Episode 294: Fighting the Familiarity Paradigm to Lead Change
It's another fabulous day right here on this edition of Around with Randall. I want to talk about the concept of discomfort, which may not be what you thought you were going to tune in for today, but it's really about this kind of ideology or philosophy of the familiarity paradigm, the familiarity premium, the familiarity trap. Why leaders, why boards are chosen and then chosen to be possibly transformational leaders.
Or they want to be a transformational leader and then, whether they expect it or not, turn out to not do the transformational things. And all too often we find ourselves in these positions. Maybe it's to be the chief officer. Maybe it's the CEO. Maybe it's a board. Maybe you're a director and you're leading a team. The point is, is that when we think about this, we tend to want human nature, most of us, to be a difference maker.
We'll come to that at the very end that we want to see improvement. We want, and we think we might have a way of doing it. These things come up, these moments come up in different ways, and we'll talk a little bit more of that in detail. But it's possible, maybe even you've been in a position for a long time, and you're looking at the options before you and thinking, I'd like to see some change.
A board goes through this, particularly if there's been challenges and they want to make a not an evolutionary change, but a revolutionary change to move the organization forward. They might even have a search committee that tells a search firm, we need some fresh ideas and thinking perspective. They tell the employees, hey, you know, we're thinking about this. The employees might say, we're looking for change.
All of this is about change. And then it gets to the moment where we actually have to do it in. Leadership becomes quintessential organizations, people, departments, teams often want the results of transformation without the pain of experiencing the actual transformation. And that's what we're going to delve into today. And we'll finish with six things that you, whether you're bored or an individual leader, should think about to avoid this particular problem.
So as we tend to do, let's start at the top. Look, a little research that really has to do with philanthropy but is important to this conversation. And that's really around the research of why change doesn't happen. Many times, as we've discussed the board, a leader comes in and says, I want to make a change. But science tells us that in the broader assessment of wanting to change, social familiarity pulls us back.
It kind of reminds me of The Godfather Part three, Al Pacino in the kitchen just before he has his stroke. The more I try to get out, the more they pull me back in. And that's the constructs of social familiarity, this idea of the trap. I want change, but I'm not sure I want to deal with it more.
Interestingly, research also examines through two decades of CEO hiring, not just in the nonprofit space that boards do this all the time that they say. And there may be a moment where they've realized our current leader isn't delivering where we want to go, but we want to make a radical change. But then they end up hiring someone from inside and or who doesn't represent change.
I remember when I was on the board at the Ronald McDonald House here in Omaha, right at the beginning of my tenure, we made a CEO change, and because I opened my big fat mouth, I got the chair as a new board member, the committee to go through the process, lead the process of finding a new executive director.
And much like my philosophy of being on a board, I'm learning that I'm not that popular on boards because I'm just not afraid of change. I'll throw the gantlet down and and, you know, blow the place up. Not literally, but figuratively. I always like to say it. I'm not sure it's all that appropriate, but I'll use it here.
I sometimes like to throw the grenade in the middle of the room, stay in the room, watch it go off and see what happens. Who's going to move? Who sees the problem? Maybe a bad metaphor, but it's worked for me mentally in terms of figuring out how I am sometimes a catalyst for this transformation. Back to the Ronald McDonald House.
I led that effort and I was adamant based upon my limited experience. I'm not sure it was actually a great decision, but it worked out fairly well that I was pushing someone who was young, and who I saw in the interview process was a catalyst changer. There was never going to be satisfied, and that's who I kind of pushed the nominating committee and then the board to hire, and it worked out incredibly well.
The reason that we tend to avoid change is something that I realized very young in my life, or early on in my life, particularly through my father, is is that we know that uncertainty brings discomfort. And when there's change, there's discomfort, there's uncertainty, there's what are we going to do? Am I going to like this? And for some reason, dad always imparted wisdom on on me.
And I think my sisters as well, that it's in those moments where you see progress, where you see opportunity, the transformation increases this uncertainty, but also increases the options for growth, for development. And that familiarity actually reduces it. And so you have to lean in a little bit to this discomfort. And so boards will convince themselves we want change.
But then the discomfort is a leader comes in and says I want to change everything and or want to make adjustments. And maybe even the employees, the team, whomever say we want it until they've discomfort. They don't do that. There are three kind of moments that we can think of this actually happening. The first is kind of the external moment that they come in, the leaders hired from the outside.
We need fresh eyes. Maybe that's CEO being supported, but we're going to bring some from the outside. And then six months later, that leader hears if they are transformational or they tend to matriculate to kind of keeping familiar. Well, they hear things like, well, that's not the way we've always done it. That won't work here. You don't understand our culture now in philanthropy.
I'm hearing this a lot, particularly when we talk about the idea of of moving forward with major gifts. Maybe it's not been a emphasis. It's prioritizing with the CEO. My book, Prioritizing Philanthropy, which changes the dynamics of what a CEO does. Maybe not. What we know is, is that when we have these moments, people naturally pull back from them and eventually external leaders, if they truly are wanting to be transformational unconsciously, sometimes adapt to it.
And instead of leading change, they become caretakers of the same system they adopted when they when they came in and didn't make the change. An organization with a new leader will change a lot less than we think. Unless that leader, the board, the organization, is committed to that. The second area is when it's an internal promotion. So this is a kind of a different version of the same trap that the organization promotes somebody from the inside.
And the board says, well, we need or the CEO or the whoever's hiring, we need someone to help move us forward. And the peers actually want continuity. They're comfortable. Senior leaders might also expect some stability. And thus the employee or the higher the person who's being thought of as maybe a change agent or maybe trying to move the needle a little bit, actually, you end up hiring the person that's going to just be a caretaker of what's done before.
Internal promotions. Research will tell us create a unique psychological adjustment, because coworkers all of a sudden must redefine their relationship. And if they're used to a norm and someone from inside their social group is elevated and is pushing against that norm, actually, that's when you have massive disharmony and it really marginalizes leaders internally when they're promoted to make change.
The third is the moment where I was saying that it's a long standing leader. So number one, the external leader might be a board or internal promotion, might be aboard a long standing leader maybe has a moment of epiphany, or the board puts a lot of pressure, or the department chair puts a lot of pressure on the team.
But there's a moment where maybe something says we have to make some changes. And this is actually the hardest of all is because particularly if there's been success in the past, there long standing. So you have to assume there was some success. They've created a repetition rhythm to what they do and how they do it. And for them to change is really hard, which means they've created a sense of values based upon the work that they've done up until now, which means you have to make changes, maybe a little more slowly.
And sometimes they will even avoid conflict because they don't want to deal with the problems that come with it. As a result, choosing you got to choose the idea of improvement over reinvention, because if you reinvent, you're probably most likely going to reinvent something you already are doing. The point is, is that nobody asks to be cautious. No one.
Unless you're just not in an environment or self-driven to do anything. It's not that we want this, it's just we kind of land on it. And particularly if we have a long standing relationship with the organization in the position of leadership that we've had for half a decade, decade or more, it's unique people that can adjust. So there are costs to this, and that's something that becomes, before we get to the tactical six things you should think about.
There are costs when we do this, a lot of times this becomes personal. It's almost like an attack. As in, well, gosh, maybe they came up through the group. Well, you know, we never we never saw this. Or possibly it's an issue of dealing with, you know, well, they're not like us or he's not like us. She's not like us.
They're different. These become personal rather than professional. And so a cost is sometimes individual feelings being hurt. And sometimes it's tough for leaders to accept if they want to be transformational. If they want to be a change agent, do they have to accept it? The second is, is that the organization, the department, the person, whatever says that they want to change, but then their greatest danger is that that there's immense internal resistance, hesitation.
And what that does is particularly if and I think we underestimate this, if you're a new leader and you go across the country into a new job, you've moved yourself, a spouse with other family, and doing that multiple times is not easy. So there's a natural reaction. If they say they want to change agent and then it doesn't actually happen, that what we find out is, is that leaders become ones who edit themselves because they're like, well, I don't want to move again.
I don't want to quit. They stop proposing bold ideas. This can happen in a board where you have a small group or an individual is like, I need to move some things forward, but all of a sudden I don't want to much, you know, resistance and change. So they pull back and they soften difficult conversations. Number three is is the cost is they never think it's the right time to make the change.
Well, you know, if we wait a little bit and make some other things happen, it'll be easier if we just do this or that. It'll be easier. And that's just never true. What ends up happening in all of this is, is that the circumstances of the situation don't change, but we're left with a leader or an organization, or at least parts of it who say, I need to make some adjustments, but we don't, and that becomes incredibly frustrating.
The last is, is that innovation is the lifeblood of success, of growth, of longevity. If all you do is keep doing the exact same thing the way you do it, the cost is, is, is that your organization or you or the department or whatever is going to pay a price because you're going to leave several things out? Number one is talent.
People will leave if they don't think they have a chance to be part of something that's exciting. New mission driven. Number two growth plateaus. If you're not willing to change. There's something called and I did a podcast on this, the second curve, where you jump off the first curve of growth at a time, where you can jump onto a second curve that makes the growth even greater, and that board members and leaders paid probably the greatest price.
It's because they never get to where they want to go. There's frustration, alienation, people just kind of jettison. And if we think about particularly people leaving a board who's not willing to think about organizational change, they stick to the familiar, can't get really cool new board members, because it's very easy for people who are willing to take risk, modified risk, appropriate risk.
They don't stick around. And as a result, you can't keep talent. You can't keep the board, you can't keep people that are going to be engaging. And as a result, you end up losing what's most important, what you could be, what you could do with the people that could make it happen to serve a greater purpose. And this brings us to our six tactical steps, which we try to do in each and every episode, is what is it you can do to make sure that you as a board, you as a leader, you as a department chair, you as a manager, a director, whatever can do to not get caught in the familiar trap.
If you're looking to make improvements, change. The first is, is that you need to very quickly. And I would argue and advocate in writing, what is it you really want to do. And so that's dependent on the position you're in. If you're a board hiring a a transformational or change agent as a CEO, let's say write it down so that when you're working with a search firm, you're working with the executive committee, the hiring committee, whomever, and the board in the decision you keep coming back to.
We said we wanted to do these things, and they're in front of us all the time. Yes, we will always adapt. But if what is our core in our decision making for what we want? If you're new to a major gift team, or you're a new leader in a foundation or a nonprofit, what are the things that are going to drive the most amount of success?
Good or bad? Example hey Major Gibson, plan gifts. Draw the best ROI. They bring the biggest gifts. Do we stick to that? Do we build plans to do that? When an organization isn't doing that, maybe it's changing a CRM, and that's been a lot of conversations in nonprofits, but I'm not sure we want to do it. What are we trying to accomplish if you don't write it down?
If you don't stick to it, what happens if happened is culture will actually make the decisions for you rather than you making the decisions for the culture. Number two is build trust. Before asking for sacrifice. You need to, as a leader, make sure that you understand that people follow ideas when they trust the people that they're following great ideas of in honor of them.
Do not move organizations. People do. And that only happens when we have the trust of the people around us. Thus, you need to invest heavily in the relationships in the beginning amongst the board. If it's a hiring a CEO, that there's trust. If you're the new leader, that you're building out a sense of genuine care for the people you're around, that doesn't mean that some people may have to go or that they're against the change, and they're going to be hurdles, concrete barriers really to the change.
And that may mean that there needs to be adjustments to personnel, but you need to give people the opportunity to come on board as a leader, as a board, one member, how do I build that relationship? Which means you can't move too quickly, but the relationships first, we're going to get to some of those things. How to do that here in a moment about what this means.
How do I get in front of people to build out what's possible in terms of trust? Number three is distinguish resistance from wisdom. There are times where there are really smart people inside the organization, or maybe on a board who say, you know, you might think about this because we've tried it before. How is that different than well, this doesn't work.
We've always we've always done it this way. The answer is it's significant. When is there a moment that you can look at and get wisdom from previous experience, particularly you haven't been there very long or you're new on the board? The two questions I like to ask, and I did this when I was I talked about hiring the president now, but executive director of the House was when we had these conversations about culture, because I was new, trying to figure it out were the comments I hearing about protecting the mission and protecting the familiar.
The mission is something that requires execution strategy that can adjust change. A familiar is just about comfort and I don't care about that. So these are different conversations, different questions, but it allows you to ask in the right way. Is this about the mission or is this about familiar? Number four is to really return to why we went through this.
Maybe if you're a CEO, you want to write down three things that the reasons you got hired or write them down and then review them every quarter or as a board, as a new CEO comes in. Or maybe you're the CPO and you hire a new head of new major gifts and start. Why did you hire them? What were the principles?
It kind of mirrors what we talked about in number one, about making sure you understand why we're doing what we're doing.
A great story, true wrote about it in my book when I was hired at the University of Exeter Medical Center more than almost two decades ago, that we had a dinner. I was 35, my wife was 29, and I couldn't figure out why they wanted to talk to me. But it became evident that a change agent is what the CEO and my to be mentor, Glenn Fosdick, wanted.
We were at dinner the last night of the interviews with all these executives and their wives and husbands, and the CFO leaned over and looked at my wife, 29 years old, and said, why should we hire Randall? And she looked at me. She looked at them. She looked at me and she looked at them, and she said, Randall's a force of nature.
If you're not serious, don't waste our time. She picked up her fork and started eating her chicken. It was an endorsement that I carry with me every day of someone that believed in me. I think still does, and I'm always grateful for that. But it was also very true of the nature of what she knew from me in our first five, six, seven years of marriage about who I was and what I believed.
If you know yourself, if you write down the things that you believe in, then you can review them, go back to them and say, hey, am I doing the things that I want to do? And there were a couple of moments, other stories which I won't tell here, where I ran into hurdles, concrete blocks, and I had to go back and revisit that and say, do I really believe this?
Am I willing to return to what actually was the reason I took the job? I was hired, and to make that change? Number five express or expect. Excuse me, pressure to conform, meaning it's going to build. And then there are the ways in which the powers that be will try to talk you off the change. We love your vision.
We love your enthusiasm. We just need you to slow down a little bit. That's one of my favorites. And I've heard that sometimes slowing down is wise. Sometimes it's appropriate. Maybe you're moving too fast. I'm not. But sometimes it's also surrender. And it's also allowing those who don't want the change, who like the familiar, not to allow it to occur.
Thus, you have to remember when someone says, hey, love your vision, slow down. Hey, you know we're moving to quick. People aren't on board. We're not all aligned. We need to. Is that wise counsel or is that, hey, we're back to that question of familiar, hard to discern. That's the question you should ask. The last is, is something that I mentioned earlier that I garnered from my father.
Remember that comfort is rarely your assignment. When I had to fire someone for the first time early on in my career, I called my father and said, you know, I'm sick about this. I don't know how I'm going to do it tomorrow. And he said something I didn't expect. Good. I said, why would you say that? He goes, because we hired a quality human being.
You should be sick. This is going to suck, but your job is to get it done. Don't let discomfort get in the way of what's right. And it did suck. And I did do it. And every time I've had to make a staff change, it sucked just as much. It is not our jobs to always be comfortable all of the time.
Meaningful change probably falls in the category of discomfort. Familiar pulls people back. The idea is, is leadership is in. Stewardship is stewardship. It's not popularity, and it's not feeling good at every moment. It's about knowing the difference that you make in moving the organization forward. Realize and be okay. That discomfort is part of what a great leaders do.
So know what you believe in. Write it down and come back to it. Build trust with people before you start moving. Distinguish resistance from wisdom. Keep returning to why you believe what you believe, what you're trying to accomplish, or as a group, what the group is trying to accomplish. Express or expect pressure to conform around. Hey, we love where you're going, but a little fast.
And finally remember discomforts part of the of the gig.
The greatest leadership risk isn't failure, it's actually familiarity, lack of movement. And that when we slowly become more comfortable with the status quo, without the change that the culture is not going to move, then we are doing a disservice to the things we believe in the most. It's not to be harsh. We need to bring people along. Some people need more help with change than others.
All things that are critically important. But at the end of the day, we are instruments for improvement for the things we believe in. And the best leaders understand that somehow, someway, good things will come from change. And that transformation isn't defined as to why you were hired or what board decisions were made to bring you on board. Whatever is the reason you're here.
Transformation is about accepting the responsibility and keeping the organization moving forward. Through those six things that we discussed. If you define who you are based upon what you've done, then you're missing out on what this is really all about. Define yourself on what you accomplish and what you want to accomplish. And then you can look at change square in the mouth, square in the face, square in the moment and say, we can get through this drag.
Some people pull, some people push some people. But stay true to the idea of what's possible. Don't forget. Check out the blogs harlot philanthropy, backslash blogs two per week. Things I read don't reach the level of podcast leadership, personal life, flamethrower P all kinds of things. Get an RSS feed right to your inbox, and if you'd like, you can reach out to me at podcast at Hallett Philanthropy.com.
I've mentioned several times this idea of change about the idea of the familiarity paradigm. We need people to make a difference. Remember, some people make things happen. I mentioned that earlier. Some people make things happen, so people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened at the end of the day. We need people to be people who make things happen, who fight through the status quo to get to new possibilities for the people and the things in our community that are wondering what happened.
And more and more every day. I believe there's more and more of these people good people, good organizations, good causes, but are wondering what happened because they don't have what they need to be successful, and you can be a part of that success and whatever part of the world you live in and whatever sector of the nonprofit philanthropic space you are engaged with.
Board member, CPO, Gift officer, infrastructure, whatever. You make a difference every day. Lean in and accept some change. Be willing to be a little uncomfortable and be a catalyst to be someone who makes things happen. For all the things in this world that are just wondering what happened. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time. Right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
And don't forget. Make it a great day.