Bounce Back After Change: Five Avenues for Mastering Resilience
September 25, 2009
By Liisa Hardaloupas, M.O.D. and Heather Stagl
For an inanimate object resilience is like elasticity: the ability to return to its original form after being bent, compressed, or stretched. A rubber band is resilient; a coffee cup that is dropped, spilled and broken is not.
Similarly, for a person resilience is the ability to grasp, assimilate and move forward from a disruption or change. Instead of returning to the original form like the rubber band, a resilient person is his same self but with the new information incorporated into the way he is and works. Read more
Four Reasons NOT to Conduct an Employee Survey
September 22, 2009
Employee surveys are useful tools for understanding the beliefs, attitudes and opinions of an organization as a whole. Surveys are commonly used in pursuit of change to discover and understand organizational culture, resistance, morale, and a host of other characteristics that can shine the light on opportunities for improvement.
However, not all surveys will improve the situation. The following are four warning signs that conducting a survey may do more harm than good. Read more
The birth of a part-time change agent
September 17, 2009
In my own story of organizational change as well as the stories of others, being a change agent started out as a part-time thing. Sometimes you realize that in order to effectively perform your day job, organizational changes need to happen so you take them on. Sometimes the opportunities you see are outside the scope of your job, so you try to get involved. Either way, you can’t just give up your “day job” to start working full time as a change agent.
I’ve recently talked to a salesperson and an IT system administrator who both see opportunities and have hopes of implementing organizational change within their companies, but at the moment, it’s not in their job description.
What are they doing to get started as a change agent?
The salesperson has contacted the corporate Organization Development function to let them know she is interested in that type of work, so when something needs to be done in her division, they might be able to involve her. She has identified that silos exist in her division, and she’s dedicated to figuring out how to influence improvements within the scope of her own job.
The IT system administrator would like to develop a centralized system that would change the way the company uses information. The project is out of the scope of his current job. He wrote up a proposal for the system that has been passed around at higher levels, and he made a presentation at a company conference. Now he’s starting to set up meetings with influential leaders in the company to try to build buy-in for his idea.
How did you get started as a change agent (or what are you doing to start)? I would love to hear your stories.
My one regret
September 8, 2009
If there is one regret I have from my years as an internal organizational change agent, it’s that I avoided having some of the tough one-on-one conversations that may have yielded large gains.
The reasons for avoidance were usually fear-based: fear of hurting someone’s feelings, fear of retaliation, fear that it would backfire and result in the opposite of my desired outcome. Sometimes the reasons were more political: it’s not my place to talk to certain leaders outside the chain of command or across boundaries. Political reasons are still based in fear – the fear of stepping out of place by saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.
It was easy to rely on subtle hints (or just plain hope) to get the message across that someone was hijacking the change initiative, or sending mixed signals, or not fully understanding the importance of implementing organizational change to achieve financial objectives. In some cases, I let others (higher-ups) field the important conversations for me. Unfortunately, avoidance is rarely an effective route for getting behavior change.
So I was delighted to find a book that gives practical step-by-step advice about how to have these important conversations: Crucial Conversations
According to the book, crucial conversations are those in which:
- Opinions vary – on the surface, you don’t agree.
- Stakes are high – the outcome and the relationship are important.
- Emotions run strong – including the aforementioned fear.
Who do you need to have a crucial conversation with?
If you enjoyed this post you may also like:
- How to deal with a clueless boss
- How to Get Beyond Leadership Buy-in
- Four Ways to Boost Your Organizational Power
The trouble with vision
September 1, 2009
It’s fairly common knowledge that creating and communicating a compelling vision is important for any change effort. A well-crafted vision helps align people on a clear path to the future. The vision gives people direction so that short of any other information they still know where to aim.
The trouble is that organizational change only happens when there is a change in behaviors. If you want to influence change, you have to figure out what you want people to do, so you can figure out how to get them to do it.
The vision does not tell people what to do; it tells them where they are going. If you tell a group of people in New York that their destination is San Francisco in three months, left to their own devices they will decide for themselves if they want to fly, drive, bike, walk, or somehow swim.
Of course, you also cannot figure out every task of every person every day that is required to reach the vision. Not only is it an impossible task, but it would surely end in revolt.
The happy medium that will attain results is to determine the key behaviors of certain individuals. For example, in Case Study: A Roundabout Path to Increasing Employee Suggestions, it was assumed at first that the key behavior was to get people to turn ideas into the suggestion box. It turned out that the key behavior that increased suggestions was to have the managers ask for them.
Once you know the key behaviors that will elicit change in your organization, you can work with those individuals and groups to ensure that they happen (through accountability, incentives, communication, etc.). Use the vision to give people a sense of direction and purpose, but don’t rely on it to align important consistent behaviors.
What are the key behaviors that will drive change in your organization?
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