How to Drive Meaningful Change - Establish credibility
Driving changes requires credibility. Building credibility requires not just you, but others.
Everyone can benefit from understanding and knowing how to build influence, implement change, and shape the organization and culture.
Much of it relies on learning and understanding the soft skill of navigating organizational politics.
This article is part of my series How to Drive Meaningful Change.
Establishing credibility
Establish your credibility
Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships
- Chris Fussel, “One Mission “
Credibility is the trust your organization has in you. Trust is a key factor in driving organizational changes.
Organizational change requires participation across many people across a company. Each one has their own perception of you. For them to buy in and take the time to support your idea, they need to trust you.
If nobody trusts you, they’ll disregard what you say even if you are 100% correct. Even if you have authority, your authority has limits. You can’t just keep snapping your fingers and getting things done without breaking your organization.
Building credibility requires competency, relationship-building, and time.
Do your job well and build a track record
There’s no better way to prove your point than with overwhelming competence. If you’re excellent at what you do to the point where nobody can argue with the method or results, driving forward change becomes a lot easier. You have a history of credibility to fall back on, and people are willing to give you more leeway even if they aren’t fully sold on your idea because you’ve pulled through in the past.
People look to those who can deliver. If you don’t have a track record of delivering, you won’t have the credibility to ask for change. Start with quick wins. Don’t tackle a massive challenge day one. Find a small pain point and solve it. Then the next, and the next, and the next. Build up a track record before you need it.
You can’t rely on authority forever
I see a lot of new executives and leaders fall into this trap when they enter a new organization. They come in and demand changes to everything, not understanding or appreciating the context of the organization. They rely on their authority.
Initially, it works. These demands are followed because of the authority granted by their title, and not through merit of the idea or trust in the leader. People are willing to give the benefit of doubt. The new leader has the excuse of “being new” when they make mistakes.
However, it wears off quickly. As time goes on, competency and proven success at the organization becomes more important. If a leader keeps making mistakes and relying on authority to push things through, they’ll start to receive pushback. They don’t have excuses to fall back on for their bad decisions. When failure does happen, it marks the leader as a poor decision-maker, and the trust is lost with the team.
With enough trust lost, resentment starts to occur. It gets harder to rely on authority to push things through. People might actually be rooting for things to go wrong or put minimal effort into preventing failure, further driving poorer outcomes.
The loss of trust makes it harder for that leader to affect future changes successfully.
The importance of credibility
At a former company, our CEO hired his longtime friend to become the new Head of Development, without a single interview from anyone on the team.
My new boss came in and surprisingly fired several people in his first day. With the tone set, he started making demands left and right about changes he was making to practice, process, and technology.
It became evident over the weeks that this individual knew nothing about how to do the job. Basic concepts needed to be explained to him, and his orders consistently contained things that had no bearing on the actual problem, context, or solution space. He brute-forced his decisions through with his authority, causing significant issues and problems, which he then quickly blamed on the team.
He wasn’t just in the wrong ballpark, he wasn’t even playing the same sport. I attempted to guide him, privately giving him feedback on his decisions and doing my best to ensure successful execution. We had many perfectly implemented things with terrible organizational consequences. As he made more and more uninformed, indefensible decisions, he quickly lost credibility with the entire development organization he was leading.
With all of the problems occurring as a result of his poor decision-making, executive pressure started mounting. What was previously a well-run organization ground to a halt, and leadership wanted to know what the problem was. My boss tried to shift the blame on to me and claimed that I was not competent.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. At the organization, I had a significant amount of credibility built up with many, many, many wins - my track record was undeniable to even the uninformed. When his negative credibility challenged my positive credibility, most of the development organization threatened to quit - myself included.
The CEO, finally realizing his mistake, quickly transitioned that individual to a different role with no authority and little interaction with the development organization, and placed me in charge.
Build relationships with others
There’s an idea of a relationship "bank account”.
When you support others and help them achieve their outcomes, you make deposits into your “bank account” with that other person. When you detract from their efforts, ask for favors, or block their successes, you make withdrawals. If you try to withdraw more than you’ve deposited, it doesn’t work.
It’s a bit of a transactional mental model, but it’s a useful one: find out how you can support people before expecting them to do stuff for you.
If you haven’t built up any credibility, you can’t ask for large favors. Help others first.
Be careful to not start viewing everything as a transaction! Nobody likes a slimy politician.
There’s a lot of ways to support people:
Do something for them
Give them information they need
Help them achieve their goal
Help them build their own credibility
Help them avoid a problem
Give them a useful insight
It first starts with talking to that person and figuring out what they need and what they want.
Help others without creating problems for them
Helping others is a great way to support them and build trust. However - it is a double-edged sword. If done incorrectly, trying to help people can get you viewed as an interloper or someone who is overstepping their bounds.
If you want to support someone - ask if they want help. Be sure your help is actually desired.
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