Practical leadership – when to walk away.

Geoff Roberts change, choice, opportunity, paradox, Risk, selection, strategy, stress

Walk AwayI have just been reflecting on the various organisations in which I have a voluntary interest, typically as a trustee or school governor. Every single one of them either has had, or currently has, significant leadership issues – perhaps that says something about the type of organisation in which I get involved but I really wanted both myself and you to reflect on our behaviour when faced with serious challenges.

Throughout most of my working life I was paid, and sometimes handsomely, to face and deal with the challenges of organisational stress and change. I mention this because I have come to recognise that facing similar challenges as a volunteer is fundamentally different. In the first instance a security driver always kicked in, after all my employer paid my mortgage and set up a pension which now allows me to volunteer my time. The situation with volunteering is fundamentally different, I can walk away at any time and can even arrange such a departure that most other people involved would recognise that I was neither implicitly not explicitly knocking the organisation for which I had volunteered. Indeed I did that three or four years ago when I temporarily gave up all of my involvement in school governance because it was taking over and I realised that I needed to pay more attention to my business and personal life. Well, that is what I said at the time.

Reflecting on that, and taking account of my current circumstances, I wonder whether I had just had enough. I guess that I volunteer in the belief that those receiving my services will value them and be prepared to listen to what I have to say. Better still, act on it. When this does not happen, the change manager in me says something along the lines of “Well, the system is stuck and I am part of the system. What can I do differently that might provoke a different response?”

As a professional, one tries and tries and tries alternative tactics and strategies in an effort to unlock the system. Equally, as a professional I have come to realise that there is a time to walk away. I have probably mentioned before that, in something like 30 years of change leadership, one of the key lessons I have learned is “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”. The implications of that statement are that on occasions one ought to walk away from a challenge, partly because walking away is itself an intervention that might shift the system and partly because a change agent’s time is usually best spent on situations where they can make a difference rather than tiring themselves out in trying to move the immovable object.

So my proposition is that the statement “I have had enough of this” might well be my subconscious telling me to walk away. What do you think? Especially for those of you who volunteer your time, what keeps you there when the going gets tough?

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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?

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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.

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Am I deluding myself by studying world class leaders?

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, strategy

So many article, blogs, books, presentations etc are based on the proposition that we can learn from ‘world class operators’ – if they can do it, so can you; if you just model how they do it, you can do it too, that sort of territory. Some NLP’ers even propound the view that “if anyone can do it, you can do it”.

I want to open an enquiry into the legitimacy of that view.

World class operators are, by definition part of a very small tail in a statistical distribution of performance, and many (most?) of these outstanding performers have physical or mental attributes that I cannot attain:

  • Usain Bolt is blessed with a super-abundance of ultra-fast-twitch muscle,
  • Richard Branson is dyslexic and didn’t really get on well at school,
  • many others around the world had ‘challenging’ childhoods.

So some have physical advantages that no matter how hard I try or visualise or set challenging goals I will never be able to replicate and others have a past that I managed to avoid. Moreover, their performance is so far removed from mine that it lies well outside my comfort zone, maybe even in the “Here be Dragons” territory that is more disabling than empowering.

What if we were to challenge ourselves with performance that lies in the stretch zone instead? What of we were to model our performance on those who perform 10/20/30%  better than ourselves, rather than the zillion% outperformers whose achievements are practically unobtainable?

Now, let’s be clear here – I am not saying that these people cannot be and are not inspirational, what I am suggesting is that their performance is so far from the norm that us mere mortals might be better off concentrating our learning on how our local business, charity, church, theatre etc leaders do it. When I look for a book on “What you can learn from you above-averagely successful but not world-class leader” they don’t seem to be there.

Is this a field for research? Do you find such global inspirations too far out of sight as to be really helpful? What do you think of this topic generally? Go on, comment away…

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Fear of Failure

Geoff Roberts change, choice, opportunity, Risk

fear of failureOften, when coaching clients, I come across those with great ideas who just do not put them into action. Now there can be all sorts of reasons for this, and what I want to explore today is a very common one – Fear of Failure.
If the status quo is OK, there can be a sense of “well, if I try and fail then I will be worse off than now”, or “if it goes wrong then I will get the blame”, or “maybe a better idea will come along…”. All of these make sense to the client and lead to inaction. But inaction also eliminates the possibility of success.

 

It’s a vicious cycle:

“I fear the possibility of failure…

…that fear leads to inaction…

…which totally eliminates the possibility of success.”

There are times when it’s necessary to just bite the bullet and take some action – my experience is that more often than not all works out well. And even when it doesn’t “There is no failure, only feedback” and I get the chance to learn something.

Go on, make that dream happen – take a small step today.

 

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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.

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Change – management or what?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, strategy

Chaneg ahead road sign

I was recently involved in a discussion about whether change can happen in organisations without the use of Change Management.

For me, the challenge of the phrase “Change Management” is an embedded belief that change CAN be managed. Yes, we may be able to manage the installation of some new piece of kit or software but when it comes to wetware that all changes because people are much less predictable (and more likely to bite back) than machinery.

To be sustainable, change needs to happen at the ‘right’ pace for the individuals (whoops, I nearly typed ‘people’) involved – push them too hard and you will end up going backwards to deal with resistance, move too slowly and you will lose followers’ enthusiasm. For this reason, any ‘change plan’ – and the existence of such a plan is implied by use of the term ‘management’ – is bound to fail.

I prefer to look at change as a strategic thrust – “This is probably where we need to get to, we will find out more along the way, do you want to go there, what can you do to help us get there?” Hold a Vision and then move as fast or slow as you can whilst keeping the people with you.

My metaphor is to light fires within the business. Some of the fires will catch, spread and maybe even attract others; some fires will die out and unless these are really critical areas (in which case keep stoking the fire in different ways until it catches) move on and find someone/somewhere more ‘productive.

One key piece of learning for me over the many years I have spent in change is to “do what you can, where you can, when you can”.

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Finding that creative spark

Geoff Roberts choice, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity

creative spark between fingersI spent yesterday morning with a group of colleagues who are members of a Net2 group. The me, this group acts partly as networking but more significantly as an informal personal development network where I can share my expertise, have it challenged and add to it on the basis of the work and presentations that we do in the sessions. After yesterday’s meeting I commented to several people how pleasant it had been to share some time with like-minded individuals who operated in similar spheres and had a degree of intellectual and practical capability that offered me a challenge.

I really enjoy these meetings and found myself reflecting on the paradoxical nature of my attendance. On the one hand I have no doubt whatsoever that there is value in this group of like-minded people. The other hand suggests the value of diversity and the importance of exposing myself to new ideas and new people. So perhaps you to need to pay attention to both aspects of your learning. Perhaps you need to be challenged and challenge yourself within your domain of expertise as well as stimulating your creativity by exposing yourself to ideas and experiences that do not seem to be immediately relevant.

For those of us that operating in an essentially data rational world, it is the second aspect that might be particularly challenging. How might spending an afternoon in an art gallery or reading about the history of the Roman Empire or simply going for a walk along a beach help me design a better road, build a better sewage works or facilitate a meeting more effectively? The whole point is that we do not know. It is a simple fact that I often find interesting ideas popping into my head whilst I am doing these off-topic activities and it is received wisdom in creativity circles that both incubation and diversity of experience are important in generating creative ideas.

I guess another paradoxical aspect of the whole experience was that it boosted both my ego and my humility by helping me realise that not only am I rather capable but I also still have quite a lot to learn.

So, my challenge to you is, and this is perhaps especially relevant if you are in one of those are driven jobs or lifestyles where everything is planned and there is no time for anything new. Find creative ways to meet your peers (professional associations, networking groups etc) and also make time to do something that is out of the ordinary. Do both of these knowing that in some way, perhaps not known beforehand, both of them will add value to your life and help you do a better job.

Do let me know what you do and how it goes.

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Challenge yourself

Geoff Roberts choice, flexibility, opportunity

man standing out from the packI was watching the new series of Masterchef last night and was seriously impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants. Some of them very clearly knew how to shake a pan, others perhaps needed a bit more practice. I was left wondering how many of them had decided to cook something safe, well within their capabilities, and how many had decided to take risks with new and challenging recipes in the hope of winning this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Sometimes we do only get one opportunity and you might find it instructive to have a think about how you react in those situations. Do you take the safe but sure approach – which unless you are world class probably puts you in a pack with many others – or do you give it your all in the hope of creating something new and unexpected?

Heston Blumenthal did not become one of the best chefs in the world by cooking conventional French cuisine better than anyone else, he needed to find his own style and even his own techniques.

People who are different, or do things differently, are the ones that get noticed, so what do you do or are you going to do to make yourself noticeable and push the boat out?

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Trying harder is not the answer

Geoff Roberts change, choice, opportunity, strategy

snake painted on eggI am walking along holding an egg in my hand when suddenly I manage to drop it and break it. Do I tell myself “Hold onto the egg more tightly” or do I find a better way of carrying the egg?

Does a stressful event start a cascade that ends up making even you more stressed?
When someone in authority challenges you or corrects your behavior, do you to push back and make the behaviour worse?
Does a failure set you on a path to more failure?

These questions seem philosophical or even paradoxical, but in fact I think they get to the heart of why some people succeed and others don’t. We can choose to create (virtuous) cycles that move us up or endure (vicious) cycles that drag us down.
A policemen hassles a teenager who is acting up. The teenager escalates. The cop escalates. Someone gets arrested – and you can bet it isn’t the cop!.
A sales call is going poorly because the prospect doesn’t perceive the salesperson is confident. She responds by becoming even less confident. No sale.
A mistake is made. The stakes go up. Rattled, another mistake is made, and then again, until failure occurs…

James Bond is a hero because the tougher the world got, the cooler he got. Symphony conductors don’t endure the pressure of a performance, they thrive on it.

If being a little behind creates self-pressure that leads to stress and then errors, is it really suprising that you frequently end up a lot behind.
Customer service falls apart when mutual escalation or non-understanding sets in. Management falls apart when power struggles or miscommunication escalate. Education falls apart when students respond to poor exam results by giving up.

Someone who gets better whenever he fails will always outperform someone who responds to failure by getting worse. This isn’t something in your DNA, it’s something you can learn or unlearn.
The useful response to ‘failure’ is not to try harder, to buckle down and grind it out. The response that works is to understand the nature of the cycle and to change it from the start. You must not fight the cycle, you must transform it into a different cycle altogether. It’s a lot of work, but less work than failing.
When the snake pushes you to recoil in fear, that’s your cue to embrace the trembling fear and do precisely the opposite of what it demands. This won’t work the first time or even the tenth, but it’s the path to an upcycle, one where each negative input leads to more productivity, not less.
Carry that egg in a bowl.

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