The phrase leaders are trained to shut down … and maybe shouldn’t

“We’ve always done it this way,” is a phrase leaders cringe at, but Julie Winkle Giulioni writes that you dismiss it at your peril.

During a recent session I facilitated with a group of senior leaders, an issue I’ve been grappling with came to a vivid and illuminating head. A vice president who managed several hundred people had spent ten minutes describing his team’s resistance to a particular change — and to the catchphrase that caused his blood to boil.

“But we’ve always done it this way.”

One of his peers suddenly interrupted, pushing back on him and his position. She shared that one practice he’d proposed scrapping had become the gold standard for her team and continued to serve customers well. Maybe, she suggested, there was something worth listening to in what they were protecting.

That one comment changed the conversation. A group of executives who’d all been trained to treat “but we’ve always done it this way” as the enemy of innovation started talking instead about their own knee-jerk instinct to pull everyone forward without pausing properly to look back. To ask what was actually working well. To name it, and to use it as a launchpad instead of clearing the ground and starting from square one.

Don’t change for change’s sake

I would imagine you’re seeing some version of this in your own organization. Leaders are adopting new tools before they’ve finished evaluating the old ones. Restructuring because restructuring feels like motion. Chasing AI integration out of fear of being left behind more than out of a strategy for moving forward. Somewhere along the way, “we’ve always done it this way” became one phrase leaders were universally trained to shut down, while “let’s try something new” got a free pass — even as it stalls teams just as often, and at a higher price.

Here’s the core issue for leaders: resistance to change and respect for what works can sound very similar. The difference isn’t always obvious, which is exactly why leaders frequently default to some version of “if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got.”

Swapping out something that’s working just because it’s old doesn’t eliminate risk. It just introduces a new kind of risk, sight unseen. Don’t get me wrong. Leaders can’t afford to wallow in the past, treating nostalgia like a strategy. Effective leaders and organizations understand that innovation and change are essential to success. But in our need for speed, might we be confusing resistance with real experience? Inertia with investment? Complacency with competence?

Maybe, in the interest of intelligent innovation, it’s time to suspend the knee-jerk reaction to “we’ve always done it this way” and take a beat instead. Entertain (even for a moment) the possibility that we may be about to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Leaders who unravel their reflexive shutdown response to “but we’ve always done it this way” enjoy several benefits. They experience the efficiency of keeping what’s already working instead of reinventing it from scratch. They communicate to the people who built it — through real trial, real error, real cost — that the work mattered. And they give their team solid ground to stand on while everything else around them changes, which turns out to matter more than most change plans take into account.

3 questions to ask

So how do you rewire that automatic response? Beyond biting your tongue, you can resist the urge to shut down what you assume is limited thinking by asking three things instead.

• What earned its keep? Not what people want to keep, but what’s actually held up. What’s been seen as valuable and borrowed by others in the organization, and what continues to serve customers. Where there are kernels of goodness to bring forward.
• What’s gone stale? Every practice that’s survived also has friction that’s frequently not discussed or named. An overt conversation about these issues creates greater receptivity to change while often offering cautions and guardrails for what’s to come.
• What’s it ready to become? Carrying something forward isn’t the same as preserving it exactly as it was. Take that vice president’s team: what he and his peers’ team actually valued wasn’t the check-in call itself — it was what the call was built to catch, a shift in a client’s tone before it turned into a problem on paper. It turned out they could serve that same purpose even better with more frequent pulse surveys.

These questions matter because of what they do for people, not just for processes. Ask a team to change everything at once, and they don’t experience it as innovation; they experience it as free fall. Leave one familiar and legitimately workable piece intact, and you give them a foothold. You give them something they already trust enough to build forward from, instead of something they must abandon before they can even start.

New is exciting. Incentivized. Necessary. But it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Leaders who want to move quickly and advance innovation need to be careful not to discount reality-based reflection just because it resembles resistance.

So, the next time someone on your team says, “but we’ve always done it this way,” take a breath, wait a minute and welcome it as a window into their minds… and an opportunity to find an even better way forward.

Source: https://www.smartbrief.com/original/the-phrase-leaders-are-trained-to-shut-down-and-maybe-shouldnt?utm_term=AEE6C64D-A551-4448-AC86-73E9EA97DDFE&lrh=286d9352d62fd57e4fed3250c88b0f8daf660a6cf28a1a542f1b6f7d4db58c17&utm_campaign=65FBA7DD-A78F-4185-A826-DB485198BE88&utm_content=2365A4DC-506F-4D2D-B133-BBB2335C9CE6&utm_source=brief