In my last blog I expanded my concept of a leader establishing a change bubble as part of their preparation for bringing about change in the organisation. The change bubble concept focuses on the leader themselves rather than the more widely understood need for planning and preparing of the change itself. In this blog I will talk about the last two layers of the change bubble, both of which are 100% about the leader themselves. We are talking about Resilience and Respect:
Layer 3 of the bubble is Resilience. When leading change a manager will draw heavily on their reserves of resilience so they need to think about what they may face and how they will handle it and most importantly can they handle it.
The first question to ask yourself is ‘Can you cope with resistance and adversity?’ Lets say that you think the change is good and your people say ‘its about time’ and everything is going hunky dory within your sphere of influence. But the change attracts attention to your division. You were flying under the radar but people talk. It gets to other managers looking at you and lets assume they don’t like it. If they go to your boss and he is onside that may keep them at bay for a while, but its likely they will then come to you, or to your system interfaces with theirs or to the data they manage for you.
Are you ready for new and unusual ways of proving that what you are doing is not right?
How will you handle those conversations? You cant tell them that their way is ‘for the dinosaurs’ and they should change (even if you think thats true), your change is doing that already.
Can you convince them to cut you some slack?
Can you negotiate a win win?
Do you know what they need from you that can be bartered? Can you hold back 1, or two or 3 managers who want you to back off?
Can you hold out for what is right or do you tend to give way to more senior or older peers by habit?
Corporate life is full of politics (if you don’t know that, you need to learn it soon) and part of the politics is the possibility of making others look bad. Your change could revolutionise ‘the way we do things around here’ but that won’t appeal to all your peers and superiors. So have a think about those outside your division, how they could react and how you will handle that reaction. Resilience is partly your own strength of will and ability to hang in when challenge comes. However it is also about being prepared for what could come your way and knowing how you will handle it.
Layer 4 is Respect. In this layer we are talking about the respect that you will need to have to make this change happen.The initial question is whether your people respect you now? Fundamentally if you have not got the respect of your people before you announce the change you are on an uphill battle. Being honest with yourself is a good start here and managing the change in a way that gains you new respect will be vital. But what about once the change is underway? What many managers forget is that during times of change they are even more under the spotlight than ever. Their people will want to see that the manager believes before they commit fully. Who is going to stick their neck out if the boss isn’t.
In preparing your change bubble, the last layer is to think about you and what this change means for your modus operandi.
A question I often ask my clients is ‘Are you prepared to be the first to change?’
Often the manager themselves becomes the weakest link in culture change as many of them think that the change is about those below them and not about them. It can mean that their habits, practices and behaviours are not truly aligned to the change that they are asking for.
Are you able to look at what changes you need to make personally to make the organisational change happen?
What behaviours do you have that may re-enforce the old ways?
What tools/methods/approaches etc do you need to drop to let the new ones thrive?
What about your favourite reports and bits of info, do they fit in?
How do you interact with people, and is that congruent with the new behaviours?
What about your weaknesses? Are you prepared to work on them as part of the change.
Gaining and maintaining respect can often come from being the change that you want the organisation to be and from showing everyone that you can do it (so they can too).
In these blogs Ive given you a simple introduction to my concept of the change bubble for leaders and given you some thoughts on a few things that you might want to think about. Please contact me if you’d like to work on your bubble for your change
At the end of 20111 I wrote about setting up the change bubble if you are creating change from the middle of your organisation. I also talked with Heather Stagl of Enclaria on her internet radio show (number 38) about the four layers (Permission, Persistence, Resilience, Respect) that you need to build to give your bubble a strong enough skin to resist the various challenges that you will receive. In this blog I continue that topic and expand on the first two layers of the bubble:
Layer 1 of the Bubble is Permission: You need to have the right to create change if you want it to succeed. If you get part way through and senior people pull the plug on you, then its your reputation that will be tarnished and the change resistance of your people will go up a factor. Before you kick off your change you need to see whether key people are a) prepared to give you the right to play and b) defend you from those who will object to what you are doing. Having a good idea is not enough, you need to think about the sustainability of the change and politics is the first killer of any initiative. Permission sets up the first skin of the bubble that you want to draw around your change initiative. Ask yourself these questions:
Is your boss ok with your idea and happy to cut you slack?
Are they okay that this may create a desire to change elsewhere (you could be a positive virus for change that they would like)
How much detail do they need to be happy?
What are their boundaries?
And do they have the appetite to defend you?
Layer 2 is Persistence. Change is not a short term inititiative. Once you’ve started it off you will need to stick with it. Dropping it at the first issue will make it harder to start another change and will also damage your reputation. That said, total stubborness in the face of a changing reality wont help (its a global recession team, but…..). The persistence question is really summarised by you looking at you and asking of yourself:
‘Are you prepared to keep going when other topics or issues demand your attention?’
Persistence means preparing for all of the things that tend to happen in your organisation on a regular basis e.g. year end accounts, budget setting, board papers, sales conferences? All these things tend to take out large chunks of a managers diary and I often hear people say ‘dont bother with that month as we will be too busy with..’
The thing about a change initiative is that you cant take a month off. You will spend most of your time convincing people of the change, holding people to account for the change, explaining the change, reminding people the ‘why of the change’ and working through the blockers, issues and the small details that come up with any change. If you take a month out for something else you are sending a signal to your people that the change is not that important. So you need to be persistent enough to juggle more than one ball.
So, ask yourself:
What could come up and get in the way of my change focus?
What normally happens in your org?
What gets in the way of you doing strategic stuff normally (budgets, year end, board papers, client launches) and how will you handle them?
How quickly do you get bored? What is your past history like on hanging on till you get a result?
Do you tend to a short term focus?
Your ability to keep going will make your change one of the small few that gets a result (a high percentage are just dropped). Your persistance is the second skin of the bubble.
In my next blog I will talk about the third and fourth layers: Resilience and Respect
Change can be started from the middle and not just as a company wide initiative. i.e leaders can create culture change within their own department or division without any impetus from outside such as HR or their CEO/GM. Indeed many senior managers learn their way through change by taking smaller initiatives of their own when running departments, before they move on to running divisions, or indeed whole companies. Your successful implementation of change in the middle ranks can be a part of your rise to the top. After all when you get to the top, change is normally what you are expected to do.
But change from the middle brings a lot with it.
I often think of culture change in one small part of a bigger entity as building a bubble around your department or division. Localised change means that you are creating something different from the rest of the organisation, something that the organisation may, or may not like. Culture has a life of its own, and like any life form it tries to protect itself. So if your change requires any form of change in your local culture (and very few systems changes stand alone without a change of working habits, attitudes etc and that means a change in culture), be ready for the larger culture to impact on your small change. As a ‘life-form’ the dominant culture will try to wash over anything that is different from it so that ‘the way things are’ is protected. In change from the middle you are up against the status-quo.
To ensure that your change survives and grows you build a bubble around your department, the people within it and the change that you are promoting. That bubble needs to be strong enough to protect your change from outside influences that may not like what they see. Your change needs to captivate and hold the attention of those within your department because they are currently ‘infected’ with the old culture; after all your organisation has told them for long enough that the other way of doing things was the right way. Therefore your people need you to create a safe space for them to engage with that change, as they may be going against the organisational flow by getting on board your change.
So starting change from the middle requires something a little different from a change that is organisational wide. There are challenges that you will face as a manager driving change in your patch. Like any change you need to do your homework and prepare before you launch, so that you have everything in place to ensure success. Part of that is the logistics and mechanics of what you need to do for your specific change e.g. the hardware and software, the plan, the process, the comms plan, the engagement process, the budgeting and control processes. All of these are the most obvious starting points for a change leader.But they aren’t everything.
Before you start you also need to understand what the change takes from you personally. Many changes fail, not because they were a bad idea, but because the leader did not understand what the change would take from them. They didn’t set up a safe place for change so the bubble burst well before the change had a chance to grow.
On December 21st I will be talking with Heather Stagl of Enclaria, on blogtalk radio, about creating a safe place for change from the perspective of what it takes from a leader. Listen here for that conversation.
As part of that conversation, my next few blogs will also continue this topic with an exploration of the four things a leader needs to consider when building their change bubble.
I’ve been watching the recent fallout between NZ Softball and a few of its players with interest. It’s had remarkable coverage for a small sport in a country dominated by Rugby and Cricket. Thats probably because Softball is something that Nz can compete on the world stage (however small that stage may be). The problem is that some of the players are that good at swinging a bat or throwing a ball that a very similar sport, Baseball, is starting to look at a few of the NZ Players and say ‘want to play our game?’.
You can see the attraction for the players: Baseball in the USA has money and that means a chance for some of these young guys to make a living in a way they never could at softball. So they want to play baseball as well as softball.
Where’s the problem in that? You may say. Well, Nz Softball doesn’t like this and is saying ‘you can’t play with us if you play with them’
So what has this to do with change? (knowing I need to get to the point soon or you will switch off). The tendency to protect the established order is something that you see time and again in the history of business. This starts simply as ‘The way we do things is fine, so we don’t need to change’. This scenario has been repeated so often that you can almost plot a ‘rise and fall’ of great names as a result of it. Norton motorcycles died because they resisted the advent of simple things such as the push button start. Borders barely survived their belief that ‘we don’t need computers in a bookshop’. Many of the established names in the stock exchange of 100 years ago no longer exist. But with some its starts with that belief and then moves to a push to make sure that everyone else agrees or ensure that change doesn’t happen.
What we are seeing with NZ Softball is that interesting ‘protectionist’ thinking. When the established order not only rejects change, but tries to force their view of the world on the world by justifying their actions. We saw this a few years ago with Finance companies who said ‘you cannot afford to let us fail’ and instead of suffering the evolutionary penalty of their actions, forced the world to change instead of them changing. Look beyond the world of business and in our lives and times Libya tried it, Syria is trying is and Egypt is struggling against the ‘we like the world the way it is because it suits me’ mindset.
NZ Softball certainly isn’t in the same basket as all those American finance companies, or those countries, but the thinking is the same. The kind of thinking that shows they can see change coming and don’t like the look of it. Thinking that leads to actions to hold back the change, prevent it from happening. Whether they are people in government, in businesses, established institutions, managers of companies you will see people using their position and their authority to try to hold back change. Its a human tendency.
Yes, I said ‘Managers of companies’. Day in and day out managers can, and do, make decisions to protect themselves from changes that they don’t like, that threaten their knowledge or their position or their power. Projects gently scuppered, proposals rejected, promotions prevented, decisions made and people put back in their place. Its a human tendency.
History shows that you can only hold change back for so long if you have the power, but if change has momentum you can’t hold it back forever. Indeed much of change seems part of the natural timeline of history. Wheels led to carts, carts led to carriages, carriages led to cars, cars to planes, planes to space travel (Please forgive the generalisation of Human history, but you know what I mean) and that’s why much of change is really just evolutionary.
What history shows is that if you don’t make the change, someone else will and before you know it you are the dinosaur that is dying out and the thing you were trying to prevent happens anyway. Evolution doesn’t give you many chances (so watch out Softball).
How quickly should you implement a change programme? Is there a benefit in quick or slow and is there a risk in either?
Some changes would appear to have a long timeline as a function of the time it takes to put in the hardware or software. But generally speaking the timeline where you have your staff involved and affected by the change is much shorter than the time it takes for your experts to install the equipment/system etc.
Its that time that has the biggest impact on the success of change; the time where your people have to engage in the new system or the structure or the changes to their job (as a result of the system or the structure) that you need to think about how quickly or slowly you take it.
Lets look at a few examples to see what they tell us about the risks and benefits in the choice of pace.
Its here!
When it comes to restructuring I have seen examples of change that involved a group of senior people being locked away in meetings over a couple of weeks or months. They make the decisions on structure and who is going to fit in that structure then go through the prep process (letters/payments etc) until they are ready to launch the change. If they manage to keep it quiet (a big if, discussed in this previous blog) they come out and tell everyone the structure, who has a job and its all over and done with in a day or two.
Clean, tidy and efficient?
Well, yes, on the face of it, but the residual after-effects say otherwise. Lack of trust in your leaders, communication channels failing and future change wariness all follow on from change that is implemented in this fashion. People are thinking ‘you knew but you didn’t tell us’ so they soon move to a place where they don’t trust you or believe what you do say. So going too quickly risks the trust that needs to exist in any successful organisation.
Heres another one!
What about situations where a few jobs are cut one week, then some more a few weeks later followed by a bit of a reshuffle here and there, then another announcement that we need to trim around the edges? The situations where change is one thing after another?
Now some organisations find themselves in situations where over the course of two or three years they need to make changes because the environment changes and they need to adapt. I am not talking about one change a year, I am talking about multiple changes within a year and multiple changes within months.
A policy of dragging your changes out over a few months so that each one is quite small can seem like a good way of reducing the pain tat a big announcement has. But it begins to feel like ‘death by a thousand cuts’. A thousand cuts that you don’t know when and where the next one is coming.
This approach tends to dampen motivation almost permanently. People live in ‘fear’ of what could be coming next. Their focus is therefore permanently aware of the ‘unknown threat’ (see my recent blog on the right time to prepare) and not on the job you really want them to do. Motivation down, focus down and of course your leaders gaining the reputation that they don’t know what they are doing. If every year you need to change, that can be communicated as a function of context, but every month?
So dragging the change out risks the motivation of the workforce.
Conclusions?
Too fast and too slow. Neither really work, so what does? Lets only look at what these examples tell us about pace (and not the trust and belief that is also inherent in the examples).
The key is in engagement in the change. The time that it takes for people to understand the change and believe it. If there is no time to ask questions, to have them answered, to discuss with colleagues and come round to the understanding that the change is necessary, whether they like it or not, then people will be mistrusting of the change.
Similarly with changes in software or hardware, people need time to engage in the ‘ why’ then the knowledge required before the change arrives, then they need time to practice the use of the tool before it matters too much and then they need time and support with the real live issues that come up when the system goes live.
Whatever your change there is an engagement phase and that involves time, before the change itself as well as during the change. Go too quickly and people don’t have time to get on the bus, go too slowly and people don’t know there is a bus to get on or whether they trust the bus you are driving!
THE CHANGE FACTOR™ work with clients big and small. Click on the link below to read client testimonials.FIND OUT MORE
Client Resources
Register now to access to papers & materials to increase your business competativeness.
Subscribe
We'd like to keep in touch with you by sharing any relevant insights and information. Sign up to our database and we'll ensure we keep you up to date. We'll never spam you and you can unsubscribe at any time.
