INsight/ Helping People Change
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Photo by MICHAEL JOINER ON UNSPLASH.
Ubud, 12 July 2023 — What if you could help people change into their best?
Story
It happened in 1999. During an exercise to help me review my life purpose, I discovered that it was to bring out the best in other people. Since then, somewhat to my surprise, my purpose has remained the same. What has changed, however, is my growing knowledge, expertise, and experience of how to go about helping others, including a much better insight into myself. Becoming a leadership coach has greatly accelerated that process.
As long as we are ready to unlearn and learn afresh, the learning journey never stops. With my personal strengths in curiosity, perspectives, and a love of learning, never a week goes by without the excitement of further learning, like a lotus flower opening ever wider. Discovering new resources that are informed by research gets me especially excited. And that’s what happened when I started reading Helping People Change.
Written by researchers Richard Boyatzis, Ellen Van Oosten, and Melvin Smith and published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2019, the book introduces an evidence-based process for helping people with lifelong learning and growth. Moreover, the authors explain that it can be used by coaches, managers, doctors, teachers, clerics, parents, and people in other helping roles. I bet that you can find yourself in that lineup. So what makes people change and what stops them?
Challenge
Let’s start with what stops people from changing. Annie McKee, Boyatzis’ co-author of Resonant Leadership, put it succinctly: “People only change when they want to. It has to be tied to something bigger than their job. They want to reach for a future that’s meaningful, powerful, and positive to them.” In organizations, that means that changes need to be tied to something that people want. Asking them to comply with directions that come from others rarely works on a sustained basis.
Boyatzis refers to a sobering statistic that you could take 70 to 80% of managers out of their jobs and their organizations would function more smoothly. Telling people to change is rarely an effective strategy, he found, even in traditional command-and-control organizations. Referring to 35 years of research into militaries in the US and around the world, he found that outstanding military leaders don't use command and control. What they use is, as he put it, ask and inspire.
In Helping People Change, therefore, Boyatzis and his co-authors contrast two approaches, which they call coaching for compliance and coaching with compassion. (In my usage, I call these transactional coaching and transformational coaching.) Coaching for compliance directs people to make changes that are expected by others. The incentive is therefore extrinsic. Coaching for compassion, on the other hand, helps people discover their own intrinsic motivation for change. When it comes to the effectiveness and sustainability of change and the well-being of the people concerned, the research findings clearly come out in favor of the latter approach.
Question
My question for you this week is how you help people change. If you would like to find better ways of bringing positive change to your colleagues and organization, Helping People Change is a fantastic resource. That said, it’s not an easy read in my experience. If you have a visual learning style, you might like the course Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence on the Coursera platform, taught by Boyatzis and his colleagues.
What is most important is that we all become better change-makers in the businesses, organizations, and communities where we serve. The world is calling out for more and better leaders at all levels. The research shows that most organizations are still stuck in approaches that are not effective and don’t lead to higher engagement and well-being for all concerned. Armed with a better understanding of what makes people want to change, we can become effective change-makers.
If you would like to see positive changes happen in your organization—and bring out the best in yourself—why not go on a learning journey to discover the set of ingredients that have been proven by research to be successful? Helping People Change is an excellent start. You can also invest in working with a leadership coach who is passionate to help you bring out the best in yourself, building on your unique combination of personal strengths and the other elements shown by Boyatzis’ research to be effective. This is especially important for executives and managers who are expected to drive change at scale across their organization. That ability doesn’t grow by itself.
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