The Magic Words

Three minutes into the phone call the recruiter said the magic words and my interest dropped to zero. Now it was just a matter of finding a nice way to say "no thanks." And there was no way I could tell him the truth.

"They are looking for an outside change agent."

It sounds flattering and exciting. They want to change and I might be the guy to help them transform a moribund organization. But it rarely works out that way.

I speak from personal experience and from the experience of friends and colleagues who have taken the leap.

In all the cases I know first hand, the outsider hired as a change agent was trapped inside an iron triangle that doomed them.

The first leg is the hiring manager. They will be a miserable boss to have because they are, in some combination, clueless, cowardly, demanding, and political.

The demanding and political are straight-forward. The hiring manager want results from the new hire but also wants to be able to dodge responsibility for any thing bad. The outside change agent gets the blame if the key numbers don't turn around. The manager gets credit for thinking outside the box by making the outside hire. If it doesn't work out, well, he tried.

Clueless-because if they knew what direction they wanted to move, they wouldn't use a meaningless term like change agent. They'd say, "I need some one who knows how to brand services" or "we need an experienced operations leader who can get our on-time delivery up to 96%."

Cowardice comes in two flavors. First, he is looking for someone else to formulate solutions, leaving the hiring manager to slide into the comfortable role of judge/critic/evaluator. This means the manager gets only the upside. If his new change agent comes up with a winning idea, the hiring manager gets to take a bow. But in the meantime, he gets to veto ideas that are scary to the organization with the blame falling on the outsider for lack of creativity/perspective/industry expertise.

The other flavor of cowardice is on the personnel front. While recognizing the need for change, the hiring manager doesn't want to get his hands dirty dealing with his recalcitrant subordinates. By hiring an outsider, he no longer has to take responsibility for that. The change agent is supposed to use her magical interpersonal skills to overcome opposition no matter how ill-informed and intransigent.

Those intransigent managers are the second leg of the triangle. They are the change agent's peers. They are part of the problem (if they were eager to change and if they knew what needed to be done, the company wouldn't need a change agent).

Not every peer is a major roadblock, but enough of them are as to make peer management a major time drain. Sorting out the lay of the land, finding allies, trying to win over opponents-- these must be done in any organization, but they are triply difficult for the outside change agent. As an outsider, she must sort out friend from foe In addition, she has very little political capital in her account. Finally, the clock is ticking-- she doesn't have years to produce results.

Boldness is required and clear insight, but the lack of political capital means she will be lucky to get a fraction of her ideas implemented. Her initiatives will be dumbed-down, compromised, and delayed. And then, her boss will wonder aloud why she is making such slow progress.

The people who report to her complete the trap. She can't expect to be greeted with open arms; some of those who report to her wanted the job she got. They are primed to find fault. Others are heavily invested in the status quo. She can't expect them to jump on her bandwagon. She will meet resistance. And remember, the clock is ticking for her, not them.

This is a bleak view, but based on multiple examples i've seen personally from various vantage points. Those examples (call them anecdotes if you wish, but I prefer "case studies") convince me that effective change agents must come from inside an organization like Jack Welch at GE. For an outsider, the pain/gain trade-off is just too unbalanced.

This doesn't mean that organizations can't change or that outsiders can't make an impact. I actually have been part of successful change efforts. The thing is, we didn't spend a lot of time talking about it in those terms. We were too busy trying to grow a division that had been a backwater.