Mobilizing People for Change

Baloise knew they needed a growth strategy, but they also realized they needed a culture change to execute any new strategy, after having visited firms such as Salesforce and Spotify. They asked themselves,  How can we mobilize our people to change our risk–averse company culture? 

Getting people to change behavior isn’t a walk in the park: Remember how willingly we accepted wearing masks in 2020?

Harmony between Leadership and Employees for Culture Change

There are natural forces at play between leadership and employees that should be considered when you mobilize people to change and transform the culture. Beat compares culture change to applying a new operating system: It has to be downloaded (buy-in) and installed (applied and lived). Getting the buy-in right is tricky. Leaders, if unaware of themselves, might subconsciously defeat processes and strategies should they try to maintain credibility by defending what they developed in the past. And skeptical employees won’t risk adopting new ways of doing things. A fear of acting outside of old boundaries leads to old behavior being reinforced. Harmonizing the forces between leadership and employees by applying a top-down and bottom-up approach is key to change.

Mobilize People to Change Top down and Bottom up

The reason why a top down and bottom up approach is necessary to mobilize people for change is twofold: First, a company’s strongest and most respected influencers are typically inside the organization, they aren’t necessarily its leadership and management. Second, fact-based PowerPoint presentations don’t help reach change buy-in, emotional stories do. I mean, have you ever been inspired to put in extra work or to try something new by slides of sales figures or dynamic market changes? Neither have I. Plus, many companies don’t realize that when they introduce a strategy to grow through digitalization there is a fear of the future. They wonder if artificial intelligence/robots will replace them. If their fear is left unaddressed, people’s uncertainty blocks creativity and inhibits change.

Let’s have a look at how Beat used storytelling to mobilize people, address fear and uncertainty and drive change top down and bottom up.

Inspiring Leaders Mobilize People By Connecting With them

Inspiring leaders can use vision to build excitement, but storytelling will allow them to connect with people and start them on a journey to achieve the vision. Being open, honest, and personal when sharing experiences on overcoming change obstacles makes leaders relatable. Being relatable helps break the glass ceiling between the ivory tower and the people, Beat says. People believe in people who speak from the heart. Hiding behind facts is more comfortable than being personal, but leaders must learn to establish true connection to their people, else they are left alone, no matter how good the strategy is.

Story works to provide people with an experience that brings the strategy to life. Story provides context and meaning, allowing people to engage with the strategy. As employees enter into discourse, asking questions, they are exploring how the strategy and change affects their reality. Learning through thinking and interacting with a story is the type of engagement that will help people see how they can contribute in creating the future and bring the strategy to life.

For a story to work bottom up it must reach people on the shopfloor, Beat included the company’s influencers into the team in charge of developing the change story. This helped the leadership team and the influencers to make the developing story their own. The company influencers helped convey personal messages and model the new behavior.

So, what does a story look like?

Story Brings Strategy to Life 

To help Baloise, Beat worked with The Storytellers, a transformation and change management agency. The Storytellers helped the company develop a story of six chapters. Each chapter explained the company’s transition from the past into the future, the moments of crisis they would face, the obstacles, and how to overcome them and take calculated risks. The ingredients that makes the story stick are the aha-moments, how by applying a new mindset and behavior to challenges to get from A to B.

The story was turned into a boardgame, making it tangible for teams to play. In a learner’s mindset, people practiced executing the new strategy to overcome business related obstacles. The game taught people to learn from setbacks and to operate as a team. Play connected to people’s reality, which allowed for an easier transfer of the insights into daily routines, Beat explains. The board game even won a Swiss national gaming award and is available for purchase.

If we want to sustain the business and enter new markets we can’t do things the way they were done in the past, we need to change the culture. Reaching the critical mass of an organization requires conviction and buy-in. Facts and figures are cognitively correct reasons for change, but fact-based presentations don’t touch our hearts and don’t help us attain the buy-in that we need. Storytelling has the power to mobilize people to participate in change, because stories engages us, they can inspire us.

Keen to learn more on how to create and tell a compelling story that works top down and bottom up? Stay tuned for a deep dive on storytelling as my next podcast guests are the storytellers themselves!

Take care,

Helena