Aren’t we grown-ups? I was at dinner the other night with a friend who leads an organization. We got on the subject of getting key information out to his teams and stakeholders in a timely manner when he said, “’These people’ keep complaining they don’t have the information they need. I shouldn’t have to spoon-feed them! Why do I have to keep repeating stuff over and over again. That’s nuts!” I thought he was done, but then he added: “I am not going to change the way I talk. We’re all grown-ups, right?!”
Hmmm…are we parenting? Or leading? I think the world of my friend but, honestly, he sounded like a dad whose last nerve had been plucked by his kids who just refuse to do as they’re told. Who won’t get with the program. Who won’t just take it upon themselves to…well…you know…figure out what’s going on. And so, two things suffer: (1) information flow, hence understanding doesn’t improve, and (2) my friend-the-leader isn’t modeling the notion that leaders may have to change in order for change to occur. Oh, and he may be mistaking his own resistance for resistance elsewhere in his organization. These things will make embarking on the so-called change journey harder than it otherwise would be.
There are two sides to spoon-feeding. Side #1: We take it to mean creating or fostering dependency, not treating teams and colleagues as adults, discouraging people from thinking on their own or from taking initiative. We see spoon-feeding as something we have to do when people are passive or lazy. When they don’t care about learning or taking responsibility for themselves, for example. And so, it would seem that a good leader would try to avoid spoon-feeding.
Side #2: But spoon-feeding is also a handy way for leaders to avoid communicating more impactfully and addressing process flaws, to ignore an absence of goals or clarity. It can be a way to skirt explaining the key imperatives of a moment, why they are important, and what the organization must keep top-of-mind. And spoon-feeding can mean failing to tie together how our efforts today pave the way for success tomorrow. If you lead as if you are the mom or dad and “your people” are the kids you need to spoon-feed, you likely will find leading change about as uphill a journey as you’ll ever travel.
Change can’t happen if you’re spoon-feeding. That feels pretty obvious, but there are two steps to revising your tactics. Step #1: Listen to the feedback you get when stakeholders — and yes, customers — say they’re encountering a problem or a roadblock. If you hear it as complaining, you’ll remain stuck in your role as parent. But if you take it in as data, you’ll be able to move to step 2!
Step #2: Relinquish the role you think you need to play, or have defaulted to, as parent. When you take an adult-to-adult rather than a parent-to-child perspective with colleagues, team members, and your stakeholders, you’ll open the door to using their input as the basis for moving the organization forward. Together. Because you are leading, not because you are cajoling or spoon-feeding.
Once is never enough. What a wonderfully simple principle. It says: Saying something, asking for something, announcing or explaining something once just doesn’t work. You have to repeat, repeat, repeat. Why? Because there is a myriad of confounding factors that go into how people absorb information: They may not hear things the first time they’re said or may disbelieve what they’re hearing. Maybe they don’t like or trust who’s saying it or they don’t understand the information (because we all compute and learn in different ways at different times). Perhaps colleagues have become inured to the message because they’ve heard it so often and nothing’s come of it. Or maybe the information never was communicated in a way that mattered to them.
How what we say “lands!” Spoon-feeding shows disdain for the very people a leader would want to inspire and engage! I’ve shuddered the several times I heard a leader actually say, “I shouldn’t have to spoon-feed” with colleagues in the room, or even to a team member. That says, “What’s the matter with you people? Why aren’t you on your game? Why aren’t you as quick or as smart as you need to be? or Why aren’t you as quick and smart as I am? Leading change has so much to do with being aware of both what we say AND how we say it. How it lands.
Optics and audio tracks matter! Successful change leadership calls on us to be aware not only of what we mean to say but how it sounds when we say it. If what we say is the information, then how we say it — that’s where the message is. What are the words we choose? Do we sound upset or angry? Impatient? Frustrated or worried? Or, do we sound eager and earnest in our desire to share something important, committed to bringing people along by reaching out persistently and consistently, no matter what, to keep them in the loop. Indeed, do we sound as if we like who we’re talking to/with? The optics and audio track of how we lead change are powerful — and can make or break a change leader’s credibility and the success of the changes they want to achieve.
Nina is a change management practitioner and principal of InterrogativesWork, LLC, a change advisory service dedicated to helping clients and consultants plan and implement organizational change. She has supported a wide variety of organizational change and strategy efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, PMOs, organization-wide policy and culture change, performance improvement 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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