A hundred small ripples make a big wave. Likewise, several motivated employees can create a cumulative effect, and drive change and growth. However, even when fully aware of the benefits of employee engagement, many fail to fathom its biological depths. It is high time organizations catered to the demands of their ‘seeking’ systems and kept them more ‘alive’.
What is the best way to motivate employees to change? Traditionally, the change literature has encouraged leaders to ‘create burning platforms’ and to ‘manufacture crisis’ in order to activate employee fear and cure their complacency. The goal was to make the status quo seem even scarier than the changes, which would help overcome employee resistance to change. For many leaders, fear is the go-to emotion when trying to get employees to accept change. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop summarized the burning platforms concept well in a memo before announcing big changes to the company’s strategy:
There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters into the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a ‘burning platform’, and he needed to make a choice.
We too, are standing on a ‘burning platform’, and we must decide how we are going to change our behavior.
This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
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