Giving things up

Geoff Roberts change, focus, metaphor, paradox, selection

calvin-hobbes-new-years-resolutionsA couple of days ago my wife called me into the kitchen. She had been rummaging around in one of the cupboards and found some paperwork and one or two other items that she thought were mine, and indeed they were. Not only were their mine but they had been in “Geoff’s Drawer”, situated immediately above the cupboard in which she found them. So full had this drawer becomes that a few items had overflowed and fallen into the cupboard below, only to be discovered some months later when my wife just happened to be rummaging around at the back of the cupboard.

Is your life, your office, your brain a bit like this? So full of stuff and ideas and projects and ‘must dos’ that some of them get overlooked for a very long time. Mine certainly is.

Well this is a time of year when we typically start to think about what we are going to do new or differently next year – those New Year’s resolutions. Whether or not the New Year is a good time to make such resolutions is perhaps the subject of another blog, but assuming that we make them at some time or another there is another aspect to which we might pay attention. What am I going to give up?

It is a bit like that a full drawer, only when I have a good clear out and throw away some stuff  do I really appreciate what is important to retain. Similarly, creating change typically involves stopping doing things as well as starting new things.

So here is a suggestion, when you make your new years resolutions how about making one of them that you will stop doing something, that way you will create space in your brain for whatever it is you want to start doing.

Flooding and leadership – what can we learn?

Geoff Roberts change

I was musing on the recent floods and my mind turned to the leadership challenges of dealing with an expectable yet unexpected event, one that has short-term impact and long-term effects…

I was particularly taken by this image of a river in flood, with both a direction sign and a Stop sign showing. The river was over 4metres above normal level at this stage and anyone who didn’t know what they were doing could quite easily be washed away – the direction signs and the Stop sign were no help at all, just like sometimes our well laid change plans turn out to be more of a hindrance than a help.

This is change leadership of a different type – crisis management – and one that needs a different set of tools to those typically used for transitions in ‘normal’ conditions. Residents of York, who had been prepared in advance by both previous experience and the blandishments of the Environment Agency knew what to do and many of them minimised the impact by taking and acting on the advice of those who had ‘been there, done that’. They relied on both external expertise and internal experience. The EA could no more be expected to give detailed advice to every single household that your change leaders can give individual advice to everyone affected by your change.

What they could and did do was to make every effort to inform as many households as possible of the broad risks AND of the specific impending hazard; advance publicity was extensive and every potentially affected households had a telephone hotline to keep them informed of the scale of the emergency and what they could do to help – that included encouragement to help others (neighbours). Actually IN the crisis the advice was simple – ‘stay away’ – well-meaning amateurs are more hindrance than help and this is where the professionals come into their own with the resources and expertise needed to deal with critical cases. The cleanup and recovery, where huge resources is needed, is where the ‘amateurs’ come in.

So, how might this apply to the crises that will inevitably arise during your change effort?

  • Firstly, acknowledge that such crises are expected and unexpectable – they will happen but you don’t know when or what their nature will be.
  • Learn from the past – the EA are good at transferring lessons from both local and wider history of flooding to their operational response. What can you learn from your own history of change or from others’ tales of woe?
  • Prepare your ‘constituency’ – to give the impression that all will go smoothly is tantamount to telling your people an untruth, and that’s never a good idea. How can you prepare them for the inevitable ups and downs? They will need to rely on internal resilience as well as your leadership.
  • Keep your eyes open for signs of a crisis emerging – it’s easy to figure out that several days’ rain in the upper catchments will eventually flood York, but what are the signs that you might expect to see if the **** is about to hit the fan on your change effort?
  • Know when to ditch the ‘business as usual’ plan and invoke the crisis plan – good emergency planning is less about the type of emergency than about the impacts, so what impacts do you need to plan for?
  • Keep Calm and Carry On – above all, as a leader you need to project calm, the impression that you know what is happening and how to handle it (even if behind the scenes you are getting the clean trousers out!). Your followers will take this calmness on board and work through the crisis with you.

I’m sure there are other lessons, just remember to be aware – as a change leader you need part of your attention on the past, part on the now and part on the future, that’s what makes it such grrrreat fun!

Coffee making and paying attention

Geoff Roberts change

Simon Hartley has written a stimulating little piece about the importance of  ‘engineering’ enjoyment into an experience – in this case, specifically of tasting coffee in a competition. In that article he states that “They will all taste the same thing, but their enjoyment of it is highly malleable” – I beg to differ on the first part of the claim!

The sense of taste, as indeed any other sense, is influenced by a host of factors beyond the pure objective content of the coffee – analysing coffee to its’ minutest chemical composition cannot predict what it will taste like to one or more individuals. Their interpretation of the taste could be influenced by physical factors such as how they swirl the coffee in their mouths, the configuration and sensitivity of their taste buds, other smells in the room (70% of ‘taste’ is actually driven by smell – so there are another load of confounding factors) etc. If we now look at factors ‘inside the head’, again individuals will interpret the nerve signals produced by their sensory apparatus in different ways. Perhaps the classic is professional wine tasters who cannot distinguish many white and red wines unless they also have the visual stimulus to ‘confirm’ their taste. If we look further into that field, tasters have to develop a language with which to describe what they are tasting. Expectations also play a part, hence blind tastings.

So, what’s my point? Well, that we all experience the world in VERY different ways – our brains all interpret the objective reality (“blooming confusion”) in our own subjective way. THAT is why the tasters are malleable to what the barista helps them experience through their words and manner.

And that is also why you need to pay individual attention to how people are interpreting whatever messages you are seeking to send to them!

Involve your people in change

Geoff Roberts change

Here we go with my fourth principle of effective change leadership – get them involved. When we think back, most of us have some experience of having resisted change. Maybe your whole department was being split up, or maybe your partner wanted to go to a different restaurant to the one you usually frequent – whatever the scale, experience suggests that those who have change done to them tend to resist, whereas those who are actively involved in the change and have a real ability to shape it are likely to become committed.

Now I imagine that this could come as something of a challenge who are typically in the command and control mentality, but even for those further along the development spectrum it can be quite a challenge to take a piece of strategy that they might have been working on for several months and ask their employees “What do you think and how can we implement this?”  But that is what needs to be done. There are those, and I happen to be one, who would argue that employees need to be involved in strategy development, not just tactical implementation. However not all employee bodies (or indeed bosses!) are ready for this, although it may just be that a forthcoming major change becomes a trigger for developing and the more actively involving employees.

When you do involve your employees, make it real. There is nothing worse than a sham attempt to obtain employee input that is subsequently completely ignored. Even in the extremely unlikely event that they have nothing constructive to add, they deserve some recognition and acknowledgements for the input alongside a coherent explanation of why you chose to ignore them.

So, rather than bang on about how important it is to involve your people I would like to offer you a challenge. The challenge is to set out your change proposal and ask your people about the good and the bad, what will help of what will hinder, hot has been missed in the proposal and what makes no sense to them whatsoever etc. You need to listen to them and it is perhaps more than a coincidence that an anagram of listen is silent.

Let them know what’s happening…

Geoff Roberts change

I’m going to talk to you today about my third principle for effective change leadership and I anticipate that when you have read this article you will be aware of the need for timely, consistent and clear communication throughout your period of change.

In my last two pieces talked about the need to Work with the Current Reality and to Do what you can, where you can, when you can. This one might best be entitled

“Communicate, communicate, communicate…”

I remember a conversation with a managing director with whom I was working on communicating a new corporate strategy and the high-level implications of that strategy for the people in the company. We had just finished a week long initial communications exercise and he had been talking to various employees about what they now understood about the new strategy. He expressed his disappointment at how little of the message was repeated back to him, and how different people had retained different things. I think my response hit home – “Bill, you and the executive team have just spent three months developing the strategy, it is unrealistic to expect your employees to understand this after hearing the message in a single one hour event”. Sometimes those of us immersed in a change project forget that it is just one small blip on other people’s radar. Our job in communicating is to make sure that everyone has seen the blip, recognises its significance and starts to think about how they as individuals are going to respond.

The communication events we had a run in the company I mentioned previously had been very well crafted (though I say so myself) and follow-up surveys of staff produced a strongly positive response to the manner and content of the communication. But a one off can never be enough. You need to pace your communications, not dropping everything on participants all at once. You need to repeat your communications and use different media (we offered everybody in that company a copy of the slides that the MD used in his presentation and the written brief that directors and senior managers had worked to; we also produced a frequently asked questions sheet that had been developed by trialling the initial presentation on a small group of trusted staff). Consistency is key “Some jobs will be lost” is not the same as “4% of all our employees are likely to be made redundant with the majority of those falling in the finance department”, yet both might describe the reality.

Communications needs to be a line on your project plan and someone must have responsibility for making sure that it happens. Bearing in mind the aphorism that “The meaning of a communication is the response you get”, following up any communication with a check for understanding is crucial

We developed a set of principles for communication that I offer to you below:

•Our people will hear things first from their managers
•Those most affected will be the first to hear
•We will use multiple channels to communicate with our people
•“One hymn, one hymn sheet”
•We will be as quick to give the bad news as the good
•We will be as open as possible given commercial sensitivities
•Face-to-face will be our preferred route for all major communications
•Wherever possible we will avoid jargon, where not possible we will explain it
•Individuals making decisions will have personal accountability for ensuring that those affected by the decision are communicated with effectively
•We will ensure that there is an unfiltered feedback route from our people to the Board
•There will be regular updates on progress
•Individuals will be offered coaching to improve their communications skills
•We recognise the existence of The Grapevine and will do our best to be sure that it deals in facts not fiction

Finally, the big challenge. Even when you have nothing to communicate, you must communicate. There are times in any change programme when not very much seems to be happening – perhaps the participants are analysing where they have got to, or perhaps they are planning where to go next rather than acting in the organisation. Unless you let people know what is going on, they will make stuff up to fill the void and in all probability they will make up a load of rubbish. It is your responsibility to ensure that this does not happen because once that rubbish starts to gain currency it will be much more destructive than if you had spent a little time to say “Well, not very much has happened this week. We’re figuring out what to do next” or something similar.

So, there is principle number three

Communicate, communicate, communicate…

What stories would you like to share about how to communicate effectively in times of change?

The immovable object and the resistible force

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy, time management

In the second of my pieces on guiding principles for delivering effective change I want to talk, in a tangential way, about one aspect of how to handle resistance.

The one thing that is certain when you embark on a process of change is that you will meet resistance. Perhaps that ought to be two things of which are certain, because the other is that you cannot predict where, from whom or in what form that resistance will appear. But appear it will and you must address it. The point of this particular piece is one way of addressing it – not that  this is only one way, indeed there are several other tools that you will need to use. This tool is particularly useful in the early stages of the change efforts.

So, many moons ago I completed my masters degree in organisational change and my then boss asked me “What was the most significant thing that you have learned in two years of very expensive study?” My answer might seem somewhat glib, let me assure you it wasn’t and isn’t. The answer was “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”. And this is the second of my guiding principles for leading change effectively.

 Do what you can, where you can, when you can

When you get involved in change you will find some people who are really keen (the marketeers would call them early adopters), some who just sit and wait but will follow the crowd once they know which way the crowd is going ( I will call them ‘the herd’)and some who will actively or passively resist. My question to you is “Why would you want to spend time, especially at the beginning of a process, working with resistance when you could be creating change and generating enthusiasm by working with the early adopters?” As you work with early adopters they start to show the direction for the herd and slowly but surely the herd will follow. The contrary scenario is one in which your efforts are frustrated by and your energy sapped by resistors from whom the emerging messages to the herd are negative. All you do by working with resistors in the early stages is tire yourself out, build up more resistance and risk and entrenching yet further resistance in the herd.

So, perhaps my principle to do what you can, where you can, when you can is not so glib after all. I have likened the job of a change agents to lighting a series of small fires in an organisation. Sometimes the fire will take hold and it is those ones, especially in the initial stages, that you pay attention to, giving them whatever support they need to burn effectively whilst not becoming a wildfire. Some of your fires will just burble along, not dying out nor turning into wildfires – these you also support, looking for easy opportunities to help them along and maybe connect to different yet related places that are all part of the overall thrust of what you are trying to achieve. The ones you ignore are the fires that just flicker before dying out. Fire dies because it does not have enough fuel or enough oxygen, or enough people to supply it with fuel or oxygen. So let it die out until such time as you can find enough fuel enough oxygen (enough support and energy) to be able pay it some consistent attention.

To me this Principle –  “Do what you can, where you can, when you can” – is probably the most important principle in leading change. We only ever have a limited resource available so let’s make sure we commit our resource to areas in which we can make a short term difference, after all John P Kotter did talk about realising quick wins.

 

What stories could you share about how this division of effort, or perhaps lack of it, helped or hindered your change efforts?

There is no such thing as “Best Practice in Change Management”?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy

“ What is best practice in change management?”

This, and variations on the same theme seem to have appeared as questions in a surprisingly large number of the forums that I inhabit recently. And every time I read the answers with a falling heart.

Respondent A suggests the following six steps, Respondent B has a nine step process, Respondent C has a commercially secret process which they will sell you the several thousand pounds a day and so on… I can rarely resist the temptation, so I weigh in with my answer “There is no such thing as best practice in change management.”

 

Now I know that this is probably not what the questioner wanted to hear. Typically the questioner will be an enthusiastic, newly appointed change agent or middle manager who believes that you can manage change in the same way as you manage their process for producing widgets or appointing a new member of staff. I fear that most of these people are going to find out the hard way that change is more about leadership than management and that there is no such thing as a best practice process.

 

Now I am not denying – indeed far from it – that the likes of Kotter have a role to play, for indeed they do. But their role is to inform an emerging process which, if it is to be effective, also needs to be informed by the scale and scope of the change, the current and anticipated future culture of the organisation, the willingness of the participants, the capability of the change leaders and their teams and a host of other factors.

A recent piece by Alastair Dryburgh in Management Today reminded me that, in my experience, successful change rests upon adherence to some core principles rather than processes. His analogy, that if you cannot write an eight step process to guarantee winning a (deterministic) game of chess then how on earth can you write an eight step process to guarantee effective change in the much more complex and chaotic  human and physical environment of a corporation? Really illustrates the point.

 

The current reality of any organisation I have ever experienced is that they are a mess. Now admittedly some are more of a mess than others, but even the best tend to have a mess of policies that do not necessarily integrate with each other, an even more complex mess of procedures driven by those policies, an even more complicated mess of what actually happens in practice regardless of the procedures and policies and a way of working that has very little to do with the formal organisation charts so beloved of our colleagues in HR.

You don’t have to be involved in an organisation for very long to recognise that how things should work and how things do work are two different concepts. How things do work has typically evolved to get round the problems created by how things should work, and yet how often have I seen consultants trying to work with theory rather than reality? They are doomed to failure. So perhaps this is the first of my principles for leading effective change –

work with the current reality

I guess it is a bit like me setting off for London from where I live. In order for any map to be useful it needs to know where I am starting from. And that fact is not always easy to discover. If, in an attempt to understand the ‘As-Is’, you ask me what my postcode is you might reasonably assume that I live in Bradford. However if you asked me which city I live in I will tell you Leeds. So which map are you going to provide me with? In fact, because of the detail of where I happen to live, you will need to provide me with a much more detailed map than would be provided were I to set out from Leeds or Bradford. And always remember Korzybski’s compelling aphorism “A map is not the territory”.

So, in an attempt to keep this blog to a reasonable length, I will discuss some of my other guiding principles in subsequent entries. Meanwhile, what are the core principles that you use find a leading of facilitating change? I would love to know.

On forgiveness

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, procrastination, stress

forgivenessA few days ago I posted on our Facebook page what was described as a Buddhist prayer of forgiveness

If I have harmed anyone in any way either knowingly or unknowingly or through my own confusions I ask their forgiveness.

If anyone has harmed me in anyway either knowingly or unknowingly or through their own confusions I forgive them.

And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive I forgive myself for that.

For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions I forgive myself.

 

This came to mind when I met a very old friend of mine a couple of days ago and we started talking about our joint experiences in the industry that we both served for over 30 years. What that conversation brought to my mind was an incident towards the end of my career when I believed, and continue to believe, that I was treated very poorly. The details are irrelevant, what is relevant in this context is my becoming aware just how passionately I spoke about this particular incident and how strong was my ongoing dislike of the perpetrators. Even talking about this 12 year old incident triggered feelings of anger that quite surprised me.

Interestingly, the outcome of the incident was satisfactory because somebody who has, in my view, a significantly stronger appreciation of the impact of the decision, not only on me but on the several thousand people who hear, about it stepped in and reversed the decisions that had so infuriated me. So in practice, the bad behaviour (and even 12 years later I still consider it to be extremely bad behaviour) had no long term objective impact. Yet here I am writing a blog about how that emotionally charged event can and does still leads to negative emotions even 12 years on. For some reason I have been unable to forget the perpetrators. And I wonder why.

Those of a religious persuasions tend to be advised to either turn the other cheek or pluck an eye for an eye – I do not fall into this camp and anyway I cannot agree with an eye for an eye and really don’t see the point of letting someone abuse me twice. Over recent years we have heard a lot about the importance of the psychological contract between employer and employee and it is clear in retrospect that not only was the legal contract broken but the psychological contract didn’t appear to have even been considered. I had trusted that my employer would honour the terms of the written contract we agreed and would continue to act honourably. Well neither of those things happened and it is now clear that that fundamental breach of trust, and in my eyes it was a very fundamental breach, lies behind my unwillingness to forgive.

Yet the paradox is that I really do believe that the individuals involved were doing the best they could in the circumstances. That it failed to meet my needs was perhaps a function of both me being unable to express those needs and them being unable or unwilling to hear and act on that request.

I have not met either of these individuals in the last 12 years, nor do I intend to, and yet the episode has been there in the back of my mind gnawing away and occasionally surfacing to sap my energy. That stops here and now. I forgive you ‘R’, I forgive you ‘K’.

 

So, my query to you dear reader is what events in your past are still there in the back of your mind, occasionally gnawing at your energy? Who do you need to forgive for what, and how are you going to do that? And as you are forgiving, remember that  your own ‘un-forgiving’ has served some purpose so perhaps the degree level question that follows your forgiveness is to explore what that secondary gain has been and how you replace it with something more constructive and life affirming.

Risk and management/leadership – don’t delude yourself

Geoff Roberts change, choice, perception, strategy

riskPart of the work I do is to help implement risk-based decision making in respect of major capital assets for the water industry – contact me if you really want to know what this is about – and every time I think about the work we do here it leads me to the need to explore how ‘we’ approach risk in our lives and how that might affect our management and leadership practice.

Now, there are loads of articles and books written about the mechanics of Risk Management – this is not another one, this is about how we mis-perceive risks and the potential consequences of that. So let’s ask a few questions:

Would you rather have a nuclear power station in your back yard or a beehive?

The nuclear power station please. There is NO authenticated record of a ‘civilian’ dying as a consequence of the proper operation of a nuclear power station, yet (in the US – I can’t readily find UK figures) around 50 deaths per year are attributable to bee stings! I haven’t done the maths, but I suspect that eve after accounting for the extra deaths caused y the accidents at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima you had better avoid beehives!

What are your odds, if you buy a single ticket, of your 6 numbers being drawn in the National Lottery? And would you prefer these odds to those of being killed by lightning?

Well, in a typical year 3 people get killed by lightning in the UK, so if we average that to a weekly basis (to enable comparison with the weekly lottery), the chances of being killed by lightning in a typical week (assuming a UK population of 60 million) are 1:385,000. Better put your £ on a random person you know being killed because the odds of your numbers coming up are 36 times less likely!

OK, so these are extreme examples, yet they do illustrate how poor many people are at knowing the risks we face in our daily lives. So how good do you think you are at estimating the risks you face in your daily decision making at work?

Health and Safety is the classic arena – it’s one of the few areas where, by statute, we are required to make risk-based decisions. Yet it is also one of the fields of greatest weirdness. How many times have you heard “We can’t do that because we might kill someone”? Well, how likely is it that someone gets killed at work? You might like to look here for the answer…and you might be surprised that you are probably more likely to be killed going to or from work that actually at work (according to the DoT road deaths currently run at ca 2000 per year) or indeed at your home!

Now, let’s come right down the scale of seriousness. How many systems do you know of, or have you even put in place, that are there ‘just in case’? And did you estimate (accurately, now) the chances of the event happening and of course the consequences of the failure if it did happen? And was the cost of the system/process higher or lower than your consequence estimate? I will admit to having been a bit of a radical when I had a ‘real’ job (actually, I was paid to be so) and a favourite trick was to stop doing things that I or my team didn’t think were worth while – it was amazing how few got resurrected.

So, this little rant was really a challenge to you to think more rationally about the risks you face in your work (and/or life), so that you can make better informed decisions. What examples have you got of weird decisions made on the basis of totally unrealistic risks?

Roberts’ Law – on the difference between management and leadership

Geoff Roberts change

My great friend Andy and I were walking back from a conference recently in Johannesburg (that has got the self-ego-massage out of the way) when he asked “If you had a law named after you what would it be?” Well, always happy to oblige, I recalled the recent session where I had drawn delegates’ attention to the quotation from George Bernard Shaw in the attached image.

(Incidentally, it had never struck me that someone might ask for the ‘academic reference’ for the quotation-I was unable to help!)

Now when I talk about management and leadership, especially about the difference, it typically comes out as “management is about the status quo, leadership about change” or “management is about processes and systems, leadership about people”. Yet this quotation appears to offer a different insight. One in which managers find reasonable way to get things done within the current paradigm; they know the rules and boundaries and know how to operate within them. On the other hand, the leader sees advantage by going outside those rules and boundaries, or even the paradigm itself; they are challenging, they are creative and they can be unreasonable (from others’ perspectives) in their pursuit of change.

So, with huge acknowledgement to GBS and to Andy green for provoking this train of thought, I offer you my attempt at immortality:

Roberts’ Law

Managers act reasonably

Leaders act unreasonably

 

And, somewhat perversely, I suspect that successful leaders do it by appearing (if only to early adopters) to be reasonable. It’s all about perceived risk-another blog, another time-because what I regard as edgy but reasonable, the next person might consider outrageous. Our first task as leaders is surely to recruit a few followers, for without any followers we are not leaders. Each follower will have their own risk rationale and/or taste for adventure, based on their own experience and desires. In my unreasonableness, I must communicate with individual potential followers in a way that helps them understand why following me will help them.

Unless, of course, I want a bunch of gung ho adrenaline junkies-but in business that’s probably a recipe for anarchy and that is certainly no place for reasonable leaders!