Category Archives: Creating Change

It Takes How Long?!

Posted on by
Reply

I have met with numerous companies who say that it will take 12 months to plan a leadership development program and then 6 months to implement and that then there will be another 6 months of data gathering and that then they will start to see the long-term behavioural changes they desire and so on. It does NOT take that long to start changing leadership, team performance or anything else you care to imagine. Not to mention the fact that by the time you develop it, it will be outdated and people will have “left the building.”

A colleague who is managing a large enterprise told me the other day about how he has recently come into the organisation and immediately started sorting out the non-performing culture. He called one underperformer into his office who broke down, assuming they were about to be fired. He said, “No, I’m not firing you. I want to give you a chance. But this is what you have to do.” That person immediately lifted their game and has been performing very well. Immediate change in performance! The person just had to see a reason and have a specific plan.

Now, he wasn’t using the threat of firing – the employee initially assumed he was taking that route. That fear-based kind of threat will generally only prompt short-term and shallow change, unless you go the route of megalomaniacal fascist dictator. But that would require far more resources than most of you can bring to bear, not to mention the nasty lifestyle.

Here are 7 keys to dramatic organisational change (because that’s the number of completion):

  1. Motivation – Assess the individual’s motivation and how to ally with that for change. Most people act in their self-interest. Whole nations do. That’s the force of human nature and history. (If you find someone motivated by the greater good, hold on to them for dear life.) If you want to change something in the workplace or your organisation or society, find out what makes them tick and work with it. That’s why leadership development programs that run alongside and outside of work practices and needs become irrelevant. “That’s all fine in theory”, people say, “but my job is to make money or xxxx”. Combine leadership with job performance and needs!
  2. Process – Ensure that the process you are putting in place are allied to motivations, capability and desired results. It is unfortunately unsurprising how frequently these are not aligned.
  3. The Job – The work itself should be relevant, meaningful and important to outcomes. And the people doing it should be shown the connections. Their tasks should also be clearly aligned with capabilities or at a level for which they can realistically strive, just above their current capability. (Don’t position them at or beyond their maximum level of incompetence.)
  4. Environment – Make sure that the environment and resources support the new behaviours and desired processes/outcomes. There’s nothing worse than being a shown a new way to do something, being excited and then finding you don’t have the tools to do the job.
  5. Expectations – There should be specific expectations. Don’t be vague. Be explicit about behaviours, norms, values and outcomes.
  6. Rewards and Punishments – Reward the desired behaviour and punish (or, in hrspeak/eduspeak/psychespeak, enable negative consequences for) the undesirable. But positive reinforcements and rewards are more powerful in the long run and should be emphasised far more than punishments/negatives. The negatives help to set the boundaries, just like your children should be told, “No, don’t touch the burning hot stove or you will be burnt and it will hurt!”
  7. Flexibility – Adjust course as needed. Let the people shape the outcome – they should “own it”. You might need to change your mind about how to achieve something. The important thing is achieving it in a way that makes all proud and optimises benefits.

I work to create dramatic change. Most of my consulting projects are 6 months or less. I start getting results within a few weeks, if not immediately – not always the whole, but in part. And that’s partially because I come in focussed on achieving specific results and integrate everything I do and communicate into achieving those results. Assuming that sufficient resources can be applied and that people have the capability, then large organisations can be subject to dramatic change. The necessary ingredient is sufficient political/leadership will.

Following through to completion and then following up on those projects, checking results against an annual business cycle, tweaking and reinforcing may well happen over the course of a year or more (and should be reinforced for long-term change and adaptation). But for most organisations, if you don’t start seeing results – that is, changing behaviours – within 2-3 months, then you or your manager or your HR people are probably spinning their wheels or just conducting assessments and analyses. It kills action, breeds cynicism and leads to poor outcomes.

Change doesn’t have to take as long as you think.

Motivation through Meaningfulness

Posted on by
Reply

I was ruminating today on an experience earlier this year, when I attended a presentation by an individual connected with The Hunger Project. It’s an initiative to help communities (particularly through women) in the developing world to start successful programs to relieve hunger and poverty. This often takes the form of advocating for those communities, educating and training local people in business, and liaising with relevant authorities to enable positive action. It is highly successful and very inspiring work. For relatively small inputs, some tremendous results have been created. (You can learn a lot more on their website. You may even wish to support them.)

The presenter made an interesting comment that I immediately recognised as reality: she said that the Australian head of McKinsey & Co. (global consulting firm) had marvelled at their results and wondered how they could possibly be so effective and pondered that if McKinsey, for all of their MBAs, PhDs, models and matrices and armies of consultants, could get such similar results it would be unheard of. (He then promptly joined the board as I understand it.) And there, folks, is why it does not pay to trust in the McKinseys of the world to generate change: they just don’t understand people, organisations, communities and causes. I would not hire that guy.

I knew immediately why it was so far beyond their experience. That’s because you really need to understand what is meant by something being “meaningful” to people. The Hunger Project work is driven by life and death situations, the drive to truly rise out of a desperate situation, the need to form communities that try to build up their people, not tear them down. For all of their analyses and charts, the global consulting firms are not about truly changing their clients’ situation. They are there to “manage change” or conduct a strategic analysis and, more often than not, end up billing hundreds of thousands of dollars writing a series of glorified reports. Even when such consulting firms approach large-scale transformations, their results are patchy. It’s partly because the cause itself has to be meaningful to you and to the people with whom you work.

We should want to lead for change, to add real lasting value, to create something truly meaningful for people. That’s where true leadership lies. But it also requires deep observation and appreciation of the environment, appropriate allocation of resources that really aid the cause and the activation of the motivation of people and institutions willing to help.

Here are two simple questions to help guide your initiatives:

  1. How is this meaningful to me and others?
  2. Am I making that meaning integral to how and why we do the work?

Are You Rocking the Boat?

Posted on by
Reply

Too many leaders focus on just “getting things running along smoothly.”

This kind of deficit model for leadership assumes that it’s best “not to rock the boat” once things are functioning at an average level. Thus, leaders and managers say that there’s no need for new programs or innovations, no need to improve team performance or organisational capability, or no need to “take on something else.” If there’s anything that companies like Apple have shown the world, it’s that “taking on something else” is a tremendous way to become market, nay, world leaders.

I love the song, “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” from the musical Guys and Dolls. The premise behind the song is that the “sinner” gambler, Nicely Nicely, has a dream that if he rocks the boat on the way to heaven, the devil will drag him under (he decides that he should repent and turn to religion, or at least the Salvation Army). But I’ve often inserted a negative when singing the song to my girls: “Sit down, you’re NOT rocking the boat!” Rocking the boat can get it off those shoals, rocks and sandbars that it’s stuck on. Sometimes it’s what leaders need to do.

I’ve often run into company leaders who say, “Oh, I’m not interested in trying anything new. The guys are settled in now and I don’t want to cause any unrest.” That’s fine if you’ve just had a major traumatic event – people should not be overwhelmed. But it’s a poor position if you want to continue to grow. And, as many have said before, if you’re not growing in business, you’re going backwards (whether you know it or not). Sometimes your stagnation only shows up when everyone else leaps ahead of you.

We need to always be seeking to improve what we are doing and that never happens by just keeping things on an even keel. Anyone who sails knows that you need to tack and jib into and through the wind in order to maintain speed and direction. It’s not enough to keep the boat afloat if you want to make headway.

What about personally? Taking the easy road is saying that you are happy to just stay where you are and not try to challenge yourself. I have always tried to challenge myself in my work and never just maintain the status quo. There are always means to keep growing and challenging yourself. Once, while I was working at University in the U.S., I asked my boss what I should do about a number of opportunities that presented themselves. Which should I apply to? His answer was simple, “Which will help you grow more?”

It’s not about being self-serving, it’s about learning how to serve even more. Don’t take the easy road out, challenge yourself and your people.

Should You Broadcast Around the World to Make Change?

Posted on by
Reply

By now, most business people have probably heard of (or read in its entirety) Greg Smith’s op-ed excoriating Goldman Sachs’ culture of – as he asserts – extreme greed and nauseating attitudes towards client “muppets” whom they regularly seek to “rip off”. (It brings new meaning to the movie title, “The Muppets Take Manhattan”.)

The Muppets Take Manhattan
Image via Wikipedia

I have no idea what any of those people in Goldman Sachs are like. My personal familiarity runs as deep as movies about Wall Street (named, as prosaically as the products they deliver, “Wall Street”) and a mild acquaintance with equally nauseating professional speakers who make a living charging people $1000 a pop to hear about how they ripped off people’s homes and livelihoods, flushed them down the toilet living the high life while they destroyed the global economy (and now they feel bad and want to charge you for hearing about how bad they were – irony, anyone? Or just simply another ripoff?). But I do have a question as to what Smith could achieve by resigning, following this up with a damning public piece and maintaining that this is an effort to “change the culture.”

The reality is that, given his exit from the firm, the senior leaders of the company will not care one whit about his challenge, except for the mild embarrassment that they receive. Various global business newspapers – e.g. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times – will undoubtedly run some articles for a short while. Will that really change behaviour?

When you consider that the CEOs of such companies still receive $12 or $13 million in share bonuses every year, despite the fact that they are even betting against their own clients’ investment success, the likelihood is very low that they will change their behaviours (if they are as appalling as claimed, to be fair) by being so severely stung by a former executive’s accusations. More likely is that Smith’s assertions would prove to be another rallying cry to “change the culture” and further regulate ethics – a cry that will subside over the weekend and become a distant memory till the next set of accusations. After all, if the imminent collapse of the entire global financial system, followed by executive suicides, millions of people being put out of work and hundreds of thousands becoming homeless, and hundreds of billions of dollars of government bailouts required for to keep their companies afloat does not change attitudes, why would one letter? As I write, Goldman Sachs recovered in one day from a sharp drop in share price as a result of Smith’s letter. The pain for them is already gone. No need to pay attention to the sore, even if it is festering below the surface.

A relevant question for most of us is: should we leave with the big public parting shot, or try posting everything on YouTube to get a reaction? A rant may make one feel better, but if the intention is to really change an industry, I don’t think so. Having left workplaces that have been as equally disappointing as Smith’s experience, I only once stated my extreme disappointment in a resignation letter. It was many years ago and was directed towards the actual individual at the heart of the problems. It was not a broad polemic. My hope was that it would serve as an attention getter, because the person in question certainly didn’t want to listen while I was working for him. He probably didn’t listen in the long run – I wasn’t there to reinforce it and I wasn’t in a position to influence anything of importance to him after the event. Some close colleagues knew about the content and said I was courageous to have written what I did and that they hoped the person would listen. I didn’t think it was brave, but that’s the way it seems to people who feel trapped.

In creating change in organisations, I know that facing people on an ongoing – and personal – basis with the consequences of their actions is one of the best ways to reinforce principles and to maintain the case for change. It’s something that I do on a daily basis. My third-party status as a trusted consultant, coach and partner allows me to do that quite effectively.

John Kotter, in his “Heart of Change” books, writes about the need to appeal to the whole person, and the heart, in order to effect change. This needs to be incorporated into any ongoing change initiation and management.

Broadcasting your shot around the world might wake a few individuals up. That’s good for them, but it’s not likely to create change for large organisations; ongoing strategic and tactical work with parties who have a reason to listen to you will be far more effective. Like the real muppets, if you want to take over Manhattan, you have to be committed to using all your talents to achieve a result.