People and Change
Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.
Hi Love Monday readers!
People need change, perhaps more than they know. But equally, change needs people. How can we build a culture of people who are well equipped to deal with change? How are you designing your communications to speak to and celebrate people who are early adopters, as well as create opportunities to nurture and reassure late adopters?
Who represents your early adopter persona? Who represents your late majority or laggards groups? Write them down.
Consider: what are the behaviours of the early adopters?
Practice: celebrating these behaviours publicly
Decide to: implement a visible forum to reward these behaviours
Fostering a culture of growth mindset, beyond a culture of growth.
Everett Rogers is a leading voice on how we can influence the diffusion of new ideas through cultures. He identified the now well known five categories of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. While we recognise that individuals will naturally migrate to early or late adoption, there are ways we can instil a growth mindset as a core pillar of culture.
In 2019, Australian software giant Atlassian shifted to a performance review model whereby two-thirds of every review now has nothing to do with job skills. Instead, equal weighting is given to how each of its 3000 employees affects others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change aims to ‘more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work’. The goal was to make sure the company was rewarding the right behaviours.
Atlassian employees can receive one of three grading levels on each element, based on ‘growth mindset language’ — rather than a score, they either get an exceptional year, a great year or an off year. If the adoption of new ideas is paramount to your culture, why not find visible ways to model and reward early adopter behaviours? When designing for change though, don’t forget to speak to and listen to your people all the way along the adoption curve.
We hope your growth mindset is in the “Let’s do this” zone this week!
Enjoying Love Mondays? I am excited to announce our next epic community challenge will be running in May! ‘Be The Change’ is a newly curated, month-long challenge delivering daily bite-sized learnings through the epic app. Why not kick your leadership learning up a level and embark on a 31-day intensive, building your influence for change, sharpening your communication ability, and learning to activate collective momentum, all in 15 minutes a day!
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