From "No" to "How?": Get Buy-in and Lead Change

By Adam B Mullett and Travis Weerts

From "No" to "How?": Get Buy-in and Lead Change is a how-to guide for professionals who want to learn to create positive change from where they are in any organisation. If you want to learn to lead change, this book shows you how you can improve the way things are and create lasting value in a way that will

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mullett Man Publishing
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645090413

Adam B Mullett

Adam Mullett lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. He has worked in journalism, marketing and agile software development.

Book preview

FromNoToHow-FrontCover.jpgTitlePage

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Ladder

Introduction

Why I Care So Much About Your Value Proposition

Chapter 1 · The Nature of Positive Change

Chapter 2 · The End in Mind: Goals and Guardrails

Chapter 3 · Curiosity Counts

Chapter 4 · Getting People Excited About Your Ideas

Chapter 5 · Problem Identification

Chapter 6 · Helping Others See It

Chapter 7 · Making It Scalable

Chapter 8 · Where to Start

Chapter 9 · Getting Started

Chapter 10 · Building Momentum

Chapter 11 · Educate; Don’t Berate

Chapter 12 · Working With, Not Against, Others

Chapter 13 · Getting Buy-In

Chapter 14 · Breeding Bottom-Up Innovation

Chapter 15 · Making a Sustainable Impact

Chapter 16 · Getting the Team to Build It Together

Chapter 17 · Kickstarting Co-Creation

Chapter 18 · Meet the Right People Where They Are At

Chapter 19 · Failure: An Inevitable Pastime of the Change Maker

Chapter 20 · Spending Time on the Right Things

Chapter 21 · When They Start Asking How?

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright © 2021 Adam Mullett

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN 978-0-6450904-1-3

Also available as a paperback: 978-0-6450904-0-6

First edition published March 2021. Mullett Man Publishing. Perth, Western Australia.

NationalLibraryOfAustralia

Illustrations by Travis Weerts.

Cover design by C’est Beau Designs.

Typeset in PT Serif designed by ParaType and Public Sans designed by United States Web Design System, both available under the SIL Open Font License. Specialty headers set in Chokle by Mr. Typeman.

For all the people who ever tried to teach me something, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Your generosity brought me here.

The Ladder

Work can be like the popular modern fable with the monkeys and the ladder. It’s a tale about how culture persists and spreads in an organisation.

There is a piece of food at the top of a ladder and five monkeys in the room. When one tries to climb the ladder to get the food, all the monkeys are sprayed with cold water as a deterrent. Not wanting to get sprayed, the monkeys self-regulate by dragging each other off the ladder if one attempts to go for the food. The monkeys soon learn the rule and hold each other to account. No-one goes up the ladder.

The monkeys are changed out one by one and each new monkey tries to climb the ladder. The others teach it the rule by dragging it back down. It has no idea about the cold shower it was just saved from. Eventually, all of the original monkeys who had experienced the shower have gone, but the unexplained behaviour of not climbing the ladder persists, having been taught to each new monkey as they arrived.

The fable serves as a powerful reminder of how cultural norms form.

When you start a new job, you are often reminded that you are viewing everything with fresh eyes. Being used to the way you did things at your last company, there will be jarring differences as you start to adapt to a new way of working.

Sometimes these differences can be simple things like how you greet one another and how people celebrate birthdays, but there are also more fundamental work issues like how meetings are run and how information is stored and shared.

If you’re used to work being done in a certain way, having it done differently makes the contrast obvious and you’ll find yourself seeing some potential changes that would help.

Being new to the job though, and potentially quite early in your career, you might not be confident to identify the right things to challenge. Some things are the way they are for very good reasons, while other times groupthink has taken over completely and no-one sees the issues anymore.

Like a chair left in the middle of a hallway, staff who have worked around an issue for a long time no longer notice it. Only new eyes see the chair for what it is: misplaced and easily fixed.

In the workforce, change is rapid. The original reasons something existed may have changed, particularly if you’re dealing with subjects related to technology. It is always worth reviewing the way you do things and looking for small, positive improvements you could make for a lasting benefit.

That’s what this book is about. It is written for people who care enough to try to make things better in their organisation. To make the experience of working there more pleasurable; to make customer service as good as it could be; to make the work as efficient as possible; to make the company sustainable and profitable in the long term.

It isn’t that people don’t want to make positive changes, but it isn’t always easy or obvious how it should be done.

Attempting to make changes or ask difficult questions about how things are done might be a tricky conversation to have with colleagues. On the other hand, they might have just been waiting for someone just like you to come along and finally fix things.

This book is written to help you be a change leader and find better ways of doing things. It is unlikely that in your university degree they taught you to identify problems, understand them and their causes deeply, come up with potential improvement initiatives, implement them and perform the change management.

I have learned the lessons I share in this book through experience, through being mentored by people who cared about my development (and their company’s performance), and through reading the words of others who have pondered this question before me.

I hope this book is easy to understand and is practical enough for you to give it a try where you are. If it is, then I have made another positive change in the world.

Go on; climb that ladder.

- Adam Mullett, March 2021

Introduction

I sat there in the small glass-walled meeting room, staring back at him. Colleagues walked past, glancing into the room from the hallway. Years later, they would invent the word triggered to describe how I was feeling. My boss seemed like he really wasn’t getting it and I couldn’t understand why.

It’s a blog! It means we put helpful information on our website and people looking for our expertise will find us as a result, I said, frustrated that he wasn’t understanding why we should do a bit of simple content marketing.

Yes, but what is the purpose of the blog for us? he asked, completely ignoring the exasperation evident in my voice and body language.

The conversation had been going round and round and I wasn’t able to get a breakthrough. I asked myself whether I was speaking another language or if he was having me on. It seemed so simple.

My other senior colleague, who had originally come into the room to support me in explaining the idea, joined in questioning the reason we should do the content marketing on the website and I suddenly felt cornered. I said, forget about it, or something to that effect, and said I would leave the idea.

They didn’t seem pleased that I had given up like that on this proposal, but at that point I felt humiliated and didn’t care too much what they thought.

I didn’t bring it up again for a while because I thought that if there was no-one who appreciated the idea, then it would be an unrealised opportunity. It’s their company! So be it! I thought.

What I didn’t realise in my moment of frustration was that both my boss and my senior colleague were trying to teach me an important lesson about problem identification and how to communicate to get buy-in.

It came by stealth, but it was my first memorable lesson in how to influence senior stakeholders at work.

The hard way

I have always had a desire to make things better around me, but I wasn’t always skilled at making change happen. When you’re young, everything seems simple and in some cases that’s true.

In the world of business, whether that is in a small business, a medium-sized company or a corporation, there will always be opportunities for you to make improvements. You will need to understand the problems of the people around you and get their buy-in to help you improve things if you want them to change. It isn’t just a matter of doing stuff and hoping for the best, though this sort of naive approach can be a great way to learn. In fact, it is how I learned everything I share in this book: by doing things the hard way, reading up a little from experts before me and then doing a bit more hard learning.

The good thing about doing things the hard way — also known as making mistakes — is that the lessons get imprinted in your brain. What I write about in this book is a starter kit for making better mistakes — ones that will help you learn the right skills quickly. For people who see themselves with the potential to lead change in their organisation, whether that is a business or a charity you help out at or a social group, I try to share some of the knowledge I have gained in my career to date.

This book is a how-to guide for young professionals who want to learn to lead positive change. It calls out some of the biggest topics you will need to know about to move up in your career:

What change and innovation mean

How to identify problems

How to generate ideas

How to get buy-in from others

How to co-create successful initiatives with others

How to build momentum

How to choose the right goals

Where to focus your effort

How to deal with failure

How to make a sustainable impact

Breakthrough

Time passed, and after working out that the conversation in that glass-walled meeting room was actually not about the blog but about the way I communicated my idea, I went back to my senior colleague to ask him for help on how to position it.

He encouraged me to just do the work, prove it worked in a small-scale experiment and then present the findings back to my boss. By the time I did that, I would have some evidence about how it would help the business and I would learn what he really wanted to hear from me about strategic alignment and business value.

It was a memorable (and slightly embarrassing) lesson and ultimately I am grateful for the knowledge I gained through it. In that organisation I had great mentoring and formal training to help me on the pathway that brings me to this moment where you’re reading these words.

While I did receive good support, I would have never received the extra mentoring and training had I not had a crack and given it a go. I had to be bold enough to try and to not give up on wanting to make a difference.

Since then I have had many attempts at making things better at work and in other aspects of my life, and in many cases I have made a sustainable difference for the better.

I have made improvements to the way teams work together and communicate. I have worked on information processes to improve efficiency. I have created new products for clients who paid good money for them because they saw the value.

Acting on these opportunities took a little bit of confidence, a little curiosity, a bit of smarts, a little dabbling in design, a little bit of learning technology, and some time. It was all worth it because not only did I get the goods out at the end and produce additional value for the places I worked, I also learned a lot: a lot about people, about business and about making things happen.

Make better mistakes

It would be false to say I got it right every time, because more often than not I’ve learned through my mistakes. If you’re trying to solve a problem that others haven’t cracked, you can be sure it isn’t always easy.

The failures taught me things that took my problem-solving skills and ability to influence to the next level. Going through that learning has allowed me to mentor others and pass on the knowledge.

This book is my opportunity to pass on my learning to you in your quest to lead positive change. I hope the information in this book will be a map you can keep in your back pocket along the way, showing you which way to go as you’re setting out, but also be there as a reference