Lasting Change Means Being Convincing, Consistent, and Committed

People resist change, including noticing changes in other people. This is simply a fact. When a person decides to make a change, they have to consider how the people around them will react to these attempts. When people say first impressions are important, they really are, because once someone forms an opinion they will generally only notice information that confirms and supports that opinion, selectively filtering and ignoring information that contradicts it.

For individuals moving into executive and leadership roles, there is often the need to change and grow rapidly to be effective and successful. These professional changes must be accompanied by an effort to demonstrate and convince the executive’s peers, superiors, and subordinates that they have changed. The organization does not need to make changes to accommodate an executive’s new behavior; it just needs to notice the new behaviour. 

What Can You Do To Institute Positive, Noticeable Change?

In short, follow these 3 proactive steps to make changes that are lasting and effective:

1. Decide what you want to change, and how that change will be manifested in your behaviour.
2. Do your utmost to consistently apply the new behaviour. Use the words “I will” instead of “I will try.”
3. Consistently demonstrate your new behaviour to reinforce it and help others recognize that you have changed.

Drawing Attention and Reinforcement

When you make changes in how you behave or operate, it is imperative to frequently discuss and explain what you are doing differently. Pointing out the new behaviour is necessary, as it will almost always be overlooked. A great place to start is when receiving feedback. If you have a direct boss, during the normal process of getting feedback you might say, “I don’t know if you noticed, but I did this differently and I feel it produced more desirable results. What do you think?” You can try similar phrasing when speaking to colleagues. If you do not explicitly bring attention to what you have done differently, your colleagues are not likely to notice the change.

Let me offer you a real world example. I was working with a young woman who was having difficulty in her role in a large financial services firm. She was new to the organization, but had already been identified as having high potential. The people around her, however, had the impression that she was not giving it her all. Being in the early stages of the role and still getting accustomed to it, she was reluctant to challenge others in the organization. We discussed what she could do differently and how she could demonstrate what she was contributing to the company.

She identified an area where she could contribute: her team was getting caught in discussions that were going nowhere. She started asking more refined and insightful questions, which allowed her team to see their problems and objectives from a new, more optimistic and productive perspective. This proved effective, and because of the success of this methodology she could now refer to this as a demonstration of her value (disproving the impression she was not contributing). Without talking about this new behaviour and drawing attention to it, it would probably not have been noticed at all. As her comfort level increased, she worried less about fitting into the organization, and focused more on being true to herself.

As this example demonstrates, she identified the behaviour in need of changing (her reluctance to participate), applied the changes (asking questions that moved the agenda forward), and spoke about her behaviour with her colleagues and supervisor.

Personal and professional changes are not easy; they will not happen overnight. It is all the more difficult because the people around you will naturally resist change. Their resistance is not born out of a spirit of meanness; it’s just a psychological quirk. Lasting change requires work, but if that change is true to your authentic self, it is worth it for you and your organization.