Positive deviants model the ethical attitudes and best practices that others should achieve. They are the primary creators and preservers of an organization’s ethics. These individuals are motivated by a commitment to create a “social good” for their customers and for their organization: they are the ideal candidates to set the bar within your company’s culture.

Use your organization’s positive deviants to establish a clear, specific standard of ethical values, attitudes and behaviors. This is one of the most effective ways you can create change in your organization.

In this video I explain how to set the bar to create a useful picture of the results you want:

Several weeks ago Robert Morris interviewed me at length for the “First Friday Book Synopsis, and I’ve been sharing parts of that interview here. Today: developing effective leaders and managers, how to lead change initiatives that “stick,” and the useful truths that sometimes emerge during the exit interview.

Morris: At Cerebyte, how are effective leaders and managers developed at all levels and in all areas?

Seidman: We use our Wisdom Discovery process with “positive deviants” (or star employees) from several organizations to define what it means to be a great leader and how to become this type of leader. These best practices are put into our persuasive technology to guide users through a series of learning activities that develop their leadership capabilities. It is just amazing to watch how people grow in these programs. They speak differently, act differently and even stand with more confidence. It is a great feeling to help people move into the leadership realm.

Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. In your opinion, what are the most formidable behaviors to change and how best to overcome them?

Seidman: The single biggest barrier to change is revealed when an organization’s leadership is insufficiently committed to the change, to seeing it through to success. Many executives seem to want the benefit of a change without being willing to do the work required or handle the resistance. This shows up generally in an organization’s unwillingness to allocate the time and resources required to learn the new capabilities, and most acutely, at the end of a quarter when there are financial pressures and all change initiatives are dropped to make the numbers. In our terminology, transactional pressures undermine transformational initiatives. In most people’s language, the change is just a “fad of the week.” There just isn’t a twitter version of change or performance improvement, no matter how much people want one.

Morris: During exit interviews of highly-valued employees who have accepted a position elsewhere, most of the reasons for leaving are associated with their supervisor. In your opinion, how best to respond to quite legitimate complaints?

Seidman: The best way to fix any turnover problem caused by supervisors is to improve the supervisors’ leadership capabilities. Using our approach, even in very high turnover environments such as fast food, turnover drops drastically and satisfaction with management increases. This happens because we separate the supervisor’s role as content expert from their role as supportive leader. In most cases, supervisors don’t know when they should be telling someone something versus encouraging exploration and growth. As a result, supervisors increasingly become “tellers” of information, which turns out to be very dictatorial and discouraging for employees.
By having the expert knowledge supplied from the positive deviants and provided through the persuasive technology, we can reduce the load on the supervisor, enabling them to learn a few — very focused and effective — support tools. We also help the supervisor become consistently more transformational by guiding them to be more effective at understanding and managing the conflict between their daily transactional role that tends to drive employees away and the transformational role that tends to grow employee loyalty.

I was recently interviewed by management consultant Robert Morris. Our conversation was posted on the  First Friday Book Synopsis,  part of ”The Employee Engagement Network.” I’ll be sharing some of the highlights (some edited for brevity) here.

Today: What I know now that I wish I’d known when I founded Cerebyte, the major challenges our clients face, and the difference between leadership and management..

Morris: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you founded Cerebyte?

Seidman: Our most valuable insight is this: how hard it is to establish an innovative product and process even if everyone says they want it and even if it has incredibly strong proof points to support it. More specifically, we thought there would be an openness to innovation in the area of performance improvement because almost every organization talked about the need to improve performance and there was widespread agreement about the ineffectiveness of the available approaches (e.g. training classes) at improving performance. However, there was actually a tremendous amount of resistance to change, even if everyone thought it was a good thing to do. It was only when the science actually caught up with what we had been doing, and became widely accepted that the resistance to change decreased.

Morris: Although there is great diversity among Cerebyte clients, in terms of both size and nature of business, which major challenge do all of them face? How specifically does Cerebyte help them to respond effectively to that challenge?

Seidman: They are serious about making the changes in their organization required to significantly improve performance, usually in a particular focus area. In many cases, it is a “change or die” situation for them so motivation and disillusionment with traditional approaches are high. We help organizations improve performance, faster, more completely, more predictably and at less expense than has previously been possible.

Morris: Do you differentiate leadership from management?

Seidman: Yes, though primarily in the leadership programs we develop for our customers. To us, leadership is much more about creating a compelling vision and providing the support and resources that enable the team to achieve the vision (in our terminology, it is about guiding “transformation”) while management is much more about the administration of the business (i.e. “transactions”). We find that this difference is most important when there are significant challenges to the organization. Managers retreat from performance improvements to a survival mode - Did I make my numbers today? -whereas leaders look at the challenges as an opportunity to drive the organization forward, even if it means taking some significant risks.

In addition, we know that “operational excellence,” which is the focus of management, is a subset of leadership —  so if you have great leadership, you get the best of both worlds. It doesn’t work the other way though. Managers, even good ones, literally think differently than great leaders and need extensive education to become leaders.

We were delighted to share our ideas on creating ethical organizations with readers of “Ethix,” in which our article recently appeared:

FOUR STEPS TO A MORE ETHICAL ORGANIZATION

By William Seidman and Michael McCauley

Do you consider your organization to be ethical? Many organizations have a moral foundation that enables them to make ethically sound decisions even when faced with adverse short-term consequences. However, as has recently been seen on Wall Street and in other places (e.g., Toyota) too many organizations are quick to put immediate economic gain before ethics. While the unethical actions may be expedient, they ultimately contaminate both the employees and the organization. Maintaining high ethical standards is the only way to produce sustainable success.

Do you want your organization to be consistently ethical? Using recent scientific breakthroughs, it is now possible to efficiently enhance the ethics of almost any organization. A simple process of setting a goal and then motivating, sustaining, and scaling ethical behaviors has produced numerous success stories like these:
• Pharmacy managers in a large retail chain think of themselves as “a critical part of the family emergency response system,” going out of their way to ensure that their patients get the correct medicines and care (instead of just selling prescriptions).

• Sales people in an advertising firm that serves small and medium businesses see themselves as “helping customers achieve their personal life goals” (instead of just selling advertising).

So how can an organization create the ethical foundation that inspires this type of response?

1. Set the Bar
First, use your organization’s “positive deviants” to establish a clear, specific standard of ethical values, attitudes and behaviors. Positive deviants are highly respected individuals who are consistent top performers and can typically be identified simply by asking management who stands out. They model the ideal ethical attitudes and best practices all others should achieve and are therefore the primary creators and preservers of an organization’s ethics. Positive deviants are motivated by a commitment to ethically creating a “social good” for their customers and for their organization.

2. Motivate Ethics
Second, guide all personnel to firmly embrace the goal of ethically achieving the positive deviant’s social good. When a positive deviant’s social good, or the inspiration behind their work, is presented to others in an empowering manner, it can be contagious for an organization. It naturally and organically spreads the commitment to the social good, and its ethical foundation, quickly and efficiently.

More specifically, once a strong understanding of the positive deviants’ social good has been established, it can be packaged into a short, emotionally powerful statement that excites and empowers other employees. To be successful, the social good must be presented in a way that creates a sense of honor and dignity (i.e., fair process). It must also cause people to naturally visualize themselves as having the same personal standards and commitment as the positive deviants (i.e., positive visualization). When these occur, people quickly embrace the positive deviants’ perspectives, improving the ethics of the entire organization.

3. Sustain Ethics
Next, ensure that the commitment to ethics is sustainable, even in the face of contrary pressures. True ethical behavior is profound and long term. It is a way of doing business that is so engrained in the organization that people cannot imagine functioning any other way.
The most effective means of generating this depth of commitment comes from the neuroscience principle “neurons that fire together wire together.” All profound learning is a change to the underlying neural structure of the brain that occurs when neurons fire together around consistent concepts. If the concepts are focused around the positive deviant ethics, new learning occurs that can be so complete that people do not even recognize they were ever any other way.

What makes neurons fire together? The key to achieve this organizational depth is simple — practice, practice, practice. Everything the organization does needs to exercise and reinforce the mental commitment to ethics.

4. Scale Ethics
Finally, engage a critical mass of the organization quickly to ensure that ethics pervades all aspects of the organization and becomes a true reflection of the organization as a whole. At the same time, individuals must display ethical behaviors in ways that are unique to their function and personality.

Persuasive technology — technology designed to “change what people believe and do” — that incorporates the principle of mass customization can facilitate widespread commitment to an organization’s ethics. Because this type of technology can touch many people simultaneously, individuals function more ethically and the organization as a whole builds a lasting foundation for ethical behavior.

Contributing to Success
The notion of an ethical organization may seem abstract, yet people who work in an organization with healthy ethics absolutely know it. They love their work, and they ultimately create better, more successful institutions.

I’ve recently read two very good books: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen and and The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.

Christensen and Pfeffer and Sutton each tell the truth about what happens when organizations try to change – and why it is so hard to change.

Christensen describes how institutions develop infrastructure that is focused, to the exclusion of all else, on today,  emphasizing current issues over planning for the future. These hidden biases and barriers to thinking ahead tend to be the factors that most undermine change.

It makes sense that a company’s daily pressures to make short-term numbers demand quick action, and that this be done in ways that have worked before.  But it doesn’t help with tomorrow’s challenges — not one bit.

Vitally important changes are all but impossible to accomplish when managers are preoccupied with filling orders regardless of what might lie ahead.  I think of the bumper sticker I used to see, “DON’T HONK. I’M PEDALING AS FAST AS I CAN!”

Pfeffer and Sutton take this idea a step farther,  showing how management teams know about these issues and even know what they should do —  but don’t do it because, again,  of pressure to satisfy immediate needs.

An exasperated colleague said to me the other day, “Sometimes you just want to shake people!”

We try to break down these barriers by using existing leadership and showing, convincingly, that there’s a lot more to sustained success than “pedaling as fast as you can.”

There’s a two-part series of articles in the online Wall Street Journal of June 5-6. In the first, Clay Shirky asks,  “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?”

The second, by Nicholas Carr, poses the question, “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?”

Clay Shirky argues that the internet makes us smarter by creating new means of learning that will eventually surpass the old – and we all benefit from this.

According to Nicholas Carr,  the internet promotes — even requires — multi-tasking,  which fractures attention, promotes shallow (or little) focus,  and limits learning and sustained, deep thought.

This is relevant to a discussion of persuasive technology.

Recently a trainer asked me about the interface to Cerebyte’s persuasive technology. He compared our interface, which is straightforward and utterly lacking bells and whistles, to more graphically whizzy learning systems.

As I listened to him, I realized that he was accustomed to learning technologies that masked inadequate learning experiences with technical excitement. Anyone with kids can think of dozens of such ”learning toys” which, ultimately, fail at their mission.

It seems that the hook for most learning technologies has to be entertainment more than direct learning because the learning experience they provide is so weak.

So these technologies are much more on the Shirky side of the discussion. Their premise is to give lots of stimulus and hope something sticks.

Our persuasive technology is much more on the Carr side of the discussion. Its job is to encourage and enable depth and focus, not to entertain. We’re committed to this approach because it puts the positive deviant content at the center of the user experience and deliberately fades the technology into the background.

Here is the interesting result:  people like to use our system because it absolutely helps them to create something meaningful and valuable.

The best entertainment — the achievement of success — most definitely does not require batteries!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with positive deviants to develop change leadership best practices within their 3 very different organizations.

Each came up with similar answers to hypothetical and real problems, calling on conventional wisdom of vision, resources, and support.

I asked them if they and their colleagues knew these (since they’re conventional wisdom) and they all did.

I followed up with, “Why is there is such a small amount of good leadership if everyone knows the conventional wisdom?”

The consensus was that the conventional wisdom really does work in good times. It’s easy to create a vision and execute it if there is plenty of cash.

The real test of great leadership takes place during bad times, when pressures are severe.

This reminded me of the great Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s remarks on the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment’s freedom of speech protection. He wrote that freedom of speech only really matters when the speech to be protected is completely offensive to you.

Speech that doesn’t offend doesn’t need protection; the same is true for leadership. Leadership matters most during the times when it is most difficult to be a leader, when unpopular decisions (whether to risk, for example, current survival for the possibility of a much better future) must be made.  This courageous leadership — which can be tough to sustain in hard times —  is what we work to nurture and protect.

I’m excited about some of the reading I’ve been doing — in diverse areas — because it reinforces some of the most exciting ideas we’ve been talking about for so long, and working on with our clients.

Daniel Pink’s research on motivation, detailed in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Barbara Strauch’s findings, reported in her book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (hear her “Fresh Air” interview here ) combine nicely with what we know about positive deviance and, also, the impact of positive thinking on positive leadership (Kim Cameron’s Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance to come together in exciting ways.

Positive deviants are invaluable to organizations.  They are rarely found among the youngest, but often among the middle-aged. It’s hardly a coincidence that Barbara Strauch reports — refreshingly — on good studies that show that while processing speed may decline with age, wisdom and a host of other positive human attributes increase in middle age and continue to increase for many years.

Motivation, Pink shows, is key to improving performance.

Cameron shows that positive thinking enables positive leadership, which in turn improves performance.

Organizational performance and personal brain function improve with great coaching. It’s gratifying to see that good scientific studies validate these interrelationships — because this is what we’ve been doing.

Until  recently, there wasn’t really any reason to think about a distinction between a craft view of change and a scientific model of change. Change management had for so long consisted of a set of conventional “craft” wisdoms that few questioned the approach, even if the accepted wisdoms were minimally effective.

Now, recent advances in four areas of research and the emergence of a new technology are changing this perspective. By combining work on positive deviance, fair process, neuroscience and mass customization into a single change model, and delivering change guidance through persuasive technology, it is possible to ensure that 98% of personnel in an organization embrace a change initiative.

Here is the model that has evolved from the science:

Set-the-Bar
In order to manage change effectively, the organization has to develop a compelling image of the desired end result of the change. Research on positive deviance tells us that the people who consistently and systematically outperform others (the organization’s “positive deviants”):
• Always have these compelling images
• Are easily identified
• Exist in all job categories in all organizations
• Can be interviewed using simple, reliable techniques that gather their “wisdom” quickly and effectively
The science on positive deviant is extremely consistent. By leveraging their positive deviants, all organizations can always, and easily develop the powerful images required to drive change.

Motivate Change
People must be motivated to change. The science of fair process and the neuroscience of positive visualization make motivation highly predictable too. More specifically, by presenting the positive deviant’s powerful images of success in a way that generates a sense of respect and dignity in the organization (fair process), people tend to embrace the change. In fact, they feel deeply honored that the organization so completely believes in their ability. In turn, when people visualize themselves as functioning at the same levels of positive deviants, neuroscience research has shown that there is a release of neurotransmitters that drive a consistent increase in their willingness and ability to learn something new.

Motivation, once more of an art form than a predictable process, is now highly predictable. By creating the right conditions, almost all participants show significantly increased motivation.

Sustain Change
The craft of change management is particularly ineffective at sustaining a performance improvement. Because so much of craft change management is about personal relationships, when the person is no longer present, change efforts consistently falter.

In contrast, the neuroscience principle of “neurons that fire together wire together” and the emergence of persuasive technology provide capabilities that consistently and systematically sustain a change effort. The key to getting neurons to permanently wire together in support of a new business capability is intensive, repetitive practice. The positive deviants tell us the nature and frequency of this practice. Persuasive technology ensures that people actually practice.

Persuasive technology, which is defined as technology that ”changes what people believe and do,” is specifically designed to provide people with the prompts and support required to achieve the levels of practice required for complete internalization of a change. Features like weekly prompts, continuous status reporting to management and other standard features in persuasive technology drive participants to practice enough to achieve the positive deviant level of performance. Thus, sustainability of a change is now grounded in science and technology and is completely predictable.

Scaling Change
The craft of change management problems with sustainability become significantly more acute when hundreds or thousands of people must change to improve performance. How can a crafts person possibly touch these large numbers since change is all due to the individual contact?

Here too recent scientific advances solve the scaling problem. In particular, the integration of the principles of mass customization into persuasive technology provides a scientific methodology for touching many more people, more efficiently than previously thought possible. Mass customization is an organizing system that enables a central organization to mass produce the energy and materials for a change, while treating each person uniquely, thereby increasing personal motivation.

When embedded in persuasive technology, mass customization guides large numbers of users to consistently and systematically embrace the positive deviant images of extraordinary performance.

Comfort with the Craft
If the science of change management is so advanced, why are so few companies using it? The obvious answer is that the people responsible for change management either don’t know about the scientific advances or are themselves practitioners of the craft and are hesitant to acknowledge that their methods are no longereffective. In either case, organizations are put at competitive risk because they are not keeping up with some of the capabilities others are beginning to use.

If you’re like me,  you’re tired of the term “solution,” a catchall term in business marketing which is so overused as to have lost its meaning.

I’ve been working with several companies lately who all claim to provide “solutions” to their clients. We work to define the term.

Each client has a different understanding of what their ”solution” needs to be,  and within companies there are often several interpretations:

For product divisions and groups, a solution is found in several of their products. The underlying thinking is multiple products, even if completely separate, equal a “solution.”

The sales collateral, sales training, pricing, and infrastructure typically line up with this notion of products that solve a problem.

For sales and marketing, a solution is often what they can sell - which still usually means multiple products because that’s how they’re set up.

I have come to favor a different perspective from the The Mind of the Customer: How the World’s Leading Sales Forces Accelerate Their Customers’ Success by Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter. In their view, a solution is really a means of helping clients to accelerate their organization’s ability to achieve its objective.

I don’t have a better word, but to me a solution is often broad: it’s about understanding what the customer wants and providing the means to get there.

While this means a mix of products and services, it is not driven so much by the individual item but by the synthesis of them.

A real “solution” enables  customers to feel better about what they buy —  and they buy more. Isn’t that what you want?