Social Awareness for Effective Change Management

Change Management is about changing the way people work. Social Awareness can improve your effectiveness at change management.

We don’t want to change people.

Personality is remarkably stable and the domain of self-help and psychologists.

In change management, we’re concerned with causing only a change in behaviour in an organisational setting.

Organisations are social environments, therefore Social Awareness skills and how people interact with others in an organisational setting is critical getting better outcomes in change management.

Social awareness if a subset of the domain of Emotional Intelligence, which includes:

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Social Awareness: Social awareness requires paying attention to others–their feelings (stated and unstated), and being aware of context and environment
• Relationship management

Why is social awareness important in organisational change management

According to APA’s 2017 Work and Well-Being Survey of employed U.S. adults, those who had experienced recent or current change at work were:

• 2 times more likely to report chronic stress
• 3 times more likely to distrust their employer
• 3 times more likely to feel cynical about change

Particularly during cutbacks and restructuring, employees can become uncertain of the future of the organization and their role within it, leading to anxiety, burnout, and disengagement.

According to Gallup’s 2015 State of the American Manager study of 2.5 million manager-led teams:

• “Employees who are supervised by highly engaged leadership teams are 39% more likely to be engaged themselves.”

An appreciation for Social Awareness as a skill and its attributes can help you orient your change management. By understanding the tenants of Social Awareness you will learn how to influence people with truly diverse viewpoints. This is the key to changing behaviour and improving the adoption of change complex systems that organisations are today.

The goal of change management is getting people to change their behaviour.

Principles of social awareness

There are three main principles that underpin Social Awareness: Social norms, status seeking, and trust. We’ll explore each in turn here:

Adherence to Social Norms

• We are social creatures. From an evolutionary perspective, we’ve learned that living in groups makes more sense than living alone, with rare exceptions. However, for such cooperation to flourish we must live within a framework of behavioural values and norms which guide our behaviour.
• Social rules, norms, and mores evolve and change over time and from culture to culture and with culture (e.g. subcultures)
• People who do not follow the rules are punished and socially excluded. The most overt forms are jail for example. But other examples, such as Martin Luther King who ushered in the civil rights movement are also examples.
• Normative pressure to conform is powerful. We’ve all heard of ‘peer pressure’ and probably as a teenager counseled by your parents to withstand it, lest you be led astray.

Social status

• Within a culture, we build our identity in contrast to others. People tend to assess if they’re smarter, better or somehow worse than others. Jordan Peterson refers to climbing and finding our position with the “dominance hierarchy”.

Trust

• Trust is an important factor improving the efficiency of getting things done. It reduces what economists call ‘transaction costs’. We can trust people will more or less do what they say they’ll do, which prevents the need for lengthy and expensive contracting arrangements with everyone we interact with.

Using these principles as a framework we can deduce ways to induce behaviour change.

The carrot and stick approach to change (rewards and punishments)

The stick (punishments)

Punishments can and do work, but behavioural economists have shown that faced with negative consequences, people will often quit playing before they face them.

The carrot approach (incentives)

It’s often assumed that people are motivated by money. But in reality, very few people are motivated by cold hard cash. The absence of money is a huge demotivator, but once the limit is reached, any more has rapidly diminishing returns.

Normative pressure

The other approach is to try and motivate people by telling them that others are doing it, and so should you. Psychologists call it “normative pressure”; your mother would have called it “peer pressure.”

This is why marketers use testimonials – studies show that people can be coerced into selecting the stick that is clearly smaller while others say it is the same size and we deny our own senses in order to conform with others.

In a now famous experiment, psychologist Solomon Asch asked subjects to indicate which of the three lines from the second image is the same length as the line in the image on the left.

What we’re after here is a culture where people automatically take up the desired behaviour. Even when no one is watching. Day in day out.

What Skills are Associated with Social Awareness?

So how do you as a change manager and change leader tap into Social awareness to improve your change management?

Consider how you stack up against these three skills:

• Perspective: The ability to see the world from another’s point of view. This means looking at a situation, concept or event and appreciating how this would occur to another differently than yourself.

• Empathy: the ability to understand and appreciate others emotions and feelings.

• Diversity: there is value in recognizing that each individual is unique and that differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, or belief rather than ignored or argued.

• Respect: getting things done and goal achievement without judging and assessing and making others wrong. Despite differences, and mostly because of differences we can actually improve our results.

Using social awareness as a change leader

The father of the science of social psychology, Robert Cialdini, has been studying how and what has people to change their behaviour, for 30 or more years. Popularised in his books, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) and Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.

As change managers, considering Social Awareness, we can learn a lot from Cialdini. Here’s a primer on Cialdini’s big six of influence. I’ve listed them below and outlined how a Socially Aware change manager and change leader can influence behaviour change in an organisational setting.

Warning: Be careful with applying these principles! If done without a little tact people may feel manipulated and switch off altogether. Once this happens your change initiative will be all but dead from then on.

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1. Reciprocity

Reciprocity if that feeling of obligation to return a favour.  We feel indebted to people who do things for us, even when we didn’t ask for it. Like the nice people handing out samples of sausages in the supermarket, it can trigger an unfair exchange: a free sample for overpriced premium sausages.

What this means for change leaders

In the same way you’d repay a colleague who helped you with a project at work, change leaders can employ this principle by creating bonuses and benefits for just getting involved in the initiative. Once the employees are engaging even a little they will be more likely to repay with their attention and effort.

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2. Scarcity

We all want what we can’t have. The scarcity principle is powerful. So much so, in one study researchers put ten cookies in one jar, and two identical cookies in another and had people rate which jar of cookies they liked better.

Twice as many people said they like the jar of just two cookies even though they were exactly the same.

What this means for change leaders

By creating the perception that the organisation is leading edge and customers are responding by showing their demand for the company’s products and services and how this change enables that, for example, is a great way to show demand. Other ways to use scarcity is to galvanise the organisation. For example, stating that you must act now or you’ll miss the window of opportunity.

Competitive pressures such as this can help shock people out of complacency.

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3. Authority

We tend to believe and act on requests from those who have power, credibility and are knowledgeable. In one experiment, sneaky researchers dressed in doctors garb at a hospital without any other attending identification and asked nurses to give patients what the nurses knew to be lethal doses of medication. The overwhelming majority of the nurses did so without question (they were not allowed to actually inject the unassuming patients).

What this means for change leaders

Find the most obvious person in the hierarchy, usually the project sponsor, and have them lead from the front articulating the reason why this initiative is important and why now. But ordinary hierarchical power isn’t always enough. Look for those who by dint of their tenor, technical skills or influence and co-opt their buy-in too. These additional appeals to authority will help others adopt the change as well.

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4. Consistency

While it might be a woman’s prerogative to change their mind, for most people remaining consistent to what they’ve said or done previously is the usual way we act. The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.

In their famous 1966 experiment, Freedman and Fraser send someone around to ask people to place a small card in a window of their home supporting safe driving. Two weeks later, researchers asked the same people but by a different person to put a large sign in their front yard advocating safe driving. The result: 76% of people who agreed to the first request now complied with the more intrusive request. This compared to only 20% of people who were never asked to put a sign in their windows and were just asked to put up a large sign in their yards.

The lesson here is that you are more likely to get a big “yes” from someone if you get a small “yes” from them first. People tend to want to act consistently from how they acted in response to the first request.

What this means for change leaders

Don’t ask for too much up front. It’s common to announce a big organisational change, resulting in eye rolling. Instead, start small and ask for smaller steps that will move people along the path. Further, create and celebrate quick wins. In a years time, people will be surprised about how far they’ve come. Think big, but plan small.

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5. Liking

It almost goes without saying that we trust people we like more than those we don’t. We are more likely to like someone who flatters us for example. We’re also more likely to like and trust people are who are better looking too. Researcher, Dan Hamermesh, explains in his book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, why good looking people have more opportunity, and thus success than ugly people.

What this means for change leaders

It’s normal and natural for people at least at some level to resist change. Some will do so vigorously. Leaders hate this because it can threaten to derail a project for fear of such dissent and this attitude spreading like cancer. The worst thing you can do is make them ‘wrong’ for resisting. Instead invoke the liking effect and meet with them, empathise and listen and generally build relationship and trust.

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6. Consensus

When uncertain situations we tend to look to others for cues on to do. Marketers use this all the time by displaying testimonials about the results and achievements from the product or service in question.

There is safety in numbers. Nobody wants to eat at an empty restaurant so if something is in demand and therefore scarce, it must be valuable. Right?

What this means for change leaders

It’s not only for spammy markets though. Social proof can be an excellent way to cascade a change. Grab favourable comments and case studies from key employees throughout the organisations who are exemplifying the change and broadcast this far and wide. This will help people see that others are getting on board and getting rewarded for it. You can also keep numbers on system usage for example, and publish it periodically. Once there is a critical mass of social proof the change adoption will gain significant momentum.

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Understanding the principles of Social Awareness and deploying them can significantly increase the chances that the end users and those impacted by your change will adopt the new ways of working.

So, over to you. Let me know in the comments or via email how you use these principles of social awareness to improve your change management.