Why Your Changes Aren’t Sticking with Your Team (or You!)- and How to Fix It

Change is hard. Whether you’re trying to shift a bad habit of your own, transform your team’s behavior or overhaul a process, resistance has a way of showing up uninvited. Even when you have initial excitement, the new behaviors don’t stick – a couple of weeks, and you’re back to your old habits.

Sometimes it’s not about the actual change – it’s about how you think about the change.

It’s kind of like driving a car. When your car is out of alignment, you have to keep steering it back onto the road. You can have a high-performance vehicle, but if it’s out of alignment, it’s not going to work right.

Your mindset – how you think – is the same way. You can have the best strategy, systems and tools on the planet, but if your brain isn’t in the right place they’re not going to work.

So how to get your mindset about change in the right place? There’s a proven formula to help you. It’s called the Change Formula.

It looks like this: D × V + F > R

D — stands for Dissatisfaction

V — stands for Vision

F — stands for First Steps

R — stands for Resistance to Change

Dissatisfaction, Vision and First Steps must be greater than Your Resistance to Change or the change won’t stick.

Let’s start with Resistance – And all of us have it – it’s called your comfort zone. Even if you’re trying to change a bad habit like working nights and weekends, you have the habit because at some point in your career it served you. It became your new normal. Breaking that habit might open up all kinds of things that you’ve also been resisting – like having to work out because you’ve removed the “not enough time” excuse. Or having time with your family but they’re teens now and they don’t want quality time with mom or dad. Get all of your resistance down on paper. Writing things down tends to make them more objective than when they live in your head.

Dissatisfaction (pain) is important as well. If you are not fundamentally dissatisfied with how things are working today, you have no reason to make a change – vision alone isn’t enough to change behavior.

I used to run some big global projects for Fiskars, the orange-handled scissor company. I could paint a vision of how some initiative would lower our operating costs and make our products more compelling and help them sell better – people would be excited and pumped, and “all in,” but they’d never get started. UNTIL Wal-Mart said they’d kick us out if we didn’t do the initiative – instant dissatisfaction. Things got done. Are you frustrated enough to try something different?

Vision is key. If you don’t know what “better” looks like, you have nothing to motivate you to do the work. Take the time to define your vision so you get excited about what’s ahead.

First Steps are your roadmap. If the “thing” looks too big, it’s your elephant. Eat it one bite at a time. Don’t worry about seeing every step right now – just the first couple. Take the first step today.

Working nights and weekends was a slippery slope for me for a long time. I had more work to get done than there were hours in the workday. So, I rationalized working ungodly hours – it was critical for my company to be successful. Today I get more done in 40-45 hours than I used to in 70. That includes Board of Directors work, networking, and even committee work.

Here’s how I worked the formula:

D – I was burning out fast and had no time with my husband. This ate at my very core. Not okay.
V – I craved time together, time to enjoy the outdoors, to garden, to bike – lots of things that I would get to do if I had more time
F – I made a pact with my husband that if I really felt I needed to work a night or weekend, that I had to ask him if that was ok with him first. Believe me I thought long and hard about whether I really needed the extra time before I was going to admit that I didn’t get my stuff done.
R – My comfort zone was believing that I always had buffer time (nights and weekends) to finish up things that I wasn’t productive with during the day. The reality? It took me twice as long to get things done on weekends because my focus wasn’t there.

So, what does all this mean for you? It doesn’t matter where you are now. Choosing that “what is today” isn’t okay anymore is the first step.