Hi! I'm Ken Bettenhausen, professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver. In the module one lesson titled change models, we learned how to analyze the organizational context to identify driving and resisting forces you need to consider when proposing a change. In this module, we'll look more closely at the things you'll need to consider when proposing a change. If you're joining us now you'll want to watch the lesson titled, change initiatives driving and resisting forces, in course one, where CU Denver's Managing for Sustainability Advisory Council member, Brenna St. Onge, described two changes she proposed and implemented. Those of you who completed course one, this course builds on what you learned and moves us closer to writing a proposal for sustainable change that you can implement successfully. And that's the goal of our specialization. In this course, we'll address how the resources needed to implement the change, whether you can go it alone or need support of someone elsewhere in the organization, affect how you go about proposing a change. We'll practice looking beyond the immediate things we want to do, in order to consider what others hear when we talk about change. And how we can better frame our change in terms, and words, and language that they can support. We'll look at the process choices you need to consider and make when selling your idea for change. And, finally, we'll examine how to anticipate and overcome resistance to your proposed change. By the end of this course, you will feel confident that you can anticipate and address other's opposition to your proposed change so it won't flounder on someone else's desk. Let's start by looking at the scope of the change you were proposing. During the first course, John really focused on keeping things simple, looking at the low hanging fruit. Here's another factor to consider, when it comes to the scope and scale of the change you want to propose, there are three distinct situations you can find yourself in. And each requires a different approach to implementing change. First, you can propose a change that you can implement by yourself with resources you personally control and have the authority to use. Or you can propose a change that complements or furthers existing company goals, such as an ongoing change effort initiated by someone higher than you in the organizational hierarchy or in another area of the organization. For example, if the organization has sustainability goals, you can help implement them where you work. And the third situation, is when the change you'd like to make extends beyond your immediate authority or it requires resources that aren't readily available. You can't make it fit within the current sustainability goal and so it needs to be presented to and sanctioned by someone with greater authority. You need to get someone who can allocate the resources needed to implement your idea to support it. Now, let's start with the simplest, the case where you can make the change yourself with the resources you currently control. Perhaps, you'd like to set up a recycling station in your office or make sure lights and PCs are turned off when not in use. These things seem so small and simple. Can I just do it myself? Do they really warrant going through a whole formal proposal writing and approval process? Well, that depends. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound. If you make a change in your immediate workplace and no one notices it, does it make a difference? Perhaps the better question is, what potential greater impact could it have? What did you forgo by doing it yourself? If you just do it, you see the immediate impact of your efforts but that's it. If you get approval, it might be the beginning of something beautiful. Let me share a personal story. Long ago, 1986, when I was fresh out of graduate school and I'm a brand new assistant professor, every professor in the management department at Texas A&M University received a copy of The Wall Street Journal. Two big bundles, 25 copies arrived every day. There was no recycling program at the university and no curbside pickup at my home. But college station did have a place where you could drop off newspapers and glass and where there is a machine that actually weighed your aluminum cans and spit out cash. I had two pre-schoolers who really enjoyed crushing the cans, feeding them into the window of the machine, and reaching in to receive the quarters and dimes that fell out. I saved and recycled my newspapers, glass, and cans at home and soon I had a stack of Wall Street Journal in the corner of my office probably three or four feet high. Once or twice a month, I'd bundle them up and dropped them off at the recycling center, on the way home. Well, after a while, I decided as long as I was recycling my old newspapers, why not collect other professors' papers as well. So, I cleared a space beneath our mailboxes, I put a cardboard box on the floor and, with a handwritten sign, I encouraged others to recycle their papers as well. Every day or two, I bundled up the papers the faculty returned and stacked the bundles beside the collection box. Every week or two, I'd load the bundles into my car. I was feeling pretty good about the things especially as the idea caught on and now I was recycling over two thirds of the papers that we receive every day. I didn't hear anyone complaining. I got more than a few slaps in the back from my initiative and then, two or three months later, I got a call from the department chair. He told me he didn't want his mail room turning into a recycling center. That really took me by surprise and I learned a valuable lesson. Just because I was doing all the work and I consider the initiative a success didn't mean that everyone shared my opinion about the initiative's costs, benefits, and success. It never occurred to me to discuss my idea with the department chair and get his permission to do something that I thought was a win-win proposition without any downside. But what I saw as a harmless, even virtuous, if I may say, a service I provided at no cost to the department, the department chair saw it as unsightly and as a nuisance. Or perhaps the problem was that it wasn't his idea. He agreed to let me continue to haul the department newspapers to the city recycling center as long as I didn't let them pile up in the mail room. Well, the rest of the story, two years later, the student government with the university president's approval, set a university-wide recycling program. And my department chair? The man who so reluctantly agreed to let me haul away the papers was the first to get on bandwagon? He openly announced his support of the student initiative but the collection bin is in a prominent spot right outside his office and he very actively encourage all faculty to get with the program. That taught me a second important lesson. Who sponsors the initiative can make a big difference in the way it's received. I, a newly hired assistant professor operating on my own, had little status. You might even say I had negative authority in this situation, as my department chair saw that what I did on my own as undermining his authority. And I learned, over time, that status and formal authority were very important to him. When the same activity was endorsed by the dean and the president, my favor-currying bureaucrat of a boss was quick to fall into line and be on the right side of the initiative. Remember what John said in one of the lessons in our first module about sharing your ideas with your boss? Even when you have the resources, that is, when you're investing your own initiative, effort, labor, enthusiasm, it's a good politics to inform your boss and gain his or her approval. When you don't require, and so aren't asking for additional resources, it's usually an easy sell. But you can't take your boss's endorsement for granted. You need to put yourself in your boss's shoes. What are her priorities? Her concerns, her personal preferences, her quirks? How can you frame your initiative so that it aligns with your boss's priorities and supports the organization's business model. Secondly, recognize that you don't operate in a vacuum. The change you make will have impact on other areas of the organization. And sometimes you want it to. If your boss supports your initiatives, she can be your ally. She may know of additional organizational initiatives you aren't privy to. And, if she knows of your interest in making the organization more sustainable, when she hears of organizational initiatives and sustainability goals, she'll think of you and may even send you to represent your workplace. At the very least, your boss will see that you take your job seriously and are looking for opportunities to make the company better. Finally, don't sell yourself short. If the change is worth your time and energy, might it not make sense to leverage your experience by extending the initiative beyond your immediate workplace? With some strategic thinking and planning, a change you make in your immediate workplace, can be framed as a test case for implementing a change more broadly. The change you champion in your immediate workplace, could start the ball rolling and can be the impetus for a meaningful and much more complex organization-wide change. Brenna's first change out of college was to introduce recycling at her workplace. She could have just done it herself but she needed resources to add bags for recycling to the housekeeper's carts and she needed institutional support to avoid push back from the housekeeping staff that didn't want the extra work involved in the project. She was a young whippersnapper fresh out of college, housekeeping staff had years more tenure, and she needed their support to implement the change. They may have felt free to rebel against or just ignore an idea advanced by a brand new supervisor. While they may still resent the extra work involved, by getting formal approval, Brenna raise the stakes. Housekeepers wouldn't be ignoring and, thus undermining, Brenna's authority as she had the backing of management. A quick aside here, note that Brenna didn't rest on her formal authority alone. She listened to her housekeeping staff and presented the change in terms that resonated with them. Reducing the amount of trash going into the landfill help preserve Hawaii's natural resources and beauty for their children and their children's children, values that their housekeeping staff shared. In the next lesson, we'll examine those more complex situations, larger initiatives that extend beyond your workplace and/or require formal review, approval, and the allocation of additional resources. And, initiatives that support organization-wide programs that originate outside your immediate workplace. Stay tuned.
