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!

You don’t have to see the whole staircase, you just have to take the first step…

Geoff Roberts change

You don’t have to see the whole staircase, you just have to take the first step…
This is one of those little sayings that, like the other one of which I am fond

“Unless you are prepared to lose sight of the shore, you will not discover new lands”

that sets out to make the challenges of change more palatable.
There has certainly been times in my life (and no, I’m not necessarily going to share them with you) when had I known the length of the journey or the challenges I faced en route, I would not have set off. But without the journey, with or without its struggles, I would not have got to where I am today (no, this isn’t going to be a Reginald Perrin’s boss moment). I have learned that the important thing is to know roughly what you want and simply set off in that direction.

If somebody had told me how many steps I had to walk to get to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa, and that the staircase would get narrower and narrower towards the top, and I might not have been so keen to set off. I was going to get to the top, and maybe, just maybe, actually not being able to see all the steps and that narrowing staircase helped.

So, next time you are faced with something that seems a bit challenging, why not just take a step? Even a single step is likely to move you closer to your goal, and even if it actually moves you away then you have the opportunity to learn something before you take your next step.

Go on, climb those stairs!

I am not a trainer – helping adults to learn

Geoff Roberts change

Often in my profession, the easy answer to the question “So, what do you do for a living?” is to say “I am a leadership/management trainer”. It’s easy, it’s lazy and it’s wrong!

Now there’s a pretty odd statement to make, so perhaps I ought to explain what I am thinking.

It’s easy, lazy and wrong because of the implications (linguistics wallahs would say “complex equivalences”) of several of the words in the sentence.

 

Let’s take it step by step:

  • leadership/management – these are disciplines and I work with people, so in my slightly less lazy moments I say that “I train managers and leaders”
  • trainer – well, I have argued that you cannot train anyone to do anything, all you can do is provide the environment in which it is easier for them to learn. You can’t even train a dog – all you do is let its brain associate rewards (or, if you are that way inclined) punishment with particular behaviours, it soon learns to behave in your (and so its’) preferred way. “I help managers and leaders to learn”

Now let’s go deeper:

Managers/leaders, at least the ones I work with, are functionally adults and how we go about helping them to learn is fundamentally important. School teachers learn about pedagogy. Now pedagogy generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction. The word is derived from the ancient Greek paidagogeo, literally ‘to lead the child’. In ancient Greece, the paidagogos was a slave who supervised the education of his master’s son. So pedagogy is about children and whether or not we accept that the child’s brain is a tabula rasa it’s certainly clear that they are very open to new experiences and ‘being told what to do and how to do it’.

Adults are different, we have created our own map of the world and constantly seek/notice  reaffirmation of that map; we have our own value set (whether or not we are aware of them!) that drives our decisions; we are more aware of socio-cultural issues, etc. So why do so many organisations and individuals who take on adult learners treat them as children, not least by using pedagogical principles? Because they don’t know ay better!

Well, there is another approach to learning, specifically targetted at adults, usually labelled andragogy, that has a very different set of principles, most clearly expounded by Knowles.

Knowles’ theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning (thank you Wikipedia):

    1. Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know)
    2. Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation).
    3. Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept).
    4. Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives (Readiness).
    5. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation).
    6. Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators (Motivation).

Now this is the world I like to inhabit. The one where participants volunteer themselves to a learning experience because they see the advantage for themselves, the one where there is immediate relevance between the learning environment and the day-job, the one where the learning becomes a collaborative and active process and the one where we all go away having learned something and get on applying that learning.

This is not about Powerpoint (although it has its place) or ‘sit attentively and listen to me the Expert (although that has its place) or even ‘this is how you do it’ (because their context is likely to be different. It’s about understanding their motivations, challenge, doing things, making mistakes, eliciting the application of the learning, having the participants co-design both content and process and much more.

…and we won’t even delve deeper into the “I am…” statement at the beginning of my original lazy and wrong statement, that issue of Identity is for another time.

So, next time I am asked, I will say that “I design and deliver/facilitate processes that help adults learn to become more effective”. That might get a question in response – just what good adult learning is about!

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…

Developing your coaching practice

Geoff Roberts change

 

Just occasionally I am happy to draw your attention to a useful gig being run by someone else – here goes…

Coaching can be a lonely occupation and so I am always pleased to be able to share experiences and grow my capabilities. One way is for me to attend the EMCC Yorkshire events. They are free, just after work and always interesting.

The next session is in Leeds when there will be an interactive session to explore how to be aware of and handle the issues and tensions that arise when coaching in an organisational context

Using a recent case study in the public sector, Christina Heaton and Janet Dean will share their experience of individual and team coaching within an organisation undergoing transformational change. Participants will be able to consider some of the key challenges and identify the range of responses and techniques available to resolve them. The session will provide new insights for those with little experience of coaching in an organisational context, and offer further development and reflection for those with more experience.

You can register your interest at http://tinyurl.com/cr7mzdn   I look forward to seeing you there and PLEASE do let any colleagues who might be interested know all about it – all welcome.