Nobody likes change. I know if you do anything that changes my routine in the morning, my whole day is whacked. We all hate change. Heck, most of us hate getting change at the grocery store because of all those coins.

As a leader, though, your job is to get others to want to change.

Getting other leaders to be open to change is hard. You have to help them understand what’s in it for them because, invariably, you’re changing something in their very comfortable lives. They’re not going to like you when you do that. They’re going to resist and find every reason to point out that your conclusions and recommendations for change are wrong.

If you want change to happen, you have to help others understand that change is in their best interest. Show them you’re trying to drive metrics they care about. (I’ll dive into an example here in a minute.) Help them understand that they stand to benefit from the changes you’re recommending.

For example

Here’s an example of what I mean: When I was running call centers back in my credit card days, there were very different sets of metrics that people received incentives on. There was the call center, which was receiving incentives based on operational efficiency. They were rewarded for how many calls they were handling an hour, their abandon rate, their customer service scores, and how many dollars they were collecting while they were on the phone (it was a credit card collections call center).

On the other side of the fence, there were folks like me who were looking longer term at the economics and profitability of individual accounts. Sometimes we were advocating for treatments in the call center that were great for long-term metrics but really, really bad for the short-term operational ones.

The leaders in the call center wanted their teams to get you on the phone and say, “You owe us $100. Please pay now.” All they wanted to do (and what they received incentives for) was to get you to say, “Yes, I will pay you,” take a payment, and then get off the phone and move on to the next one as quickly as possible.

We concluded that what drove long-term value was building relationships with the customers and understanding their financial situation. If we better understood how we could help customers and what their long-term goals were, we found those accounts were more profitable than others. The operational effect of this approach, however, was that those phone calls started getting longer and longer and longer.

In the short-term, we were messing up the call center’s metrics. But long term, we were building a more profitable relationship with the customer. What we had to do was sit down with those call center folks and help them understand the long-term behavior we were trying to drive. We had to explain why it was in the best interest of the broader organization and of the company as a whole.

We were pretty frank with those call center leaders and told them we understood how we were going to mess up their metrics. We knew that if we wanted to achieve the long-term changes that drove profitability, we had to blow up our call center operating efficiency metrics.

Making it happen

We as leaders knew that if we wanted to make those changes happen, we had to be willing to stand side by side with that call center leader in front of their boss and ask that boss for relief on those operating metrics. The call center leader had to say, “If you want to make a change that’s good for the long-term business, this is going to be bad in the short-term for operating metrics. We need you to change the operating metrics incentive plan.”

As soon as those call center leaders knew we were willing to go to bat for them, and they weren’t going to get hosed on their personal incentives, they were much more willing to support the changes. In the end, we made the changes, changed the incentive plan, and improved the overall profitability of the business.

If you want to get other leaders to change, you must be willing to stand side by side with them. You have to help make their case for change and do what you can to protect their interests while simultaneously pursuing your own. When you partner with others in change, change can actually happen.

Published April 2, 2025, in The thoughtLEADERS Brief on LinkedIn.