FZ Book Club: Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard

We're proud of our leaders and their dedication to constant growth and learning. That's why we've start the FZ Book Club. Every month, one of our leaders will share what they've been reading and some takeaways that they are looking to apply to their job.

Leader: Troy Myers, Operations Business Leader
Book: Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Dan and Chip Heath

Switch's core message is how to effectively shape culture. It explores the challenges of implementing change in an organization by using the analogy of an Elephant and a Rider to represent the emotional and rational sides of our brain. The book poises that the key to successful change is to address both the Elephant and the Rider as well as the environment (Path).

There are three main points:

Direct the Rider: Provide clear direction to the rational side. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. By scripting the critical moves and pointing to the destination, you can guide the Rider effectively.
Motivate the Elephant: Engage the emotional side. To keep the Elephant on the path, you need to find the feeling, shrink the change, and grow your people.
Shape the Path: Change the environment to make the change easier. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

My main takeaway is that bad behavior might actually stem from a bad environment. For example, if employees are not following new processes, it might not be because they are resistant to change or lazy. Instead, it could be because the environment makes it difficult for them to adopt the processes due to unclear instructions, lack of resources, or an unsupportive culture. In short, what first appears like a people problem is actually a situational problem. Once you view it through that lens you're able to shape the environment to get your desired behavior. This has allowed me to slow down and give people more grace and investigate if there are underlying issues in our environment that need to be fixed.