Strategy is about making things happen. This generally requires getting a group of human beings to agree to do things differently.

In theory, bosses can just tell employees what to do. In practice, as noted by 17th century English poet and change management expert Samuel Butler, “He that complies against his will, is of his own opinion still.”

The best leaders not only get people to do stuff but get people to want to do stuff.

Strategic execution has many components, but for our purposes here, let’s look at leading change in environments that require the buy-in of an independent-minded cadre of executives—that is, situations in which the success of the strategy hinges on humans-with-autonomy making different choices than the ones they have made previously.

That is a reasonable description of the entire consulting enterprise, but it’s also particularly applicable to the specific sector of consulting—retail—where one of us, Tamar, spent most of her career. Sometimes her work focused on how to get consumers to make new choices, but more often it focused further up the chain on store managers, club managers, or franchisees. The store managers have always presented the larger challenge. This is in part because the “new choices” have to meet a very high bar:

• Store managers know much more than anyone else about their store, customers, and market.
• We’ve never once met a store manager who had enough labor hours in her budget to do all the things she was expected to do.

But it’s also because most strategies depend on a store manager’s alignment and their autonomy—their ability to intelligently adjust and prioritize based on local conditions—as well as their ability to turn around and induce a whole other crew of autonomous humans to make new choices.

Changing behavior in organizations with a lot of distributed autonomy is hard. Those who hold that autonomy need to believe the change is a move in the right direction and worth bothering with in light of all of the other decisions and responsibilities on their plates.

Furthermore, these beliefs need to be achieved at scale. As a leader, you cannot always rely on time-intensive sequences of pairwise conversations and small-group cocreation workshops to build commitment; they are obliged to “broadcast." What can you do to make those broadcasts more likely to succeed?

Describe the current state with balance and fidelity

Don’t be a platform arsonist. It can be tempting to overplay the weaknesses and failures of the current state so you can burnish the glow of your desperately-hoped-for future state. Don’t do it. A team that thinks you cannot or will not describe point A will not be following you to point B.

Your description of the current state is the first test of the credibility of your guidance--do you understand the situation well enough to proceed through to complication and recommendation? Can you be trusted to share all the facts or just the ones that advance your argument?

Don’t skim glibly past all the details. You will be under constant pressure to keep it short and simple, but if your audience contains segments and multitudes, so should your description of the status quo ante.

The best and most credibility-building descriptions of the current state include micro-details that make it clear you have actually considered the experience of your decision makers.

Tamar remembers winning over a group of cynical bakery franchisees by alluding to the fact they would never have an accurate muffin inventory so long as it took the staff member several extra keystrokes to tally any flavor other than the alphabetically advantaged “blueberry.” It wasn’t earthshaking, or even decisive. It was just evidence she was paying attention.

Validate past decisions and implicate yourself in any past mistakes

It’s taken a couple centuries of inadvertent experimentation, but we are now able to conclude that telling people they are stupid or bad does not incline them to take your advice. They need to hear that their existing decisions are well intentioned and rational (and if you must describe them as mistaken, implicate yourself in the mistake).

Consider two change narratives:

1. We’ve long done X, but external conditions have changed and, as a result, we now need to do Y.
2. We’ve long done X, but there is lots of evidence that Y is much more effective. 

Option 1 will require you to prove that things have changed and that the new conditions are better suited to new motions.

Option 2 will require you to dig into just how poorly current behaviors compare with recommended ones.

You would never say that previous decisions were lazy or stupid, but you don’t have to. If that conclusion can possibly be drawn, our lizard brains will draw it for ourselves!

Now, all of the energy that might have gone to considering new conditions or learning new motions will instead focus on dismantling the threat to personal esteem.

If, as a leader, you must describe previous motions as mistaken, you should also implicate yourself in the mistake. This doesn’t have to be a radical martyrdom—it can be accomplished by sharing surprise at the new findings, or even initial skepticism, ultimately overcome.

The point is to eliminate the stigma of having done things the old way or having believed the old findings.

This advice may seem very basic and yet, if you are listening for it, you will find many situations where it is not applied. A leader who takes ownership for the point of departure and the point of arrival is rare.

New leaders in particular want to distinguish themselves from the old regime, and in doing so, they often manage to offend all of the old regime’s subjects.

Consultants are anxious to prove their recommendations are sufficiently new and sufficiently better and, ironically, in doing so, they tend to reduce the odds that those recommendations will be adopted.

When it comes to convincing autonomous cohorts to do something different, contempt for the current state is wildly unproductive because shame (and the lengths humans will go to avoid shame) is wildly unproductive. (Honestly, contempt is bad news all around. It’s not just an unproductive communication style. It’s a decent predictor of lousy strategies and recommendations. At root, it is a failure to understand experience and motivations.)

The best change narratives underplay the weaknesses of the old and overplay the early adoption of the new. Whenever you have the chance to hold a mirror up to your audience’s best self, take it!

“We have long done X, which was beautifully suited to prevailing conditions and served us marvelously! As those conditions change, the natural evolution of those motions will be to do Y. Indeed, many of you have already started to move in this direction …”

Present your case as the judge, not one of the lawyers

Your allegiance is to your audience.

In a perfect world, they would have participated in a series of workshops laying out the options and debating their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Instead, you have served as their proxy. On their behalf, you have heard and weighed all the arguments, and now you are sharing the conclusions for their benefit.

So … describe your process and let them explore the options you considered. If there were instructive debates or requests for incremental analysis—share those too.

If your allegiance is to your audience, well, then it can’t be to one side of the debate. Seek out and include the best arguments for the options you have not selected rather than pre-hobbled strawmen. Include the weaknesses and downsides of your recommendation.

Your autonomous humans know that no choice is perfect. A good argument for the road not taken increases confidence in your honesty and the comprehensiveness and rigor of your decision calculus.

It also controls or at least disarms the informal post-communication chatter where someone else ventures this good argument and you are not present to address it. You are better off anticipating and incorporating likely resistance than leaving it unchaperoned.

Detail and debug the last mile

Leaders have to be ready to acknowledge that change is hard but also vigilant about not making it harder.

If you are pushing a rock up a hill, it’s a good idea to clear debris from your path before you start:

• Be painstakingly clear about what the new motions will look like and what old motions they will replace. Write and share a detailed “from/to” or “before/after.”
• Give people all the information they need in one place. Don’t make them search for instructions, links, or the data they need to execute their new motions. Every step that cannot be easily taken is a potential failure point.
• Attach new motions to old routines so that there are clear prompts for action.

If you can’t ensure that everything will work perfectly from the start, calendar time to gather feedback and troubleshoot. This establishes your accountability to the team as well as their accountability to the process.

Being linear, logical, left-brained thinkers, executives (and consultants) tend to put a lot of energy into figuring out what needs to change, and even how that change needs to be made. But success depends at least as much on understanding the people who need to change and what makes them tick.

Autonomous humans, unlike autonomous cars, don’t just go where they are told to go.

Engage them honestly and with humility, be vulnerable and, above all else, be practical. Then people will naturally want to go where you are trying to lead them.