in the first place? Why is change so difficult in practices? Perhaps it hasn't been that difficult for you, but perhaps you have struggled with incorporating something new into your practice or helping your team adapt to change. And there are a lot of reasons why people resist change, or why practices and teams resist change, or perhaps even the leaders resist change. Your overall busyness and overwhelm can be a determining factor. When we're already very overwhelmed with the workload, the idea of incorporating one more new thing into our day-to-day can be a little stressful at best. And so you can find that people resist.

It also may be that they're not against the idea, but their speed of change is very slow because they're busy doing other things, they're distracted, or they're generally overwhelmed and can't handle the idea of taking on one more thing.

Lack of respect for the leader can be one of the reasons. Fear of personal loss or fear of failure. The tradition of how it's always been can really help put a roadblock in front of you in terms of that change. The requirement of additional commitment and narrow-mindedness is going to thwart the acceptance of new ideas. The rewards don't match the effort required. These are all just a version of some of the reasons why you may be met with resistance. The fear of the unknown. It won't happen when people are engaged in negative thinking. All of these are reasons why change is resisted. 

And then of course, there are the two primary reasons why people resist change. And that's, we've always done it this way, or we've never done it that way. I'm sure all of you can appreciate that that is a primary deterrent for change for many people. 

How do we Help our Team Overcome these Mental Roadblocks?

So how do we help our teams overcome those mental roadblocks and become more open-minded and willing to not only explore the idea of doing something in a new way or integrating something new into our workflow, but actually implementing that change to where it becomes a habit? I’d like to have everyone visualize a rubber band and visualize yourself as that rubber band. And when we need to use that rubber band, we're often stretching it to wrap around whatever we're using it for.

You're feeling stretched when you're asked to change. You're going outside of your comfort zone, and all it takes is one day falling apart or getting really busy, or one team member calling in sick, and we all have to roll up our sleeves and help fill that void and we snap back. Just like if you released a rubber band, you're going snap back to how you always did things because that's most comfortable to you. That's the habit. It doesn't even matter if it's inefficient, if it's ineffective, if it actually in the long run adds more stress to your day. It's how we're used to doing things, and therefore we snap back to that place of comfort. So that is a challenge that we have to overcome, is being comfortable with the stretch, being comfortable with stretching outside of our comfort zone, because it is in the stretch that growth and positive change occur, right?

So one of the things that we want to think about when we are facing change, or doing our best to lead change, is that many, many, many people that we're going to work with and try to lead in that positive direction have become very comfortable. They have become complacent. They''re comfortable with where they are. They are happy and comfortable in status quo. And so what we're battling against is complacency. 

Yes, there is apathy. As we know from studies, 60% of the workforce considers themselves “quiet quitting,” which is basically doing the minimum acceptable to get by, but really not contributing any more than that. So we're faced with that sense of apathy, the “quiet quitting” complacency. 

What Keeps us From Battling Complacency?

So how do we battle complacency? Well, first, let's understand where complacency is coming from. Often we can play a part as leaders in the level of complacency or even apathy that we are faced with with our teams. There may be little to no training or development provided for our teams, and that can cause that. The culture may be toxic or negative, and, wow, all you need is one toxic person and that is going to hinder any efforts that you put forth to help change your business or your practice in a positive way. 

There's no team alignment or an aligned pursuit of vision and goals for the practice. This is what I often ask doctors, practice owners, practice leaders. What is your vision for the practice? What are your expectations for each team member within that vision of the pursuit of your ideal practice? And do they know what those expectations are and are they on board for it? That alignment is so key and imperative for us to have a team that's motivated and engaged enough to want to implement something new successfully.

We may be in denial, because of stress or overwhelm. We may be in denial at just how mediocre our performance has become, or how status quo our performance has become because we're so overwhelmed in our minds. This is great, this is fine, everything's fine. Right? We may be avoiding issues that are causing this complacency to take root in the practice, and the pursuit of the ideal vision comes to a halt. What is it that we're avoiding? What performance issues are we avoiding? What critical conversations are we putting off or looking the other way because we want to avoid conflict? What decisions are we avoiding because they seem so hard or difficult or we can't imagine what the reality could be in the aftermath of that decision? Lack of performance feedback, no accountability. This goes hand in hand with the avoidance of issues.

If we aren't holding our team members and each other accountable for high performance, it’s going to be very difficult to expect them to take those steps forward in incorporating change for the better in the practice. Whether that's incorporating the new technology you've invested in, or it may be changing the way that you're scheduling, going out of network with a large insurance plan, whatever those changes may be. If we already are avoiding critical conversations, it's going to be really difficult to lead that change successfully. 

Low performance standards. If our standards of expectation of how our team and how we perform is already low, there's no reason for them to take those extra steps of effort because we have created a culture, an environment that nurtures low performance. I know that's a hard one to really hear, but if you're allowing low performance, and that has been the common acceptable approach to performance, why would I do more? Why would I take those steps forward to do more or do things differently or get uncomfortable when really, historically, it's been fine that I've done things this way? 

You see this a lot when leaders and doctors are really excited after coming back from a conference, or they went and took a course, they bought the equipment, whatever the case may be, and the team is literally sitting there just telling each other, if we just wait two more weeks, doctor's excitement will wear off and we'll get back to normal. That is the kiss of death for positive change. So we as leaders have to persist and we have to get really clear on our vision, the why behind the what, the why behind the change, and we have to lead that forward by example and holding people accountable to incorporating the change as effectively, as successfully, and as quickly as possible.

So those are the reasons why complacency starts to take root in our businesses and our practices. So the question is for you, of those areas, are there particular ones that hit home for you? What do we need to do to address the culture of performance so that change can be successfully implemented whenever it is needed as your practice or your business evolves. 

How Do You Gain Confidence?

A great book about building influence and being more positively influential and having the aura of confidence and competence is a book called Presence by Amy Cuddy. And in that book, she talks about how they ask people in a survey, they ask those participants of these particular people in business that were considered successful or influential, what were the characteristics about those people that made them influential to them?