Do You Drive Change Like a Nail? Or Like a Car?

“Driving change?”

I personally have never cared much for the term “driving change” — makes me think of when I was a kid and farmers where I grew up talked about how that “driving rain” last night didn’t do much for the crops cause the soil was so dry all’s there was, was run-off and flooding and then next day a lot of clean-up. “Driving change” in an organization can sometimes have similar impacts, but for better or worse it’s now part of our vernacular.  We’re seeing a lot of people “driving change” across government these days, so make what you will of the ruminations that follow here. 

My question to you today is this:  As a leader or manager, what does “driving change” mean to you?

Do you drive change like a nail? 

When you think about the act of driving a nail, it evokes a picture in which a person has a hammer in hand and is focused on hitting the nail into some hard object — wood, stone, metal maybe. There’s force.  There’s got to be considerable concentration so that the result is exquisitely accurate (gotta hit the nail on the head.)   There are iterations of whacking away at the nail with whatever requisite pressure and speed.  There may inevitably be splinters that fly off during the process, and so some thought must be given to putting on goggles, or creating a “safe space” in case others are around so that if splinters do fly they won’t cause damage. Maybe there is something placed beneath or around the object that is “receiving” the nail like a buffer for the impact and noise that occur while pounding the nail in. Or maybe not.  But for sure, and I know this myself, when I am driving a nail, if I am looking at anything else except the nail, I am in trouble.  I might miss the nail’s head and pound the hammer onto my thumb by mistake and yowl. I know for sure, if I take my eyes off the head of the nail, I won’t succeed at driving the nail where I want it to go.

Do you drive change like a car?

In this case I want to know who’s in the car with me, is everybody buckled up, do we all agree on where we want to go, is the car in good shape to get us there and do we have enough gas.  I’m going to want to know what the traffic and weather are like.  I want to know when we’re leaving and when we expect to arrive.  I will want to know if there any off-ramps if we need one. Also, are there any detours along the way and if there are — or we encounter one we hadn’t counted on — do we have enough time and snacks so that we won’t be stressed if we are late arriving.  In the case of driving change like a car, I can’t just keep looking straight ahead. I definitely need to look left and right, and occasionally in the rear view and side mirrors because I need to know what’s going on all around us as we drive along. For sure I want to pay attention to any oncoming traffic.  I will also want my passengers to be on the lookout with me for signs and signals, potholes and accidents, too.   And I’ll determine my speed based on whether this is an excursion we opted for ourselves or an emergency trip — so do we need to pass the guy ahead of us or can we just take it at our own pace?    

Driving might be another word for leading 

If you are leading change as if the change were a nail, you are likely going to have by-standers, but since only one person at a time can drive a given nail, that’s what they will be — onlookers with a lot of opinions about whether what you are doing matters (to them), and whether you are doing a good job (or not) driving that nail.  If you persist in being the one to pound the nail, those folks literally will not have a hand in the process, and so while your eyes are trained on that nail, some of those on-lookers who aren’t really engaged may view your efforts as a distraction from what they “really need to be doing” and peel away. 

If, however, you are leading change as if you’re driving a car, you’ll make room for folks to come along.  They can help you pack up the car and prepare for the trip, talk through the best routes to take, challenge you and each other about whether the route you’re all on is the best one or whether it’s time to shift gears.  You’ll have the benefit of listening to each other as you all look out the window and share ideas about what you are seeing — maybe for the first time — even as the road may twist and turn in expected,and unexpected, ways.  No onlookers here — everyone in the car will be reading the map together and on the lookout for rest stops and fuel stops. No back-seat drivers, just co-navigators for the journey ahead as you all travel to your change destination.

Nina is a change management practitioner with Rockwood Company, a woman-owned Washington-based strategy and change management consulting firm serving government leaders and their teams as they work to address our nation’s most complex and meaningful challenges.  In her client work, Nina supports a wide variety of organizational change efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, organization-wide policy-change initiatives and more. She has an MA in Communications and an MS in Organization Development, and graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP). She is ProSci trained, and has written about organizational change for govloop.com, Change Management Review, and Government Executive.

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