Leadership is about many things, some of them quite lofty: setting a strategic direction, creating a shared sense of purpose, modeling behaviors you hope to see in others. But effective leadership often boils down to something more mundane — getting people to do things they would rather not do. Maybe it’s returning to the office three days a week after working remotely for so long. Maybe it’s reinventing performance reviews, or launching a new product that disrupts an old favorite. If the work of leadership is the work of change, then overcoming the natural tendency to resist change has to be at the top of every leader’s agenda.
Persuading Your Team to Embrace Change
How do leaders persuade people to do things they would rather not do? The author outlines two very different persuasive techniques based on social science: the “foot-in-the-door” technique and the “door-in-the-face” technique. Each of these techniques can work in the right situation, although neither of them translates perfectly from the ivory-tower world of social-science research into the messy realities of organizational life. But both techniques can help leaders reflect the hard work of making big change, and what is required to get beyond what management theorists like to call “active inertia” — the tendency for people and organizations to seek comfort in the old ways of doing things, even (or especially) when the world around them is changing dramatically.