Many people – inside and outside the business world – are at best skeptical and at worst afraid of change because they often don’t know how to handle it.
Dr. Barbara Trautlein not only doesn’t hate or fear change, she’s been embracing it her whole career. The principal at Change Catalysts (changecatalysts.com), a Vernon Hills, Ill.-based company designed to help people, teams and organizations lead successful and sustainable change, has been at it since her college days.
Trautlein started her own company in 1989 when she was in graduate school at the University of Michigan earning a degree in organizational psychology and began working for a consulting company.
At the time, she pointed out, the Midwest was burnishing its reputation as the “Rust Belt,” because the auto industry was facing stiff competition from Japan, which “bled into other industries,” she said.
One of those was the steel industry, which was why, on her first day on the job, Trautlein found herself in a steel mill that was facing bankruptcy. Trautlein and her consulting team were on-site trying to turn things around.
“I get up and introduce myself and it’s a room full of men … they’re all 20 or 30 or 40 years older than me, and pretty much to a man they had worked in that mill their entire careers,” Trautlein recalled. “And I get up and I talk about how we were going to transform them to high performance, total quality self-managed teams. And a guy from the back of the room stands up and … says, ‘We’re steelworkers and we don’t listen to girls.’
“I knew right from that first day that there was a lot of fear in the room,” she added. “However, I also knew from that first day in the job that there was a heck of a lot of fear and intimidation and uncertainty in the change leader standing in front of the room. So that’s what got me down my now 35-plus year path to equip and empower my fellow change leaders.”
Trautlein said Change Catalysts helps people, teams and organizations “lead successful and sustainable change” with greater confidence and less frustration and stress.
She said the first 20 years of her career showed her there are thousands of models and methods and books to manage, but still there’s a “very high failure rate of change.”
“It’s interesting because the number one topic in the ‘change management’ literature is overcoming resistance to change,” she said. “And the whole vibe of that is doing something to people or against people even in spite of people instead of with and for them, which I think for leaders is exhausting and probably insulting for everyone else. What we really need ‘change leadership,’ for everyone to step up regardless of tenure, title or role and team up to play our parts in navigating through constant disruption, and that’s what we help clients do at Change Catalysts.”
Trautlein will be the keynote speaker at the Best and Brightest Executive Summit, set for March 10 in Detroit. The summit is a gathering of premier companies from across the nation, collaborating to advance their employee enrichment and enhance organizational culture and provides a unique platform for senior leaders to delve into cutting-edge strategies in leadership, creativity, and innovation, driving transformative change and sustainable growth within their organizations.
Trautlein talked with Corp! Magazine about change, her career and a variety of other issues:
Corp! Magazine: What are you going to talk about at the summit?
Dr. Barbara Trautlein: I’ll share about the neuroscience of change, which is always very interesting and empowering for people because that also helps us see that when we lead change and we get resistance or pushback or challenges or questions, we’re not doing anything wrong as leaders.
It’s literally how our brains are wired and why we survive as individuals and thrive as a species. But it’s what happens next that is important. So we’re going to talk about how to diagnose and develop our own Change Intelligence® and then give attendees some actionable insights about what they can do with this knowledge on the job to lead their teams and their organizations through all the changes that we know are not going to slow down anytime soon.
Corp!: Why is there so much fear around change?
Trautlein: I’m an organizational psychologist by training. It’s fascinating to know some of the neuroscience of change and what happens to our brain on change. When neuroscientists put electrodes on people’s brains and introduce them to a change, the same new receptors fire when we get introduced to a change as when we feel physical pain.
What’s the implication of that to our brain? Change equals pain. It triggers all that fear-threat response. What do we want to do when we’re in pain? We want to get out of the pain. We want to solve it, fix it. So if that’s what happens to our brain, then what happens to our body? Fight, flight, freeze or faint.
What happens is that all the good stuff that feeds our brain — the oxygen, the glucose — gets sucked down past our neck so we can fight, flight, freeze or faint. And what all those reactions have in common is that change makes us less smart. We get blinders on and we go to our well-learned dominant habituated patterned behaviors that made us successful in the past. And we don’t even do that. Well, that’s our brain on change.
Corp!: Talk a little about ‘Change Intelligence®’
Trautlein: The bottom line of Change Intelligence® is that it helps us all be smarter and therefore more successful together. We all know our IQ, our raw intellectual intelligence. And then a lot of people have heard about EQ, emotional intelligence.
Beyond those, Howard Gardner was a thought leader who talked about multiple intelligences. What I noticed is that people who are highly successful in other aspects of their career struggle to lead change. I didn’t see that we had methodologies or tools to develop change leadership capabilities. We have a lot of models and methods and tools to manage change and a lot of models and methods and tools to develop our leadership and interpersonal skills around communications or conflict management or coaching. And we have some around change-related skills, but they’re all kind of reactive, focused on ‘coping with’ or surviving change. But I didn’t see anything to really help us step up and play our roles to lead change. And I think we’re all change leaders regardless of our place in the organizational chart. That’s why I created CQ® or Change Intelligence®.
Corp!: Do all business leaders have the traits they need? What do you need to be able to handle change?
Trautlein: The definition of Change Intelligence® is the awareness of our style of leading change and the ability to adapt it to be optimally effective. So what do I mean by that?
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, sometimes there’s a nail in front of you, and that hammer is a very functional adaptive tool. But sometimes you need a micrometer or a power tool. Sometimes you’re dealing with a merger or acquisition, sometimes with an IT implementation, and sometimes with a global pandemic. That’s basically Change Intelligence® … being aware of our style, and to be able to adapt it to lead successful and sustainable change. That’s basically Change Intelligence® … being aware of our style, and to be able to adapt it to lead successful and sustainable change.
Corp!: For the most part, people hate change. How do you motivate them and bring them to not only accept it, but embrace it and begin it?
Trautlein: People own what they create. When you involve people, you get higher-quality decisions and also get smoother implementation because they’re on board, they own it. People are smart, they know that not everybody’s going to be able to have a vote in whether you merge with a new company or you implement this new technology system.
However, there’s often a lot more opportunity to enable people to get their voice heard in terms of how we’re going to execute a change initiative and a lot of the critical variables. Think proactive build-in versus reactive buy-in.
Corp!: What does it matter whether business leaders can lead through change? Why is it important?
Trautlein: It’s important because — it sounds trite, but it’s true — change is the only constant. We all know the stories about organizations that did not change with the times, and they’re not here anymore. There’s new technologies, markets shift, new generations coming into the workforce, customers expecting more and different things. Being a leader is all about leading change.
Change Intelligence®, Change Quotient®, and CQ® are registered trademarks of Barbara A. Trautlein, PhD. All rights reserved.
