Communicate, communicate, communicate

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility

Communication is critical in change

So you have your burning platform, your guiding coalition and your vision – what next? Well the vision won’t achieve anything sat on the managing directors computer, it needs to be communicated to everyone involved in the change and that will be the topic of tomorrow’s blog. I have often been asked “What is the most valuable piece of advice you could give to a change leader?” My response is constant – “Communicate, communicate, communicate and when you have finished communicating. communicate some more.” People often report that the worst part of change is not knowing, that once the way forward is clear they can start making their personal decisions about their own way forward. Any change leader or manager who does not have a communications stream in their programme should be sacked immediately, sat in an office by themselves for a month without any communication and left to ponder what life is like when nobody tells you what is going on.

People will want to know why the change is happening, what is going to be different afterwards, how the change is going to happen, when things will happen, who is in charge and how it will affect them personally. At some level, the question that every individual will be asking themselves is W. I. I. F. M? “What is in it for me?”

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers some useful insights into effective communications during change. You already have your advocates, the members of the guiding coalition, and they must be the initial message bearers. They probably need a communications professional to help craft clear, consistent and accurate messages that can be passed on initially by themselves and subsequently by others in the organisation. I was working on the job only a couple of years ago when talking to 3 equally senior members of the management team I got three quite different messages about what was going to happen in one particular part of the business. This cannot be allowed to happen – it leaves employees and other stakeholders confused, it leads to significant mistrust and will inevitably leads to hours and hours of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Plan and rehearse your communications especially if you are going to hold any form of launch event. I did this with the board of the company I was working with who wanted to announce a significant piece of organisational strategy and change. With probably spent three or four days in total crafting the messages, wondering what the listeners responses might be to the messages we were sending, re-crafting them rehearsing them and then letting every single employee know within a 24-hour window. Yes, I’ll say that again, every single employee heard  from their own director and within no more than 24 hours of other employees what was going to happen in the future.

Be prepared for questions, and misunderstanding – remember that you have probably taken weeks to get where you are and you cannot expect your audience to catch you up with a half-hour PowerPoint, followed by 10 rushed minutes of questions and answers. Your preparation will have left you with a set of questions and answers that you can hand out or put on your company website and there will be more emerge as individuals and groups start to understand the possible implications for them. If you don’t know the answer to any of the questions say so-the worst thing you can possibly do is to make answer up only to be proven wrong sumps later stage. This totally destroys trust. You will get a lot more respect for saying “I don’t know but I will find out and get back to you within 48 hours” than you will for waffling or making up stuff on the hoof. Of course once you promised to get back within 48 hours, or whatever, you must do so or fall even deeper into the pit of mistrust.

So your communications efforts have started, there is a long way to go, they must be kept open throughout the process. Even when there is nothing to say. I will say that again “Even when there is nothing to say, you need to say that there is nothing to say.” Too often I have seen a vacuum left when there really wasn’t much action being taken. There really wasn’t anything to tell everybody else but the trouble is that if you don’t say anything people make stuff up to fill the gaps and what they make up is not likely to be reality and will take you ages to disassemble and correct.

Communications is a critical part of any change efforts and needs to be handled as professionally as the engineers or IT specialists or chemists or whoever are handling the technical aspects of the change.

If you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there.

Geoff Roberts change

Craft your VisionIf you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there. Of course it might not be where you wanted to end up!

Kotters third step is to create a vision. A compelling vision of where you want the organisation to be in a few years time, what do you want to be different in the future, oh and don’t forget what you want to be the same in the future as well? The visions could be about different markets, different products, different ways of organising, different organisational culture, different levels of profitability, turnover etc. Whatever it is about it needs to be clear and compelling (I will talk about communicating the vision in the next blog).

Now there is a lot of brain power and breath expended on the difference between mission, vision, purpose and I am not into that game. I don’t care what label you put on it so long as you have spent a significant amount of time working with whoever you need to work with (more about that later) to establish clarity about what you want your organisation’s world to be like after the change. It needs to be short, sharp and simple and if it cannot be explained in Daily Mail speak then it is far too complicated. Remember, not only do you have to explain it to the Daily Mail readers in the staff canteen but you will be surprised how many of your external stakeholders will be pleasantly supportive of a vision, mission and purpose that does not require a degree in philosophy understand.

It is rumoured that at one time Coca-Cola’s vision was “A glass of Coke within arms reach of everybody in the world”. Whether or not this is true is immaterial, what does matter to me is that was a very simple very clear and very understandable vision, which could lead everybody in the company to ask themselves “Is what I am doing getting a glass of Coke closer to everybody in the world?”

So how do we go about crafting this vision? Well, it depends. There is plenty written, and I might well write more myself, about different approaches to creating vision. There is a chapter in my copy of Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook that is so tattered I had to photocopy someone else’s to be legible. He makes the point that crafting a vision, or more accurately the approach to crafting a vision, depends upon a series of factors, including the time available, how radical the vision might be, how ready willing and able are the workforce to be involved in crafting it and so on. What is clear to me is that it is very rare for it to be appropriate for the Chief Executive to craft the vision on her own and then to announce it to the world fully formed. At the very least this vision is the work of the guiding coalition and I would argue that the more people can be involved in the better, not least because if they are involved in crafting the vision then they are already supportive and advocates and can help spread that vision to anyone else affected.

Form your guiding coalition

Geoff Roberts change

Guiding coalitionWell any change effort needs a very strong leadership. Kotter suggests the need to form a guiding coalition. You need a small number (in my head, small numbers only have one digit) of powerful individuals who can lead the way both behind the scenes and in public. Although effecting change leadership is not about the exercise of hierarchical power, my experience clearly indicates that the most senior person in the business units or whole business that is being changed must sit on this guiding coalition. If it’s not important enough for the head honcho to spend a significant amount of time on the subject then it’s certainly not important enough for somebody six steps down the hierarchy to commit their efforts. I feel very strongly about this, so strongly that I have vowed never to work on change in an organisation unless the most senior person is both active and visible in promoting the change. Without the active support of the head honcho you are constantly battling uphill.

So who else should be part of your guiding coalition? Basically, this group is about power and influence and those two things do not necessarily correspond with hierarchy. Having got the overall head of the business or business unit on the team, you definitely need the leaders of the particular business units that might be affected; you need the key players in any significant internal customers (I have seen far too many change efforts fail because the leaders of the change became over focused and forgot about the implications of the change on internal or external customers); you need the leader or facilitator of the change effort (their truth about what is happening is more likely to be accurate than the truth being reported by the other interested parties on the group) and finally, you need somebody independent, somebody who will be able to see the wood for the trees and to help keep you at a strategic level. I would even go so far as its suggest that this latter person chairs this guiding coalition.

Having formed the team, and it is a team, there is a need to understand and learn how to work effectively together in this environment. As I have said earlier, hierarchy is not important, indeed sometimes it is positively unhelpful if the senior player keeps insisting they are right. The value of hierarchy is for sending external signals, the reassuring the organisation that the bosses are behind this and satisfying external stakeholders about goals and progress. Work within the team needs to be on the basis of equals with each of the equals having a key influencing role in relation to the change.

My final recommendation is that this team is provided with professional facilitation. Leading change is not ‘business as usual’ and the processes associated with business as usual may well be inappropriate-after all those of the processes that led to the business to the point at which it needs to make significant change! So invest in a professional facilitator who can work with the individuals and the team to help stay objective where appropriate and subjective where appropriate, to support the individuals and the team when the going gets tough (and it will get tough sometime) and to help develop and deliver processes appropriate for this critical time in the organisation’s career.

Burning platforms

Geoff Roberts change

Create a burning platformHave you ever noticed how easy change is when there is a crisis in the air? I used to work for a company that almost ran out of its product, a product that was used daily by four and a half million people and whose very lives depended upon that product. We were within 11 days of not being able to provide several tens of thousands of those customers with that life critical product. I vividly recall how easy it was to get decisions made and implemented in that climate and I also recall how, in the aftermath, the whole organisation found it relatively easy to become customer focused rather than product focused. The change that rocked through that company, and it was one that was already familiar with both continuous improvement and transformational change, was astonishing in its breadth and depth.

So think of times in your own life career when change seemed relatively straightforward-perhaps moving from one part of the country to another for a new job, perhaps you got a new or lost an old partner, perhaps the recent economic crisis left you facing unemployment, or not, perhaps the company about to go bust. In all of these situations you are likely to have accepted that change was necessary, whilst perhaps still finding it difficult.

Kotter suggests that the very first step in any significant change process is to create a sense of urgency, others have called it a burning platform. Whatever you call it you need to formulate a very clear rationale for the change and to be able to explain why if you do not change a range of unpleasant consequences will arise for both the organisation and the individuals within that organisation. And remember that the burning platform for the company is not a burning platform for the people employed within it.

Indeed I remember a conversation with an ex-managing director  some years ago who, after his first hundred days, did the usual thing and stood up in front of his senior managers to explain what he was going to change and why he was going to change it. I challenged him, by saying that “Well that’s all very interesting Mr X, but do you understand that what you will get is what the four and a half thousand people working for this company wants to give you?” He had completely missed the point that people change for their own reasons, they change because they see an advantage. So your burning platform, your sense of urgency need to address both the corporate issues that you face and the implications of those corporate issues on the people within and around your organisation.

So, you’ve established your sense of urgency, your burning platform-what next?

Planning change

Geoff Roberts change

Kotter's 8 StepsYou have probably figured out by now that one of my areas of interest, indeed professional expertise, is change leadership. Perhaps it’s about time I wrote something on that topic. For the next couple of weeks I will be sharing my experiences with leading and facilitating change, using John Kotter’s 8-step model as a vehicle.

This change leadership business is not new. The following quotation from Charles Darwin sticks in my mind

it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

However, being adaptable or even willing or better still desirous is not usually sufficient. In order to effect a significant change in an organisation a process and a plan isnecessary. This is where the various change models offered by an ever increasing range of gurus comes in. You can take your pick, and most of them have something to offer. However my real life, rather than academic, experience suggests that is the eight steps offered by John Kotter are a very good place to start and to come back to to make sure that you are covering all bases. I will write about one of the steps of each of the next eight days but in the meantime, here they are listed out:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency.
  2. Form a powerful guiding coalition.
  3. Create a compelling vision
  4. Communicate to the vision
  5. Empower others to act on the vision
  6. Plan and create short-term wins.
  7. Consolidate and integrate improvements.
  8. Institutionalised new approaches.

Now this reads and feels as if change leadership is a linear process where step six follows step five. I have to say, that is not my experience. Whilst such an apparent linear model helps to understand what needs to be done and the preferred order of doing things the reality is somewhat more pragmatic. Shortly after I finished my Masters in organisational change, in parallel with which I was leading a major organisational change for my then employer, I was asked what was the most important thing I learned on the programme. My response was that effective change leaders do what they can where they can when they can. Sometimes this means joining the dots up later, indeed I have blogged earlier about how easy it is to join the dots up in retrospect, even though there was not an initial plan. Well, by all means start with a plan but do not expect reality to our line with what you have written on your paper, or even put into MS Project!

Always remember that you are much better off working with one advocate then against 10 resistors. Seek out your advocates and help them light fires at various places around the business. Some of those fires will die out, let them. Some of them will flareup, you will make much more progress than you thought possible. Some of them will just glow away slowly waiting for a puff of wind to spark an interaction-make sure you keep your eyes on these and are ready to provide the puff of wind whenever it is necessary.

Tomorrow, I will write about the importance of creating a sense of urgency.

Commit to Action

Geoff Roberts change, choice, language

Yoda“Are you really committed, or are you just going to try?”

I often hear others, and occasionally myself, say “OK, I will try to do ….”

Well here is a simple little exercise for you to do – go on, do it now, it will take you longer to read the instructions than do the exercise.

Put a chair in the middle of the room; stand behind the chair; now try to pick it up.

NO, I did not say ‘pick it up’. I asked you to try to pick it up. You can’t can you? You either pick it up or you do not pick it up!

The use of the word “try” carries with it an implicit possibiity of failure. Is that what you really want for your goals, or do you want to achieve them?

So go on, make that committment – decide that you will achieve that goal.

Remember, it was Yoda who said “There is no try, there is only do or not do”.

Let your light shine brighter

Geoff Roberts change

Let your light shine brighter“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

What can you chip away to reveal the true you?

I sometimes wonder what happened to the real true genuine authentic me; the me that is totally comfortable in my own skin, that does not question my thoughts or actions because it just knows that they are in line with the inner Geoff.

As we go through life we tend to accumulate beliefs and habits that surround us and cover us. They build up without us noticing, they dim our inner light, and we shine less.

Those beliefs and habits sometimes create a ‘mask’ that we project to the world. For example, the belief “Emotion has no role in the workplace” leads to hard-nosed hard-faced hard-acting managers, no matter how they behave privately (I used to know one of these!)

So,what mask do our colleagues and our friends see? (BTW – the “S” level question is “What mask do YOU see?”)

So here is this week’s challenge – Chip away what is not really you.

Chip away what is unimportant.

You do this through feelings, not thought. Oh yes, you start with thought, but your feelings let you know whether you are being authentic. Does what you have just done, or better still what you plan to do, feel right for you? Is there a little uneasiness somewhere inside? That’s the clue!

Chip away that which might cause someone to think you are less than authentic.

And your light will shine brighter.

Have you noticed that true leaders shine more brightly in some way? That is why they can lead.

Are you really listening?

Geoff Roberts change, choice, focus, perception

I hear you but am I listening?Yesterday, I was driving my granddaughter to meet Peppa Pig. The radio happened to be on and it was one of those “my favourite tracks” sessions. The subject, I can’t remember who it was and it doesn’t really matter anyway, played Michael Jackson’s ‘The Man in the Mirror’, introducing it with comments to the effect that it was a song about how effecting change in the world necessitated starting with the man in the mirror (that is, yourself). I have heard this track many times and never, ever made that connection.

Then, this morning, I am driving that same grand daughter to nursery listening to a programme about The Jam Generation – that generation brought up in the 1980s with The Jam as part of their youthful soundtrack. The commentator seemed surprised that some senior Tories claimed to enjoy The Jam, and other groups of that ilk, despite the relatively left wing nature of their lyrics. He could not understand how they could subscribe to the lyrics in the song and yet be right-leaning Tories.

What both of these incidents suggested to me was the difference between hearing something and listening to it.

I have heard the Michael Jackson track many times and many times I have explained to other people that when I am listening to music. I very rarely pay attention to the specific words in the lyrics. More, I am concerned with the patterns of sound.

In the second case there the similarity, the commentator did not seem to acknowledge the possibility that these right-wingers could be hearing the lyrics while not listening to the words.

Now this observation is no great shakes but it does remind me of the need to be clear about whether a conversation I am part of is simply part of my life’s soundtrack or something whose contents might have much more meaning if I paid attention to what the other person was saying. Listening is an active process, its demands mental effort.

So today my challenge is to pay active attention when you are listening – whether to the radio, your colleagues at work, your partner, or whoever. Maybe it’s okay to have the radio on as a background soundtrack; but surely when we are face-to-face with someone they deserve as much attention from those as we might expect from then in reverse

Rattlesnakes can cause stress

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, procrastination, stress

Richard Bach has been at it again, this time he has stimulated my thoughts around change. Ask anybody who deals with change on a professional basis and they will typically tell you that either it takes a very long time or it can happen instantly, the latter usually when there is some sort of crisis to be dealt with. This requires a response outside our normal repertoire.

Richard Bach, brilliant writer that he is, put it this way:

It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem” he said, his face lit with excitement.” Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it does it?

Sometimes I was unaware that rattlesnakes were even around, sometimes I knew about the rattlesnakes but ignored them, sometimes the rattlesnakes transformed into a poisonous spider, but every now and again one of those rattlesnakes ends up in my hand. This is a bit like how some people deal with stress.

We wake up in the morning and someone has left the bathroom lights on all night (it’s not worth the hassle of finding out who and reminding them to turn it off in future), we go downstairs and the first thing we notice is the waste bin overflowing (who is it that is so lazy that they cannot be bothered to empty it and so just it just piles up. It falls on the floor), only try to fill the kettle up but we can’t because the sink is full of dirty dishes, then we find our favourite cereal has been used up, then there’s no milk, and the kids are late which risks me being late for the appointment that I have to meet after I’d taken them to school, then there’s an accident on the way there and I am delayed yet again, then the client I’ve been speaking to 4 weeks decides he wants a fundamental change in the proposal we have been working on, then I get home and my printer has run out of ink again, then the telephone rings and rings and rings but I am trying to concentrate on something else, then… (add in your own stressors will).

Then my wife comes in and asks what’s the dinner tonight?-And she gets it all dumped on her. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT. WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT IS WHAT YOU COOK WHEN YOU WANT TO COOK IT….

Poor woman, a simple enquiry yet the stacked up stresses of the day just collapsed on her very ordinary question. And I spend the next week apologising and making it up – somehow.

If only I had dealt with those little things as they were happening…

If only I had dealt with the rattlesnake before it ended up in my hand…

Life is for living

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, procrastination, selection, time management

Richard Bach - OneI have just been reading another wonderful little book by Richard Bach called “One”. I first came across Richard’s books when I was introduced to Jonathan Livingston Seagull over 30 years ago. JLS can take you half an hour to read or a lifetime; it can be a simple story about a Seagull are a complex parable about learning. For many years I never left the house without a seagull on a chain around my neck, until the day that I realised the seagull had flown away when the chain broke,  never to be seen by me again.

Anyway, back to this latest book “One”. He posits a situation and an exercise that I challenge you to take on yourself. Somehow or other  he meets himself in the future and that future self  knows, for certain, that he only has six months to live. Let me give you the exercise by quoting from the book:

“I think we ought to take this napkin here”, she reached into her purse, “and this pencil, and we ought to list what we want to do most and make this the best six months, the best time in our lives. What would we do if there were no doctors with their dos and don’ts? They can’t cure you, so who are they to tell others what to do with whatever time we have left? I think we ought to make this list and then go ahead and do what we want.”

I don’t know whether the subject of this piece was lucky or not that he knew for sure that he had another six months to live. I don’t know whether or not I will be alive when you read this entry-there is no reason why I shouldn’t be but who knows what happens on the roads or in that complex biochemistry that keeps is running every day?

So my challenge to you is to do the exercise, to figure out what it is that you want to do (not need to do – that’s usually someone else’s agenda), to make a list and to get out there and do it. Oh, there will be challenges, but isn’t a life full of those anyway? Yes, you might upset a few people but you are living your life and you probably only have one of them so you might as well get the most out of it.

And some people will tell you that it’s impossible, selfish, not affordable, etc  – those are their hangups. So let them deal with them rather than dump them on you. I urge you do this exercise , after all you might only have six months to live.