Whether it’s good or bad, stopping the rhythm of the way your organisation habitually works isn’t easy.
Now if everything is perfect inside your organisation, and the rhythm of your business today is getting the results you want, then whatever you do, don’t touch it.
Don’t introduce new tech tools “to help”. Don’t change the people. Don’t decide this is a good time for an organisation-wide restructuring process.
Stand back and leave it alone. Any changes made at that point are only likely to make everything worse.
As a leader, that takes discipline and self-control. You need to be humble about your role in all this, rather than feel you have to throw everything up in the air every now and again just to show everyone who’s the boss around here.
Let me say two things about that, though.
Firstly, almost no business in the world is running perfectly.
Perfection doesn’t mean all the KPIs are green on your monthly reporting dashboard. All your KPIs can be gamed…and often are. Every business I’ve seen in real difficulty had near-perfect KPI dashboards just before the bank called their loans in. As a result, it’s been a long time since I was impressed by an all-green KPI dashboard.
Rather, this is about the rhythm in your business being perfect. Where everything happens just as it should, perfection comes naturally, seemingly without effort, and your people routinely go above and beyond for your customers. It’s like watching anyone who’s a true master at their craft – they make things most of us wouldn’t have a hope in hell of achieving look easy.
If that’s what’s happening in your business, the bottom line will largely look after itself. And the last thing you should do is change anything while you’re in that groove.
More likely, statistically speaking, that’s not how your business is running. So it’s not unknown for business leaders to want to change things to get different results to the ones they are getting now.
The difficulty, however logical and sensible the ideas you want to implement might be, is that the process of change will be hard, expensive, and is unlikely to stick.
That’s because the beat inside your organisation is going to keep you travelling down much the same track you’ve been travelling down for months or years beforehand. It’s hard to stop.
If your instructions up to that point have been that customers are to be treated as if they were trying to steal from your business, your staff will have developed a way of making customers feel on edge all the time and probably creep them out by following them around everywhere while they’re on your premises.
But one day you read an article in a business magazine and you decide being more customer-centric is the way to go. So you send an all-staff email to tell everyone to be nicer to your customers. Job done, right?
Well – and I suspect you’re ahead of me here – almost certainly not.
Once someone has been ingrained with the belief that customers are to be regarded as potential criminals, and people become used to being rewarded for thwarting potential thefts, I can pretty much guarantee that not a single member of your staff will treat your customers any differently.
Their “beat” is to treat customers like criminals. Stopping that beat is hard.
Bottom line benefits
Now, I strongly believe that there is almost no cheaper, better, more lasting way to build your bottom line than by becoming excellent at customer service.
So let’s imagine someone comes to that point of view too, and decides to change the “customers are criminals” ethos that has prevailed in their business up till now. What’s likely to happen?
Well, at first, probably nothing, due to the ingrained behaviours highlighted above.
Then, in most organisations, there are all sorts of memos written, instructions issued, meetings with HR, escalating rhetoric from the board, firing of a few of the worst offenders, and all manner of internal comms. All at great expense.
After a round of blood-letting, if you’re lucky, the best you can probably hope for is an anaemic level superficial compliance to whatever people are being told to do…mostly carried out with a sceptically raised eyebrow or a knowing look between co-workers who, inside, haven’t changed a bit.
After all, they were probably hired because their “customers are criminals” outlook on life came relatively naturally to them.
In even a half-reasonable job market, all the people who thought the opposite, but might have breezed into a customer-hating business by accident, will find another job as soon as decently possible and move on.
So the people left mostly have a natural “customers are criminals” mindset.
This, by the way, is why some astonishing number of corporate change programmes don’t work. I think KPMG, or one of the other big consulting firms, did some research a while back to the effect that over 70% of change programmes didn’t achieve their objectives.
And that’s because businesses spend $millions to implement new systems, build an AI-enabled front-end chatbot, re-align the organisational structure to synergise efficiencies…or whatever corporate-speak guff business magazines are writing about at the moment.
This is not a mystery. What happens most of the time one of those organisation-wide change programmes gets rolled out is a demonstration that you can’t stop the beat.
Or, at least, not quickly, easily, or through the mechanism of an all-staff email.
It’s not difficult for a business to find itself spending £10 to try to force change into a system and receiving only £1 of benefit back again…if, indeed, there’s any benefit at all. I’ve seen it many times, albeit the KPI dashboard usually magically becomes all-green shortly after, allowing whoever made the decision and whoever implemented it to claim victory by gaming the metrics.
Every time a business employs a manager to “deliver X” or “change the culture in the Y department”, it’s probably adding a lot of overhead (the £10) to barely move the needle on the outcomes (the £1). At least that’s what happens if you track your costs properly, which an alarming number of organisations don’t.
Can you stop the beat?
You know the old saying about every action causing an equal and opposite reaction?
That’s not just true in physics class. It’s true in every aspect of business.
If you take action and tell people they’re wrong to treat customers are criminals, after years of telling them to do exactly that, you’ll very quickly find that the equal and opposite reaction either involves your people ignoring you or spending a lot of time telling you that you’re wrong.
They’ll dredge up that time five years ago when they really did apprehend a criminal and use that as the seemingly-logical justification for refusing to change their views that customers are criminals.
Paradoxically, the harder you go in to make a change, the less likely it is to happen. That’s not just my point of view – it’s physics…
So what can you do?
Well, I’d argue that while you can’t stop the beat, you can change the beat.
And I’d also argue that changing the beat is better for your bottom line than trying to stop the beat.
That’s because 1p of effort gets you £1 of bottom line results, rather than £10 of effort getting you £1 of bottom line results in a more conventional top-down change management process.
Here’s how it works…
A DJ saved my life
Imagine you’re a DJ in a club. You’re getting towards the end of one song and you’re getting ready to play the next song.
Everyone is dancing and having a good time, so you don’t want to kill the mood.
But the song you’re playing now is more up-tempo than the next track up.
If you abruptly switch off Track 1, people will leave the dancefloor, nip to the loo, or get themselves another drink.
That’s bad news if you’re a DJ, because you want people to be dancing, not buying drinks or sitting down to chat with their mates.
This is a bit like a traditional corporate change programme. The shock of the switch kills most of the benefits which, in theory, were the reason for making the change in the first place.
So, what do DJs do?
Well, firstly, they start from where people are (on the beat of Track 1), not where they would like them to get to (on the beat of Track 2).
Let’s imagine Track 1 is “YMCA” by the Village People. And don’t pretend you don’t know that track – it might not be cool, but I’m assured by a DJ pal of mine that it’s a guaranteed floor filler. A couple of bars of the intro, and everyone is on the dance floor, ready to do all the moves.
And let’s imagine Track 2 is “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees – a disco classic, and also an infectious tune that has everyone dancing.
Two good choices for a DJ who wants to keep the dance floor busy, you might think.
There’s just one problem.
“YMCA” runs at 127 beats per minute, while “Stayin’ Alive” runs at 104 beats per minute. Or in other words, Track 1 is about 25% faster than Track 2.
You’ll notice the DJ doesn’t just issue a memo to ask people to dance 25% slower. Nor do they just “flip the switch” and do what corporate change management people call “going Big Bang”. Neither of those are likely to work – either in a business or on the dancefloor.
Typically (although there are other techniques) the DJ will gradually slow down Track 1 until it matches the beats per minute of Track 2. Then they will fade out Track 1 and let Track 2 run at its designated 104 beats a minute.
When done skilfully, most of the people on the dancefloor will barely notice, and they’ll transition with almost no fuss and almost no leakage from Track 1 to Track 2. Everyone will stay on the dancefloor and they’ll still be dancing, albeit a bit more slowly than they were before.
Net result: A 25% change has been accomplished, and most people didn’t even notice. There was no push-back. No arguing. No need to get HR involved. The transition took place smoothly and now people have changed their behaviour at a cost of pretty much zero, with just a little bit of thought and a tiny bit of effort.
I don’t need another hero
You might notice a couple of things about this approach.
Firstly that it is a low-cost, high-impact approach – which is always the best for your bottom line.
And secondly that there is no hero in this story. There’s nobody on a white steed calling on people to change and follow them to the Promised Land.
People are changing because they want to change. That’s the bit corporate change management types find hard to deal with, because it doesn’t give them the space to be the hero.
This has always puzzled me. Not because I’m an ego-free zone – none of us are. But because, given a choice between a more effective way of achieving and end-goal and a less effective way of achieving the same goal, I’m surprised how many people insist on taking the less effective path.
And it’s not even like the more effective path is harder. If anything, it’s easier. Provided you don’t make this all about your own ego.
You just need to understand where people are now. Not necessarily to agree with their perspective, but to understand it and to sit with them in their perspective that the world moves at 127 beats per minute.
Only after you’re, metaphorically, dancing along with them at 127 beats a minute can you gently move them in the direction of dancing at 104 beats a minute, all the while ensuring they are still having a good time.
If you force your way onto the dancefloor trying to dance to “YMCA”, but at 104 beats a minute you’ll look like an uncoordinated fool.
And if you stand at the side of the dancefloor grooving away at 104 beats a minute and shout to everyone having fun while making all the dance moves to “YMCA” that they should come and join you because you think 104 beats a minute is the future for dancefloors, people will think you’re a lunatic.
Yet that’s pretty much how corporate change management programmes work.
A much faster way of getting to the objective of 104 beats per minute is to start at 127, where everyone else is, and for the DJ to gradually slow down the first track until “Stayin’ Alive” takes over on its own at the desired 104 beats per minute.
If you’re serious about making changes to improve your bottom line, think less like a heroic medieval figure on a white charger, waving your sword around your heat.
And think more like a DJ.
While stopping the beat is hard, expensive, and unlikely to achieve the end-goals you hoped at the outset, changing the beat to transition your people from one outcome to another is usually easy, inexpensive, and much more likely to bolster your bottom line.
PS: the title of this article was inspired by the wonderful song “You Can’t Stop The Beat”, written by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, from the movie and stage show “Hairspray”. If you fancy a boogie right now, you can find the song here.