Personal Excellence Programme

I like to think of myself as something of a gourmet and a better than average domestic cook. Indeed, on occasions I even live out the fantasy by putting on my chef’s jacket (I even bought a toque once) and cooking for groups of friends and our clients. I guess it was that interest in food and cookery that led my wife to buy me a ‘molecular gastronomy kit’ for Christmas 2011 – a box full of kit and chemicals that might just turn me into the next Heston Blumenthal. I’m ashamed that 14 months later I have not used any of that kit. Why?

Switch the scenario, your employer pays for you, or perhaps you even pay for yourself, to go on an expensive training course where you learn – or, more usually, someone tries to teach you, all sorts of new tools and techniques to improve your management or leadership practice. You come away with a head full of ideas and the course manual goes on the shelf never to be looked at again nor are very many of the ideas that you brought away with you put into practice. Why?

Perhaps it’s because I’m comfortable in my kitchen. I can nearly always rustle up something very tasty from whatever we have in the fridge and store cupboards and on occasions I will go out and buy some special ingredients to make a special meal. Yet all of that is within the envelope of what I know already and what my intuition tells me might be an interesting combination of ingredients. I rarely follow recipes, although I do read cookbooks out of interest and (also I think) a desire to stimulate my grey cells into something new or different. I guess I want whatever I cook to be mine, not a regurgitation of the beloved Delia’s undoubted skill in writing recipes. I know that I want each meal to be different – I could no more eat foie gras two nights running than listen to the Archers or watch Eastenders two days running. Doing things the same way as before just does not do it for me. Perhaps that’s a legacy of a life in organisational change, where I soon realised that every situation is different and required a different approaches to resolution. Or perhaps that is why I ended up in change because repetition is a boring.

Anyway, back to using that molecular gastronomy kit. I looked at it this morning and wondered why on earth I was not, so far, interested in using it. I don’t know the answer but here are a couple of propositions:

1. that I am not interested in learning anything new. I hope this isn’t the case, for as long as I can remember learning has been one of my core values and much of what I do seems to be about putting myself in positions where I might be able to learn something new.
2. fear of failure. I am really not very good failure. The prospect of not achieving my goals leads to one of two responses, either avoidance or persistence. I clearly remember the sinking feeling in my stomach on the rare occasions when my culinary concoctions have not worked out. Although I can only think of one or two occasions (from over 35 years of cooking just about every single day), when what I produced was actually inedible.

Switch the scenario again. When you return from that management or leadership training course, what gets in the way of trying out the new ideas? Do you really want to improve your performance or did you just go on the class for a bit of intellectual masturbation? Do you fear the consequences of trying out some of these new ideas? Or is it just that you can’t be bothered because you are stuck in a rut? Well as someone said to me some time ago “the difference between a rut and a grave is 6 feet”.

So, before the week is out that molecular gastronomy kit is going to be explored and used. I need to watch the video and read the manual because of this stuff is so different to what I already know that it seems unlikely I will be able to use intuition to guide me. I also need to do something else that I generally don’t need in working with intuition – plan. I know I will need to decide in advance what equipment, materials and ingredients I will need in order to prepare my chosen gastronomic treat.

I know it will be okay, because if it doesn’t quite turn out how I expect then I create the opportunity to learn by having another go. I suspect my wife might be in for some interesting treats over the next few weeks!

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!

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!

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.