Using internal Influencers to drive change: our research with Ashridge Business School
In our 15 years helping organisations change we’ve learned that however great the ideas or process, no change happens without the right people in place. But there’s a specific type of person we’ve noticed is the driving force of change — and we’re not talking about the ‘Chief Innovation Officer’ piloting a drone around reception.
They are people who have built careers in corporates whilst remaining outsiders; are senior enough to affect change, whilst remaining just beyond bureaucracy’s reach. And most importantly, they just can’t help but change things.
We asked Ashridge Business School to help us find out more. We worked with them to identify and interview some veterans of transformation, drawn from a variety of industries across the public and private sectors, to find out what makes them so effective.
What we learned
We discovered that they can bring vast numbers of people on board with change because they build an extensive network inside the organisation. They do so by getting people to join in a movement.
In other words, they are Influencers.
They’re driven by leaving a legacy — tackling big questions that don’t have obvious answers. They engage not just the people in their teams or those directly affected by change, but others too — building momentum to make it feel like change is something to get on board with, not resist. And they’re expert at turning naysayers into advocates.
(Download the research summary here).
In this way, they help the organisation to drive change from the inside out: not just by compliance with management’s wishes, but by leveraging people’s own motivations.
But Influencer life isn’t easy. All our Influencers had been frustrated by organisations that tried to squash their movements, or recognised they were different but didn’t know how to leverage them.
(This is why ‘intrapreneur’ programmes don’t drive change. They take innovative people out of their context, inspire them with new ways of working, then return them to an organisation unable to change. They find it ten times as frustrating as before, and leave).
We realised that it isn’t Influencers that need help — it’s organisations that need help in finding Influencers, and creating an environment for them to mutually help each other.
What we’re doing
70% of change initiatives fail. There are many reasons for that but the most commonly cited is employee resistance. Influencers are masters at getting mass buy-in, but they’re typically mismanaged or under-used.
So alongside Ashridge, we’re designing a programme that organisations use to identify their untapped Influencers; empower them with change-driving techniques; and build a movement which transforms the business, bottom-up as well as top down.
We’ve already brought this method to an organisation facing the dramatic change of a merger — the results were better than we could have hoped for. In fact we believe in the power of Influencers so much, we hired one to be our CEO.
If you’re interested in driving change that lasts with your own internal Influencers, get in touch: jenny@albion.co
Thanks to Paul Hudson, Americo Lenza, Ben Braun, Mark Allan, Peter Markey and many more Influencers who gave up their valuable time to help us understand this topic and (hopefully) help them out.
