Selling Change

How Successful Leaders Use Impact, Influence, and Consistency to Transform Their Organizations

A global auto manufacturer rapidly flattens its leadership team to achieve unprecedented success. A retailer on the ropes financially manages to turn a profit in less than a year. A fast, casual restaurant has multiple cross-country cases of sick patrons, but sales bounce back a year later. How did they do it? By effectively selling the need for change to the people and teams in their organizations. As an agile change leader, you will own multiple disruptive, strategic, and operational challenges on your watch. Will you be able to sell your team on the need for change? Will you be able to generate the levels of buy-in and commitment required to transform your organization across multiple often misaligned stakeholder groups? In Selling Change, change leader and former management consultant Robert E. Smith, PhD, provides a practical and sustainable playbook to tackle one of the most difficult challenges facing leaders today: generating commitment and buy-in to organizational change. Selling Change shows how leaders can prepare for and transition through operational shifts by generating highly engaged commitment to change. The principles of effective commitment and buy-in are distilled into the 2IsC model (impact, influence, and consistency) that lays out a practical and road-tested process for crafting commitment-focused change communications. Smith outlines approaches leaders must embrace to overcome emotional, behavioral, and mental resistance to change by addressing the following questions: Why change? Why now? Why you? Why your change? Without clear answers to these questions, organizational transformation efforts flounder. Effective change leaders have transformed organizations in a variety of sectors including health care, manufacturing, retail, and technology, redistributing billions of dollars of value. Building on leading research, lessons learned, and proven frameworks, this book gives change leaders everything they need to lead their teams through the journey of creating the next version of their organizations, allowing them to create the future rather than being disrupted by change resistance.