Whether in our work as leaders or in our individual lives/careers, the ability to drive change (or to change ourselves and others) is a key competency for leaders. This month I’d like to suggest that focusing on the positive is a much better way to drive change than focusing on problems. This is as true in our personal lives as it is at work.

Let’s begin with a fascinating piece of research that I discuss in my forthcoming book-Stepping Up. The research involves getting more people to go to the polls and vote. Both the United States and Canada have very low voter turnout numbers compared with newer democracies. The research compares two different messages in terms of what make it more likely people will vote. The first is a negative message-“people are apathetic and not voting-so please get out and vote”. The second a positive message-“record numbers of people are turning out to vote-so make sure your voice gets heard.” What is fascinating is that the second message—everyone is voting-turns out to drive people to vote whereas the negative message suppresses the vote.

Place this alongside some other fascinating research such as the work of Dr. Dean Ornish in California who has conducted extensive research on cardiac patients who must change their lifestyle to avoid death. The bottom line is that he discovered that the “fear of death” is actually a very poor motivator for these patients. Instead by focusing on the positive results of a healthy lifestyle, he was able to turn a 20% lifestyle change rate to over 80%! Turns out being healthy is more motivating than “not dying.”

Think about how most leaders and organizations tend to drive change. The focus is often on how bad things will be if we don’t change and how too few of us are “getting with the program.” This approach flies in the face of most everything we know about driving change. Fear is a great short term motivator but neuroscientists told me that the long term effect is debilitating. Perhaps we need to focus more on the benefits of change and less on the downside of status quo.

For many years, I was involved in efforts to improve customer service in large organizations and inevitably leaders would tell me they wanted to find a way to deal with the “problem” employees who were not serving customers well. Our method focused on the opposite, we had them identify those who were already treating customers superbly and find a way to highlight these folks, make them more visible, and show the organization that the emerging norm was great service. Our results were almost uniformly successful. Instead of saying “few of us are treating customers well” we said something like “growing numbers of us stepping up to great service.” Like the experience with voting, it turns out that focusing on what is working is more effective at driving behavior than what is NOT working.

Here is one more interesting twist. In a fascinating book titled Instant Influence, Michael Pnatalon-a Yale professor shows that if you are trying to influence someone it is best to focus on feeding their desire rather than lack of desire. A simple example—if you ask someone to tell you on a scale of 1-10 how motivated they are to make a change and then say “three” instead of asking why they gave it such a low number, ask why they did not say a one or two. Turns out his research shows that people then get in touch with the motivation they do have instead of what they don’t have. The likelihood of influencing them so he says—much higher with that simple turn of phrase.

So next time you have to drive change in yourself or your organization focus on the positive benefits of change rather than the negative consequences of status quo, highlight those who are already changing instead of those who are stuck, and if your motivation or their motivation is low, ask why it isn’t even lower. You just might find they or you will start convincing yourself to change.

Be well, do good work.
John