3.1 Reflection

Change Management

Changing an Organization’s Culture, Without Resistance or Blame by Tom DiDonato and Noelle Gill

July 15, 2015

One of the biggest challenges a company can face is changing

people’s behavior — getting them to collaborate and be humble,

for example, or put the company’s long-term interests first. Most

behavior-change initiatives accomplish little, at best.

So when we faced such a challenge at Lear Corporation, a Fortune

200 automotive supplier with 136,000 employees worldwide, we

knew the odds were against us. We asked ourselves: What could

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we do differently?

Lear had gone into bankruptcy during the Great Recession.

Getting the company back on its feet required a major boost in

operating efficiency. We succeeded, but by 2013 we worried that

we had taken our focus on results too far. In satisfying our

demanding customers, were we pushing the organization to the

breaking point?

In order to make our success sustainable, we decided to roll out a

new “leadership model” for our middle- and upper-level

managers. We’ve been in HR for a combined total of more than

four decades, with multiple organizations, and we’ve been

involved in a couple such rollouts. Our model at Lear —

essentially a list of desirable behaviors — was pretty similar to

what many other companies promote. We focused on the soft

qualities that managers often overlook in their zeal for short-term

results. “One Lear” was all about keeping the company’s interests

ahead of one’s own division, function, or region. “Results the

Right Way” emphasized collaboration and long-term perspective,

while “Lead with Integrity” pushed for accountability and

humility. We wanted strong but collegial leaders.

To make the implementation work, we took a four-phase

approach, focusing on awareness, learning, practice, and

accountability.

Awareness. We spent some money on publicity, including framed

posters, mouse pads, and even a sculpture commissioned for the

headquarters lobby. The leadership model and related

descriptions went out in the 20 languages used by Lear managers

around the world. But we knew all this was just a starting point.

We couldn’t sit back and just let the well-publicized model do its

work. It wasn’t enough to say, “The instructions are clear, we’re all

grownups, so people just need to follow through.”

Learning. Too many companies skimp on this step. Any change

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in behavior that matters is going to be difficult. First of all, it’s just

hard to translate words on a page into specific behaviors,

especially when the words are about sensitive subjects. What does

it really mean to “get results the right way”? Were managers

supposed to be more relaxed about expectations, more focused on

the process, more forgiving when their subordinates missed

deadlines? How do you show empathy without seeming weak,

without losing your authority?

We ended up putting a lot more resources into this step than into

awareness. People needed to see what success looked like, and

they needed to get support along the way. To make the process

manageable for HR, we divided our 250-plus middle and upper

managers into cohorts of about 65 managers each, with each

cohort getting intensive attention for a three-month period.

The work started with each manager getting an initial assessment,

based on surveys of direct reports, on how he or she matched up

to the model. We wanted managers to know the areas they needed

to get better at, as well as the strengths they could build upon. The

assessments were purely for self-improvement. They had no

career consequences — no one outside of HR, not even managers’

bosses, saw them.

Soon after receiving their assessments, each cohort attended a

two-day retreat, with the first one in August 2014 near our

Michigan headquarters. Our senior executives kicked off the

retreat by talking about the key behaviors in detail. From there,

we guided people through an online library of materials, centered

on videos showing good and bad examples of each behavior. Then

we put everyone into four-person peer-support groups, from

different locations, so they could talk through the behavior in

their own terms. We encouraged the groups to keep meeting

throughout the process and beyond.

Practice. I’m proudest of this step, which I’ve never seen

elsewhere. Real change is hard for anyone. If people are going to

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muster the energy and discipline to alter their habits, they need to

start with self-confidence. We didn’t want to castigate people —

we wanted them to feel OK about themselves, while still

understanding the need for change. In essence we said: “Before,

the organization rewarded you only for short-term results; now

we need you to get sustainable success. It’s going to take real

change for everyone.”

Framing the situation that way made a big difference. People

didn’t feel blamed or put on the spot for their past actions. That

made them much more receptive to the message. It helped that a

lot of managers already knew that our current culture wasn’t

working so well — they just didn’t know how to fix it. Because we

cast the issue as an organizational challenge, not a problem for

individual managers, people could talk about it and help each

other much more.

We had a good message, but I couldn’t send it, nor could HR as a

whole. It had to come from the leadership, and it had to come

with some humility. That’s harder than you might think. It’s rare

for a C-suite executive to publicly admit to struggling with a

corporate initiative. We put so much pressure on leaders

nowadays, and they need so much ego in order to rise to the top,

that it’s genuinely difficult for them to show vulnerability.

Showing vulnerability, though, was key to getting people to take

the change seriously. We weren’t going to get anywhere if it

looked as though the leadership model were only for “some”

people. All the ambitious managers would figure a way to game

the assessments and come out clean. We needed people to really

embrace the change, starting at the top.

At those learning retreats, our executives made a point of saying

everyone was in this boat together. I’ll never forget our CEO, Matt

Simoncini, getting up in front of dozens of managers and saying,

in essence, “I’ve violated several of these model behaviors myself

in the past. I’ve started to get better, but I still have a lot of work to

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do.”

As for checking progress, fortunately we had overhauled our

performance management system only a year earlier. As one of us

(Tom) explained in a previous post, instead of a big annual

evaluation tied to bonuses, we now had people meet their

supervisors on a quarterly basis, with no connection to

compensation decisions. The new leadership model fit easily into

those conversations. With the money pressure off, managers

could talk more freely about their struggles with the key

behaviors. Instead of hearing only the bonus rating, they could

actually listen for their bosses’ feedback and advice. Managers got

more-frequent, positive reinforcement, which is key to behavior

change.

We wanted people to have a good deal of time to figure out and

practice the new behaviors. We didn’t expect them to get it right

the first time. A lot of behavior change is about failing your way to

success.

Still, we did have to let several managers go, including some vice

presidents. These were known troublemakers, at the extreme end

of the spectrum, whom we’d previously turned a blind eye to

because their results were good. People had justified their rough

leadership style by saying they had “passion,” but over the years

I’ve learned that’s just an excuse for bad behavior. We couldn’t

have them around while we pursued the program, or we would

have lost our credibility. We had many more, not-so-extreme

managers I suspected wouldn’t make it either, but we wanted to

give them the benefit of the doubt — and some have changed.

Accountability. After six months of development, we assess each

manager again, and this time the assessments have teeth.

Managers’ bosses see the assessments and start to factor them

into promotion and other considerations. I remember one

manager read his assessment and asked me, “Do I still have a

job?” I reassured him that we were giving everyone one more

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