“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This quip from business guru Peter Drucker comes to mind when I think about change. Wherever you are in a change process, how leadership shows up impacts success. At the City of Fort Myers, we have been on a digital transformation journey for the past two years. What’s apparent about this process is that no matter how much I want it to be great my will is not enough. Leading change is hard. People don’t like change, and change is fundamentally not about processes or software. It is about people. So how are we handling the people business in order to deliver success?

Our first action was to build engagement from division managers and IT partners. To achieve buy-in we held a workshop laying out the case, vision and approach for change. This was followed by one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders to understand current challenges and resistance points. Without the division managers as champions for change, nothing was going to move. Part of the workshop was also devoted to creating a sense of urgency around the change. It would have been one thing to say, “Well, times are changing and we need to change with them.” It was another to go into the meeting and vulnerably share our why.

Our then director and I shared the embarrassing story of how a resident came in, exposed our lack of understanding of the emerging digital landscape and wiped the floor with us in front of a councilmember (see my February column). Essentially, we were on the hotseat to either change or be replaced.

While we agreed on the need to change, we were faced with one of the biggest impediments to change which is a fixed mindset; the belief that one’s intelligence or abilities are static traits and cannot be changed. The alternative is a growth mindset where one sees intelligence and abilities as dynamic and capable of being impacted through effort, persistence and learning from mistakes.

A great read on this subject is Grit by Angela Duckworth. Many people in the utility industry suffer from a fixed mindset. As a leader, your job is not only to identify it, but to craft ways for your employees to move beyond it. This can be accomplished through stretch goals and work assignments that are uncomfortable. People do not grow when they are comfortable. I’d even argue that comfort fosters a decline in ability.

Even with the right mindset, software and processes in place, failure is an option.  People may not adopt the new system but rather adapt the new system to their old way of work. To reduce this temptation, you need to tweak the environment and build habits as Chip and Dan Heath describe in Switch.

For example, part of our digital transformation was to retrench our computerized maintenance management system. One temptation we’ve seen is printing paper work orders, marking them up, giving them to an administrative assistant and having them keyed into the system rather than using the new tablets. This totally undermines the purpose of digitization. To build better habits we continually audit the process making sure people are following the SOPs. As we find discrepancies between the SOPs and actual work, we reinforce the SOP as well as the reasoning behind them.

Leading change is hard, but failing to lead it is harder. As a utility leader, you must embrace the challenges and demonstrate your commitment to the change. Your willingness to remain visible, persistent and accountable will ultimately determine whether the change becomes part of the culture or gets eaten for breakfast.