Creating Change for You: It's Personal!

People have asked me a lot of questions about an upcoming change taking place in my life (I’m moving to a new Province for a new job!).  Their line of questions got me thinking about whether huge life changes and personal transitions could be facilitated using a change management process.  

Subsequent to accepting this new position, and because of the types of questions I received as a result of my decision, I did a bit of investigating and found tons of well-researched articles offered up to guide business professionals contemplating job/life changes.  In these articles, I noticed that rather than focusing on one or two aspects of transition, most of the articles offered a very wide range of topics for the would-be job seeker.  This is likely done intentionally so the articles will appeal to a broad audience with a wide range of reasons for considering a transition.  So, with this in mind and getting back to my change management perspective on this level of personal and professional change, my first question is:  would you take a scatter gun approach to any other change initiative in the workplace? Answer:  No!  So why take that route for your own career and life? 

In a change management process, one would start by taking focus and looking at the facts – plain and simple.  As a professional, this translates into looking at your current work and life situation as objectively as possible and doing some visioning for yourself as to how you would like to see yourself in the future – maybe five years down the road (hint:  work and life considerations do go hand in hand – think about it!).  Never mind if your friends and family don’t immediately buy into your vision.  What’s important is that you do and since you’re leading the change, you’ll have to realize early on that friends, family and colleagues may resist the notion of change, especially at first.  And as the lead in this very important journey, you’ll have to manage the difficulty others have in the same way you would in other change progression.

So if you’re contemplating a change for yourself, I’d encourage you to go ahead and read all those job transition articles – there are plenty of them out there!  But remember that in a typical change management practice you wouldn’t approach any initiative without first examining where you are and visioning where you want to be.  As with all circumstances when you’re considering change, there are pros and cons to staying with the status quo, so do the exercise – really!  When in doubt, remember the most important voice: that of the customer. And in this case, you’re the customer.

Take care, and have fun thinking about where you’d like to be in the next few years, and do small or large things everyday to bring you closer to your goals.  Wasn’t it Gandhi who said “…be the change”? 

New goals, new dreams!

The best part about Christmas Holidays is New Years Day!  The end of the calendar year excites me. 

Every year as the weeks wind down to days, I look forward to this phase because, for me, it is an opportunity to reflect on the past year and to develop goals as the New Year is ushered in. 

This morning, I joined a few hundred other hearty, enthusiastic Vancouverites for the local Resolution Run in Stanley Park.  It was picture perfect:  clear, clear blue skies, above zero temperatures, and a great post-race spread.  On that side of my life, my goals for 2013 include aspirations to continue to stretch me into areas I’ve never explored before – new events, new distances, and new training plans.

On the leadership side of my life (and similarly to you leaders out there), some of the questions I ask myself as I develop new goals and aspirations are as follows:

·         What are the things/events I’m most proud of in the past year?

·         What impact have my actions had?

·         Have my actions and influences resulted in an overall betterment for my personal/work  mission?

·         What impact do I want to have in the upcoming year?

·         What are the best strategies and tools at my disposal to do the best that I can?

And so on…must sound familiar and similar to what many of you and others think about at this time of year.  Of course, some goals are personal and some are professional, while some are intertwined. 

This upcoming year, as in all years since I started my career, I’m going to be given the opportunity to stretch my abilities and skills in Leadership.  Leadership, as a field, has much to do about the self, but it also has a lot to do with leading and coaching others.  Naturally, both aspects are inseparable (like one hand washing the other), and what’s really exciting is that the more one learns to lead others most effectively through positive coaching, the better leader one becomes.  So in addition to all the exciting opportunities you might have ahead of you to develop your skills and actions to bring out the best in your teams (which you know will also make you a better  and more effective leader), let me offer another resource I’ve bookmarked for myself for 2013.  It is a website devoted (in their own words) “…to energizing and transforming organizations through research on the theory and practice of positive organizing and leadership. “  Please see the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship for additional resources.

A final word for you to remember cited from my friend and colleague’s website. (Dr. Jim Hill can be found at Positive-Leader.com):

 Positive Leadership focuses on relationships, not roles.

Every person has the potential to be a positive force in the workplace or community. Positive Leaders consistently match their values and beliefs to building something that improves their world. A high tide raises all boats.

Thanks Jim, and thanks to you for reading.  Happy New Year!!

 

Bringing a Frog to Work Today?

Anytime my dissertation chair/mentor would comment about how old and crabby he was getting, I knew he was winding up to let me know something I should pay attention to – usually it had to do with my writing skills, but other times he would share more general observations.  I’m taking a page out of his book.  I think I’m getting old and crabby.  And now I’m going to tell you why.  This is my rant:

 A colleague recently posted an article through her LinkedIn account .  I really liked the catchy title:  What Successful People Do With The First Hour of Their Work Day.  Initially, I was curious as to what this article could teach me that I had not yet integrated in my daily routine.  Let’s first establish my routine:  up between 5 and 6 am, fire up the desktop at home, coffee, work and personal emails for a half hour, usually a run, swim, or yoga, then prep for work.  Once I’m at the office, the routine shifts to however my day happens to be structured with various appointments, meetings, and so forth.  If I’m lucky, I’ve got some cushion time built in to do…what, you ask?  To do my other work, of course, which could be anything from attending to correspondence, reviewing material, proactively asking questions, often touring work sites, more meetings and the usual administrative and leadership business.  But to sum it up, I have a personal mission and preoccupation with providing excellent customer service through excellent business practices.  So imagine my huge disappointment when I let it sink in that articles like the one above were aimed at a slice of our population that allows itself to be so distracted from their job that they need cute stories to help them figure out how to prioritize.  Heck, most of the people I know have this already sorted out!

As if it wasn’t enough, I found two more equally compelling article titles with content along the same lines (see Frogs, Gnats, Butterflies and Gems and Watch out for the frogs )

If you haven’t read any of these articles yet, I suggest you give it a go.  I am always interested in what habits successful people have.  I strive for excellence, and I figure there’s always a nugget or two in what other people write.  I, too, want to be successful!  I dove into the first article like it was a long awaited treasure…but after I was done, I did a bit more searching on the internet for similar publications.  Then I did some thinking.  Then my enthusiasm deflated.  Then I started to feel old and cranky.

I can’t believe we live in a society where people get paid to go to work and can’t get it together enough to do what they’re supposed to.  Does someone really have to publish an article to motivate us to do our jobs?  Wait!  Maybe that’s the answer to my original question:  What do successful people do everyday?  Answer:  Not sure, but I bet it has something to do with them actually getting their work done. 

Thanks for tolerating my rant. 

Be the change!  Joanne

Management By Wandering Around (MBWA)

The Olympics are on! I love watching every athlete who makes it there and seeing how they each carry their excellence and achievement. Each athlete is an individual, and these games really drive that home. Watching them perform, it is easy to forget all that it took to get them there. But we all know it took a lot of practice, blood, sweat, tears – and did I say practice? – to get there. I want to talk about “practice” this week.

I am new yoga student. As intolerable as it can be to listen to new students gush about the benefits of yoga or any other activity, there is something to be said about the journey that brings you to a humbling realization that your own practice is never going to be perfect. Yoga, I am learning, is about working on your own capacity incrementally. I’d like to propose that the same can be said for leadership.

Leadership practice starts early on. You don’t all of a sudden get a job that makes you a leader. You develop leadership skills and styles over time. That’s the fun part! But the best part is that you never really reach a point where it gets boring because you know it all.

Many years ago, I worked as a CEO with a First Nations organization in Eastern Canada. During my orientation, my coach (someone who’d been the CEO for the same organization) recommended that I spend some time walking around the administrative office to get to know people, and for them to get to know me. At first I took his advice literally, and then later, I took different travel paths in this very large building so I could see folks I would otherwise never encounter. It was great to get to know folks outside of meetings, to laugh, chit chat, and all that. The change agenda for this organization was daunting, and I’m convinced the relationships I cultivated by walking around helped move this along.

Through the years I’ve maintained a degree of closeness with staff, but because of my various roles, my focus has been working with organizational leaders. Recently, I had the opportunity to dive a little deeper. On two occasions this week, I’ve been able to shadow frontline folks as they carry out their everyday activities. And was that ever an eye opener for me. Let me explain.

As with many healthcare organizations, ours has embraced the LEAN methodology . Management practices associated with LEAN encourage a strong link between the senior decision-makers in the organization and the front-line service providers. There is a belief that improvements can only be made when those leading the change involve frontline staff (because they really know what’s going on) and with leaders who really understand the business processes. This is also basic bread and butter in solid change management practices.

Today, I’m here to say that I’m realizing that even the management practices in LEAN must be achieved incrementally. In researching the origins of LEAN and leadership, I came across something I used to know, but forgot: managing by wandering around (MBWA) introduced years ago by Tom Peters. Intended to get all of us out of the office, especially because every manager from a CEO to a program coordinator can lead by example, MBWA is all about getting us out of the office and into the real world of work.

Personally, I don’t mind telling you that I let this slip a bit in the past few years, but after the past few weeks of being back in the trenches, I’ve already booked my next few frontline tours. Then, I hope that when I’m ready to apply more fidelity to my LEAN management practice, I will have a solid place from which to start.

Below are the Twelve Guiding Principles for MBWA:

Do it to everyone

Do it as often as you can

Go by yourself

Don’t circumvent subordinate managers

Ask questions

Watch and listen

Share your dreams with them

Try out their work

Bring good news

Have fun

Catch them in the act of doing something right

Don’t be critical

Click here to read a short article on MBWA including the definitions of the Twelve Guiding Principles listed above. Isn’t it great that our leadership practice allows us to keep learning every day? Have an enlightening week in your practice - leadership, yoga, or otherwise.

Change Management: A Modern Day Idiom

Idiom: An expressionthat doesn't necessarily have a definition but more of an understanding behind it.

It all started a few weeks ago when someone mentioned  reindeer games.   I’d heard the term before and never really bothered to find out what it truly meant, but I made an assumption that this just described how people were gaming with each other and maybe holding back information from others.  In fact, I was guilty of using the concept without being sure of the exact definition.  Hey!  At least I admit it. 

In preparing for this blog, I found a definition of reindeer games in the Urban Dictionary. So the dictionary’s definition is the same as what I originally suspected.  Or close enough.

Later, again at work, someone said we’d have to find a cat to put among the pigeons, and I wasn’t really sure what that meant, so this time I looked it up in the Urban Dictionary right away.  Turns out that this is also an idiom and it implies some way of creating a disturbance and causing trouble.  Now, rarely would anyone in an organization deliberately set out to cause a disturbance with malicious intent,  but as we’ve seen in previous blogs, it sometimes helps to have First Followers or others who can help instigate movement for change.  To me, that’s a step away from putting the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons, but it doesn’t seem to bother folks if idioms are used casually and can sometimes cause misunderstandings. 

All of this has had me preoccupied with idioms and cutesy catch phrases we use every day in our business lives.  One that I’m especially preoccupied with and very concerned about is how organizations toss around the concept of change management.  

I’m hoping not to come across as snobby about this, but these days, change management really is being used as an idiom, and to everyone’s peril.  As the change management field and practice evolves, there is a heightened awareness of the importance of using real change management techniques – which is good.  But the downside is how some folks clumsily toss the term around as a substitution for only the tools we use to help us achieve real change management.  When we short-change the definition of change management to single out the tools alone, then we see the resulting, weak results. 

Instead, here it is clearly defined by a reliable source at the Change Management Learning Centre: Change management is the [application of] the set of tools, processes, skills and principles for managing the people side of change to achieve the required outcomes of a change project or initiative. 

Folks, change management is about the people side of the coin.  You can only be successful in leading a change when the people involved adopt the change and adapt to it. Change management requires effective, deliberate communication about your proposed change.  For example, don’t issue a memo about a change you’ve already made and expect the same results as if you used communication as a tool and means of gaining adoption during the course of change. 

For more on the real change management story, check out Kurt Lewin on the net.  Lewin is the forefather of change management theory. Everything that’s been developed since his time is just building on his three-step model: unfreeze, change, and re-freeze.  And who is going to experience said climate change of this three-step model?  People.  Let’s get it right:  change management is all about the people.   

Thanks for listening. 

Building Teams

I just finished reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I didn’t necessarily read this book because I have or want a dysfunctional team. I read it because I want to work with a high functioning team! This book tells the story of a new CEO (Kathryn) and how she deals with a new team she inherits. The author (Lencioni) uses his third person storytelling style to let you hear and understand what the CEO is thinking as she encounters a variety of situations with her senior team.

The following list outlines the Five Dysfunctions along with my further description of each:

Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust
Fear of being vulnerable with team members prevents the building of trust on a team. (JB: This dysfunction is most noticeable when you encounter teams who won’t let each other see they don’t know everything. Teams like this don’t openly admit their limitations to each other and don’t ask each other for feedback so they can grow. Teams without trust don’t like to spend time together.)

Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict
The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles the occurrence of productive ideological conflict. (JB: Teams with this condition just go along with each other to get back to their own areas of concentration. They don’t care to know enough about each other’s areas to criticize or offer improvement strategies. )

Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment
The lack of clarity or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they will stick to. (JB: This dysfunction results in stripping confidence out of a team. It creates an atmosphere where everyone second-guesses everyone else.)

Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability
The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents team members from holding one another accountable. (JB: This one is tough because it is about everyone on the team knowing what the organizational goals are, and holding each other accountable for the quality and timeliness of deliverables.)

Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results
The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective results. (JB: This dysfunction shows up when team members care more about their own individual goals than those of the entire enterprise. It encourages people to think only of themselves and their own career advancement.)

After learning about these dysfunctions, I did a search to see what else I could find out about developing a functioning team and found another Lencioni book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps EverythingElse in Business and found a reference for leaders that basically summarizes two main points : 1) Build your team (see the Five Dysfunctions), and 2) Set clear organizational goals and hold everyone accountable to stick by them!

My one, big take away from this week’s episode on my leadership path is that clear goals are really essential, because even with a high performing team, if you don’t have clear goals you can still risk squandering valuable human resources and talent. And you know what? The “good ones” won’t stick around if you can’t articulate your goals clearly and hold everyone to be accountable for them.

Have a great week, everyone! Be the leader you want to have!!

First Followers

I learned a new term just a few days ago:  first followers.  A fantastic leader and very good friend I work with sent me a link to watch.  She promised me that if I didn’t dismiss the video in the first few seconds, there would be an important message in it for me.  Of course, she knows I’m a “change junkie” and I would have to trust that her instincts were right about this video. 

I watched the video and wondered if the concept of “first follower” it introduces was just a disguise for the term “early adopter” frequently used in change theory.  But in looking up “early adopters” and “first followers” in the change literature, I found it was not possible to compare the two as easily as I expected. 

There’s a lot written on “early adopters” and how they are the first consumers of new technology: 

This is the second fastest category of individuals who adopt an innovation. These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Early adopters are typically younger in age, have a higher social status, have more financial lucidity, advanced education, and are more socially forward than late adopters. More discrete in adoption choices than innovators. Realize judicious choice of adoption will help them maintain central communication position (Rogers 1962 5th ed, p. 283).

But, I couldn’t find much on “first followers”. I realized I had to go back to the source. 

I watched the video again this weekend and found that the video moderator zeroed in on a few very important distinctions, with the first one being the impact the “first follower” has on the leader.  As the story is told, the leader doesn’t stand out by himself (see the video) – in fact, to me, he looks like he might be under the influence but the video moderator says that he looks like “a nut”.  The first follower is really the spark that draws special attention to what the leader is trying to accomplish.  A key learning at this point is that the leader should treat his/her first followers as equals, because alone, the leader is just a “nut”. Recognizing and nurturing your “first follower” is really important.  In fact, the video story says that leadership during change is over-glorified – the real leadership comes from the “first follower(s)” because the main role “first followers” play is teaching others how to follow. 

In our organizations, leaders are continually under pressure to lead change.  In fact, many are assessed and evaluated by their competency to lead and execute change.  Often, a poor change process reflects badly for the leader.  For those of you who may have struggled with the change challenge, try finding your “first followers” and elevate them to a visible level so they can demonstrate how to follow your change to others.  By leveling the hierarchy between the leader or innovator and the first followers, you’ll be comforted to know you aren’t alone.  Sometimes leading change feels like a job for the lone Ranger, but with one or two “first followers” nearby, you don’t have to be alone.  And that, my friends, is a very nice feeling. 

Watch the video now, and see if it changes your ideas on leading change.