Equipping individuals to lead organizational change
As a change agent, you might occasionally need to facilitate a leadership team to drive your change initiative forward. Like many meetings, leadership team meetings can be boring and ineffective. Leadership team meetings are especially challenging because the time when the entire team can meet in the same room is rare and easily squandered.
Follow these five rules to increase the productivity of your leadership team meetings, and thus make progress on your change initiative. [Read more...]
I spoke on the phone with someone this morning who has had tremendous success getting leadership buy-in from multiple levels in a large organization. As he shared his story, he reminded me of something that seems like overkill but that contributes to successful change initiatives: having meetings before the meeting.
Having pre-meetings is far different from having post-meetings. Post-meetings happen because not everything that needed to be said came out during the actual meeting, due to fear, mainly. Pre-meetings are held to make sure that what needs to happen in the actual meeting actually happens.
What do I mean by the actual meeting (herein referred to as the Meeting)? The Meeting is where people with crazy schedules (usually in leadership positions) somehow find a way to meet all at the same time. The topic for the Meeting, in whole or in part, is your change initiative.
To make the best use of the team’s time during the Meeting, only do the things in the Meeting that need to be done together as a team. Focus the team on the task at hand, whether it is a discussion about solutions or whether a decision must be made. Everything else should be done beforehand in pre-meetings with individuals or small groups.
Some of the things you can take care of in pre-meetings are:
Notice that I’m not talking about a pre-meeting e-mail. This is a real sit-down (or phone call if necessary) meeting where you are preparing individuals for the Meeting (and also helping you prepare for the Meeting). If the Meeting and its desired outcome are really important to the success of your change initiative, an e-mail is not going to cut it.
Having pre-meetings may seem like overkill, or even like playing politics. But, if you’ve ever been in a leadership team meeting that has careened out of control or that has become stuck on an irrelevant or minute point, most likely there was not enough preparation of the attendees beforehand.
Take the time to have pre-Meeting meetings so you can focus the Meeting on achieving the desired outcome for your initiative.
I’ve been thinking about how despite our better intentions, changing organizations is never predictable, and doesn’t perfectly fit into a nice theoretical model the way we wish it would.
As change agents, we frequently Dance in the Moment (a term I learned a few years ago in the CTI coaching program). While we work toward an envisioned future, we can only handle what is right in front of us, which is constantly shifting based on the reactions to the strategies we’re using to try to influence change.
If you think of the process of change as a dance, you realize it’s a partnership between two entities. Even if you haven’t taken ballroom dancing classes (or watched Dancing With the Stars), you probably know that each person in the duo has a specific role: leader and follower.
A few of the moves that the leader does to show the follower where to go are overt gestures that can be observed from the audience. However, most of the time the follower just seems like she knows what to do next, even if the dance is not choreographed. For the most part, the dance is a series of subtle nudges by the leader: a tug of the hand, a slight pressure at the waist that indicate the steps and the direction to go next.
The follower, for her part, responds to the nudges with what she interprets as appropriate movements, and adds her own flair to the dance. Sometimes the corresponding movements are what the leader intended, and sometimes they aren’t. Depending on the leader’s ability to react quickly, the result can be a seamless transition, or it could be a disastrous fall. Either way, it is the role of the leader to make the follower look good.
It’s important to note that the dance doesn’t work at all without a third element: the music. The nudges by the leader mean nothing to the follower if there is no context, no framework that they share. The music tells the dancers if they are doing the Waltz or the Mambo. They won’t get very far without stepping on toes if they are performing one of each. The music also keeps them in step, moving together at the same time.
The analogies of the dance’s leader and follower to the subject of organizational change are obvious. But the music might be a lot of things. What do you think?
What role does music play in the dance of change?
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By Robert Gold
Everyone makes mistakes – we often say that ‘to err is human, to forgive divine.’ And despite occasional assertions to the contrary, our leaders are in fact human. So our leaders have made mistakes, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The consequences of our leaders’ mistakes are usually greater than the mistakes of those led; through their decisions and actions, leaders cause many others to do things. This is the definition of leadership. In meritocracies, individuals rise to leadership roles because they are viewed as capable and skillful, and are therefore expected to make good decisions for the organizations they lead. But we also say that ‘mistakes will happen.’
About a week ago, U.S. President Barack Obama made a comment at a press conference (about the racially-charged arrest of a noted college professor) that exploded into a firestorm of popular and media criticism. In an unscheduled press appearance a few days later, he somewhat clumsily acknowledged his error, and has since arranged to sit down for a beer with the professor and police officer involved. His admission was kind of a refreshing moment. In his remarks, Obama said that he hoped the episode would become a ‘teachable moment,’ presumably on the topic of race at the center of the incident. Perhaps it can be a teachable moment here, as well.
We properly hold our leaders to a higher standard when it comes to their errors; we want errors to happen infrequently, we want leaders to be motivated to avoid errors, we want errors to be quickly rectified. We want confidence that our leaders’ directions will lead to good outcomes for ourselves. Leaders with too many errors don’t always get to keep their jobs, especially when financial performance and stock price reflect the consequences of those errors.
Leaders face a dilemma when they err – to avoid the appearance of fallibility so as to sustain a perception of error-free performance, or to acknowledge their error and risk losing the support and trust of those they lead. All too often, leaders find it more attractive to try to be seen as error-free.
Many of the organizations I’ve worked with have become dysfunctional over time because of this approach to error. Their leaders are willing (sometimes even relieved) to unburden themselves of their misdeeds behind closed doors, but are simply unable to do so in a public setting. The members of these organizations are aware of the mistakes, but fear retribution from raising any public discussion of the errors. Thus, leaders and the led enable each other to sustain a fictional parallel universe in which everything is (and will continue to be) hunky-dory. It is unsurprising when these leaders finally do go away, and only a short time before a new parallel universe is constructed around the next regime.
But other organizations have a healthier culture in which errors are expected and handled as part of normal routine. Leaders freely admit their mistakes and are open to criticism. Willingness to quickly identify problems and to focus on corrective action rather than blame means that the impact of errors is lessened. Contrary to intuition, employees trust and are loyal to their fallible leaders more than those who attempt to appear infallible.
Strategy is about setting a direction for an uncertain future. Errors will be made. Hypotheses will be more quickly proven or disproven when leaders expect to be wrong, and course corrections can easily be made. But how often have you heard your leader say, “I made a mistake, and I was wrong. Let’s move on.” ? Have there been teachable moments in your organization? Please share your comments below.
Robert S. Gold brings over three decades of professional experience to his role as founder and thought leader of Tenacious Tortoise, LLC.
This post was originally published at the Tenacious Tortoise blog. Reprinted with permission.
It almost goes without saying that an organizational change initiative without proper levels of leadership support is doomed to fail. Perhaps the project will be paid lip service, but it will ultimately either be ignored into oblivion or cut short of its potential with one drop of the axe.
Not only do organizational leaders have the power to make or break your project on their own, but it is impossible to bypass them to change the organization below. Individuals experiencing change will look to those in power for confirmation that they are committed to the new way of doing things. It is under intense scrutiny that leaders are watched to see if their actions match their intentions. If not, the change initiative will be dismissed as “flavor of the month” and not taken seriously.
Amid all this doom and gloom, there is a bright side. You don’t have to settle for the level of leadership support you currently have. As fellow human beings, leaders are capable of being informed and influenced.
Take the following steps to determine how to best garner the support of the most influential people in your organization. [Read more...]
I’ve found through my conversations with organizational change agents that one of the most common challenges is getting individuals – usually peers or superiors – to do what needs to be done to make change happen.
Does this sound familiar?
The head of another department is not responsive to my requests.
An executive is not communicating the change properly, and it’s diminishing the message.
The CEO insists on maintaining an environment that is not conducive to the changes we should make.
Join me for a free webinar that shows you 5 steps to gain leadership support for your change initiative – through their words and actions.
Beyond Buy-in: Raise Leadership Support for Your Change Initiative
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2009
Time: 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern
Space is limited. Please register to reserve your spot and receive log-in details.
I had lunch today with a woman who is interested in a career in organizational development or change management. She is currently in sales development and getting her MBA.
My advice? Start right now.
Don’t wait until you have a job with “change” in the description.
Don’t wait until you have a title that gives you the power to change things.
Don’t wait for permission.
Assume the role that you’re itching to play, no matter where you are in the organization.
Take action to change something for the better. Today.
I had another conversation today with a man who wished he had done just that. In the last few years, he saw that things were being poorly managed, that processes needed to improve, that silos needed to be broken down. Unfortunately, at the time he thought that he was not in a position to say or do anything to make a difference. Now, the company is being sold, and he doesn’t work there any more.
If you see a problem, you might be the only one who can start to fix it.
Inquiry: What will you change today?
To better clarify what needs changing, check out the Change Starts Here workbook.
In the last few days, I gobbled up the information in a wisdom-packed book called The VITAL Core, by Audrey Dorsey. In her work as a Fortune 500 executive coach, the author has identified five core focus areas of successful leaders:
Vision – Know your ultimate pursuit
Intention – Focus on clear goals and have a plan of action
Telling Your Story – Engage people and build relationships
Attitude – Hold beliefs and values that support you
Leverage – Use your resources wisely
The book contains stories that demonstrate each key point, then each chapter zeroes in on the specific steps you can take to make progress on your own toward being a more successful leader.
One new insight that is particularly useful for change agents is the value of learning to Tell Your Story. When you talk about your change initiative, do you make it compelling and draw people into the story? One of seven tips for generating impactful stories is to “convert information into impressions” – that is, win people over not only with logic but with how they should feel about the project. If you want the other six tips, plus numerous others, you’ll have to read the book: www.thevitalcore.com.
In the history of Balanced Scorecard implementations and organizational change in general, stories of projects falling by the wayside are numerous. Even organizations that have had great success and demonstrated breakthrough results have fallen away from the methodology, either due to a change in leadership or from the initiative growing stale. In the case of The Jel Sert Company, a mid-size food manufacturer based in West Chicago, Illinois, the project never quite gained the traction it needed to sustain itself, and the leadership team made the conscious decision to end it. [Read more...]
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