There is no failure, only feedback

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility

Head in hands with failure

 

My friend Andy Green has decided to label this week “Failure Week” and it set me thinking. Those of you who read this blog will recognise that it has become rather occasional – one might say that I have failed to write something every day, which was my original intent.

However in my world failure is only really failure if I fail to learn from it. So what have I learned?

  1. I am most successful blogging daily when I have a plan – usually to write a series of articles on a particular topic (see Twixtmas or Metaprograms earlier).
  2. I need to sort out the ‘Schedule’ function in my WordPress – it doesn’t work and it bugs me that I have to go in every day to workaround the fact that my scheduled post didn’t make it to your wonderful eyes.

What I have learned from earlier experience is that a list of more than 2 or 3 items is less likely to get completed than a very short list – eat the elephant one bite at a time. So that’s it. I suggested elsewhere that I might write an A-Z of personal development, so I am off to compose the first few, any suggestions for topics (especially for Q, X, Z) will be very welcome.

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One day at a time

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus

One day at a timeDo some of your goals sometimes seem a bit too challenging, a bit  too long-term or a bit too much to take on? Do you find it hard to make and maintain the committment necessary?

Well, I came a cross a suggestion that I found helpful – take it one day at a time. Now just a minute, isn’t that what is always advised? well, what I heard was a slightly different take.

The suggestion was to commit to your goal, or more accurately the action needed to achieve it, one day at a time. When you wake up, promise to yourself that you will eat only healthy food, run for 30 minutes, contact one new potential customer, whatever…today. If you miss it, you miss it, get on with life and re-make that commitment again tomorrow when maybe you will be more successful.Yoou will probably hit your action more often than not, each step still moving you forward, but without the weight of months or years of effort in your head weighing you down.

I find it easier to do something one day at a time than ‘for ever’. Maybe you will too.

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Institutionalise new approaches – embed your learning

Geoff Roberts change

Institutionalise your gainsSo here we are on Kotter’s eighth step “Institutionalise the new approaches”. What does he mean by this?

Well, your “As Was”  organisation had structures, personnel practices, reward and recognition systems and lots of other processes and systems that were designed for the old world. Unless these are changed there is likely to be a tendency to regress and to slip back into the old ways.

The last part of this phase of your change program must be to ensure that the support processes in your organisation reinforce the new ways of doing things and work against the old ways of doing things. Continue to articulate the benefits of the new status quo and work relentlessly to embed new habits throughout the organisation.

Remember those people who were critical in helping move you forward? Make sure that their commitment and drive is rewarded, after all, they are the very people that you may need to your next significant organisational change.

Nobody ever said that change was easy, at least nobody who was ever involved in it said so. But having John Kotter’s eight steps in mind you stand a much better chance of being effective in your change program, but always remember that there are a planning tool not a tool for producing a plan. Good luck in all your efforts and watch out for the next series on change leadership.

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Consolidate your gains – complete the jigsaw

Geoff Roberts change

Consolidate changes - complete the jigsawYou’re on your way, the benefits of the change are becoming visible, so now is the time to planning yet more change!

Remember that earlier when I said “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”? Now is the time to look for what else you can change, where else you can change and when else you can change it.

The increased credibility of the change program allows you to look at systems, structures and policies that don’t fit the vision; to hire, promote and develop employees who can implement the vision and to reinvigorate the process with new projects, new areas for improvements and new change agents. You are building the momentum and extending your influence to different areas of the organisation.

My only word of caution is to be avoid trying to do too much too soon. Now, there is no known algorithm for establishing how much you can do and so you need to be listening to the rumblings at ground level-are they welcoming these new initiatives as complementary to what is already happening or is resistance building rather than reducing? Always remember that you need to be able to explain how your latest initiative is just another part of the big jigsaw represented by the vision. You started with the pieces that were easy to connect together, you are now starting to fill in the gaps and make sure that the parts of the jigsaw being worked on by different people connect together efficiently.

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Quick wins are key

Geoff Roberts change

Quick wins are criticalSo, your great vision is underway. You have your sense of urgency, your guiding coalition, your compelling vision, you have communicated and empowered your people and all you have to do is sit back and wait for the results. Wrong! The big challenge now is to keep the motivation going.

Kotter’s sixth step is to “plan for and create short-term wins”. You need to be both actively planning quick wins and actively looking out for opportunities to praise and reward those involved for the progress that is being made. I might even suggest that, without going too far over the top, you temporarily lower the bar as to what is praisable.

These quick wins, or more accurately the public reward and recognition of the quick wins, will not only made motivate the individuals responsible for them but sends signals that progress is being made and will be rewarded. Make sure that you plan in celebrations at key milestones and always remember that the cost of a few bottles of champagne, cream cakes or whatever is nothing compared to the gains from your overall change programme. I recall, about 20 years ago, on completion of a software upgrade for a laboratory management system that I bought the project lead a bottle of champagne. That might not sound like very much (although it was unheard of in the organisation at the time) but I know that it created a huge buzz round the IT department and believe it or not still gets mentioned occasionally. A bottle of champagne that perhaps cost the equivalent of one hours work had an impact lasting many years-now that is what I call return on investment.

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Empower your people

Geoff Roberts change

Empower your peopleI once had a client complain to me that “I have told my people they are empowered, yet they still don’t get on and do things.” Of course the heart of the problem lay in the very way he expressed himself – “I told…” with its implicit hierarchical power.

I cannot empower anyone, all I can do is create an environment in which people will feel able to make their own decisions and to coach and support my people in ways that encourage them to take hold of the reins themselves rather than be constantly looking upwards for direction.

Many organisations, no, let me correct that – many bosses – see Kotter’s fifth step “Empower others to act on the vision” as the most challenging. This is the step which requires them to hand over their carefully crafted vision to the workforce who can take action to deliver it. Change it. Leadership is no field for control freaks.

A significant part of the work in this step is to remove the controls that kept the organisation in its prior status quo because these will get in the way of change and progress. Just think of a lorry facing downhill with a couple of wooden chocks under its wheels to stop it actually rolling. What is the easier way to get it rolling downhill, get lots of people at the back and push it over the chocks or get one person to quickly kick the chocks out of the way?

This is a time to encourage risk-taking, to promote experiments and non-traditional ideas and activities. It is a time for truly open dialogue about the vision and how it might be achieved-remember that the key skill in dialogue is listening, not speaking. It is a time to lead, not manage, a time to encourage your people by praising them for trying and failing (there is no failure, only feedback) as well as for their successes.

Essentially, you need to set the direction get out of people’s way.

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Managing change according to Kotter (or Geoff!)

Geoff Roberts change

Kotter's 8 Steps according to GeoffLast week we explored the first four of Kotter’s eight steps for managing change effectively:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency.
  2. Former powerful guiding coalition.
  3. Create a vision
  4. Communicate a vision

For the rest of this week if I want to explore the remaining four steps:

5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan and create short-term wins.
7. Consolidate improvements.
8. Institutionalise new approaches.

However, before I do that I want to go back to a comment I made in the opening blog of this series relating to the non-linear reality of change in leadership. I stated, and I stand by that statement, that most change models are false in that they imply that you started a point A, go to point B, then point C etc before eventually arriving at your destination. Anyone who has experienced change in the real world, as compared to the world of academics and theoreticians, recognises that the situation is somewhat different.

Just look at last week’s four steps-might it just me that someone has a vision for change before getting together their guiding coalition? Or perhaps an initial guiding coalition (often one or two directors or maybe even the whole board) just senses a need for change and set out to create the sense of urgency and burning platform upon which subsequent action will be based? So when you look at change in your organisation, always remember my guiding principles

  • “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”
  • “Light fires in the business and tend or douse them, as appropriate”
  • “Be prepared for changes of course-the planning is more important than the plan.”

So tomorrow we will explore the oft misunderstood field of empowerment and what we have to do to get people on board and working towards the new vision.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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