Three Critical Questions For Leading Change
I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process. You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.
Your team is out in open and you are eating your lunch on the ground. The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.
In first scenario you as team leader say to your team in stern voice get up and follow me right now. A few people respond but the majority stay in place. Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.
The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move. Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind. The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.
The third scenario is you say to team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe. Everyone moves and no one is hurt.
In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore especially with next generation workforce. The second scene was perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading. The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.
The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story. Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change. What is the Problem? How are we going to Solve it? Why is this important to You?
Five Keys in Setting Goals
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Time Management
All of us have experienced the frustration that comes from really wanting to accomplish something important and thinking we are really committed to it only to realize several months later it did not happen. When I evaluate personally and professionally where the breakdown occurs it usually centers on the disciplines involved in effective goal setting.
These are the five critical things I have learned over the years:
1. Write it down—if it is not important enough to write down in your personal planner or enter into your cell phone list then it will almost always never get done.
2. Check your resources—do you realistically have the time, energy, knowledge, skills and commitment to make this happen?
3. Make it clear—you must be very specific about what you want to accomplish. It cannot be I want to lose weight; it needs to be twenty pounds over next six months.
4. Develop your plan—strategy is the realistic intersection of resources and commitment. There is a big difference in walking twenty minutes five days week and training for marathon.
5. Evaluate your progress—this is where the rubber hits the road. Do it often until you know you have sustainable momentum and most important celebrate every win.
Leading Change
The greatest mistake organizations make during difficult times like we are currently experiencing is to try to manage change rather than leading the process. Sometimes survival is the only critical issue and then you do whatever you have to do to stay alive.
Most of time though we look very short term and develop a bunker mentality that’s only goal is to ride out this storm until things get better. This means of course reducing expenses through personnel reductions , delays in capital investment, marketing and of course training and development. Especially, all those bad trips and conferences that congress is railing about.
Leading change recognizes the brutal facts that the fundamentals of global economics have been permanently changed. Effective leaders will use the urgency and severity of this current cycle to reposition their entire organizational culture for success in the 21st Century and beyond. The future is incredibly positive for all those who are willing to embrace it. No going back!
Execution
It is amazing to me how all of the most respected people in the field of leadership are so consistently saying the same things about the most important things that all organizations need to be doing. It really started when Steven Covey wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People followed by Jim Collins Good to Great and now every bestselling book on leadership prioritizes the same factors.
Execution is a great read by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. They define execution as the discipline of getting things done.
They start with the number one issue of the day the personal character of the leader. If you are not able to execute your own personal priorities then you will never be able to establish execution as a priority for your organization.
In the spirit of Good to Great they insist that the leader must never delegate their most important responsibility of getting the right people on the team. This factor more than any other will determine if you r people can consistently move beyond creative development and project planning to actually get the job done.
The next priority is to create a culture of discipline where execution is valued. A great insight is that we don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Translation, at some point in time we need to stop talking about the problem and start doing something to solve it.
Finally, after the leader has set clear goals and priorities you must evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Then it is extremely important to reward the doers who are actually getting the job done and this will move execution to the top of your leadership core values.
Four Critical Team Dynamics for Leading Change
How many teams have we put together over the years to help us lead the change process only to realize several months later that nothing happened that was sustainable? In John Kotter’s excellent book on Leading Change he gives four key characteristics that must be in place for the team to be successful.
1. Position power: Are enough key players on board, especially the main line managers, so that those left out cannot easily block progress?
2. Expertise: Are the various points of view- in terms of discipline, work experience etc.- relevant to the task at hand adequately represented so that informed, intelligent decisions will be made?
3. Credibility: Does the group have enough people with good reputations in the firm so that its pronouncements will be taken seriously by other employees?
4. Leadership: Does the group include enough proven leaders to be able to drive the change process?
When I have been responsible for leading major change initiatives all of these types of people must be involved. The other important dynamic is that you must avoid people who will try to take over the group and lead by positional power and the other extreme of individuals who will not engage and confront the brutal facts with their active participation.
Dan Greer
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