Untap your potential with people power

People power is grassroots, bottom-up change. Swift, powerful and deeply emotive, it challenges the norm and gathers followers quickly.

Many organisations equate change with pain. However, it’s been our observation that people don’t resist change. They resist being changed. A study by MIT Sloan School of Management reveals more than 60% of employees can't make sense of change that's pushed on them, so their knee-jerk reaction is to resist. 

Smarter organisations know how to harness the power of their people to innovate, and make the shifts en masse to reinvent the organisation time and time again.

Get Rapid Action and Results

People embrace the change they create themselves. If you want to activate change, anchor it to your purpose and engage employees’ heads, hearts and hands in co-creation to make change happen. That’s how you get discretionary effort. 

A study by BCG in 2018 found that 96% of companies that did this achieved the break-through and sustained performance improvement they wanted from their transformation efforts - nearly 3 x that of other companies. 

The principles of people power

BCG’s study is not a standalone. The results have been replicated numerous times and are backed up by our own data. 

Successful change can be ignited in your people with three key principles.

1. Engage heads by clearly communicating your ‘why, how and what’. People are more likely to commit to change when they understand the reasons for it, can imagine what the future will look like and can see themselves in it.
2. Capture hearts by connecting people to purpose. Tell a compelling story that paints a picture, so your people can connect the dots and make sense of it.
3. Align heads, hearts and hands by engaging your people, listening to them and involving them in co-creation to make change happen.

All you need to do is to find the capacity and equip them with the necessary information, resources, tools and training. Also, be mindful that sense-making doesn’t follow a uniform timeline. 

Change starts in leaders’ heads long before it’s announced. Pausing and giving people the time to catch up with you will pay off and it will make change happen faster. 

In our combined 200+ years of experience managing change, we’ve found that it doesn’t have to be hard.  It doesn’t need to take long, and it certainly doesn’t have to be painful. Rapid action happens when you harness the potential of your people and engage them in co-creating the change.

If you'd like to talk it through, get in touch with us today.