Organizational psychologist, Adam Grant says you spend a quarter of your life at work and you should enjoy it! In his WorkLife Podcast with TED Audio Collective, Grant takes you inside the minds of some of the world’s most fascinating professionals to discover the keys to a better work life.
In this episode, How to Change Your Workplace, Adam Grant speaks with New York Times bestselling author and keynote speaker Dan Heath, who is a senior fellow at Duke University CASE center and co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovation education company. The NYT bestseller, Switch (co-authored with Dan’s brother, Chip Heath) is “the best book I’ve ever read on change,” says Adam Grant.
Adam Grant:
One day I got a call from a hospital that was working on a major change initiative. A committee of surgeons had identified a customer service problem. Basically, patients weren’t happy. And after 8 months of work, they were getting ready to roll out a big fix. They were going to train the entire staff…to smile more. I was appalled. When the surgeons saw that patients were dissatisfied, they immediately went and studied organizations with the happiest customers–and picked Disney and the Ritz Carlton. Not exactly the best fit for a hospital. There were a bunch of legitimate reasons that patients were miserable–starting with poor quality of care and long wait times–and none of them had anything to do with staff sparkle! The surgeons didn’t just misdiagnose the problem–they failed to diagnose it at all. Which left the health of their patients in peril. Even the smartest people in the room get stuck on change when they don’t look inside their own organizations for answers. Which is why change often goes wrong at work. But wherever you stand in the hierarchy, there’s a science of making it go right.
I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead, and live.
TODAY: How to champion change at work– from the bottom up and the top down.
Thanks to UKG for sponsoring this episode.
Organizations are always running change initiatives… and often failing at them. You’ve probably seen more than one change crash at work. A new automated expense tool—Bust. Your colleagues felt intimidated by a new technology. No meeting Wednesdays? Bomb. Your boss was too stuck in his ways to let your team try it. That new mentoring program?—Burn. Your new manager quit after a few months. So people develop change-fatigue. Then they get cynicism. And NOTHING ever gets better. The biggest obstacle to a successful change is human resistance.
[00:02:36] Dan Heath:
People have this sort of skepticism about change and everything you hear about change is pessimistic. Change is hard. People resist change. People dread change. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but it occurred to us very early on that that has to be oversimplified. And it has frankly, to be wrong.
Dan Heath is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of four long-running bestsellers: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. Dan’s new book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller, and it was included on “best books” lists from Apple, Amazon, the Financial Times, and others. Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who fight for social good. He is an entrepreneur himself, having founded Thinkwell, an innovative education company that next year will celebrate its 25th anniversary. Dan was named in 2013 to the Thinkers 50, a ranking of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers, and also to Fast Company magazine’s list of the Most Creative People in Business.
