Change Leadership

It’s a holiday week in the US so, for this blog post, here’s a gift: a downloadable checklist to help you think through your next change effort. Happy holidays!

So much needs to be done when planning a change—and that’s just the work around creating the new product, process, or solution. Organizations that wish to be successful must deal with the human aspects of change leadership and help people make the transition from the old to the new. Change leaders need to answer key questions in each phase before moving on to the next. Use this simple checklist to see if you’ve answered the important questions about your next change initiative.

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It’s 1981 and I want nothing more than to own a pair of designer Jordache jeans. My mother thinks they’re too expensive. “But,” I complain, “All of my friends have them.” Her response: “If all of your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you jump too?”

That was my first lesson in the importance of resisting peer pressure. (It didn’t stick, by the way. I eventually wore down my mother. In my jeans, I thought I was the coolest kid in town.)

My views on peer pressure are a little more nuanced today than it was in 1981. Today, I believe that social pressure has power that can be used for good.

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Technologists are notorious for having independent thoughts and ideas. Sometimes this is a help to organizations, such as they’re innovating a new process or technology. Other times, this is a challenge, like when trying to change behavior. Now imagine that those desired behaviors are perceived as limiting freedom and independence on projects. Change could be hard.

One organization, a former client, succeeded in herding a group of smart cats—technologists—to implement software engineering best practices by adopting the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). For those of you who live outside IT Land, CMM is a proven approach to process improvement implemented by many companies throughout the world.

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I’m delighted to announce that November 28, 2012 is the release date for Handbook for Strategic HR: Best Practices in Organization Development from the OD Network. 

This volume draws on the best thinking on strategic Human Resources from the premier OD practitioner journal, OD Practitioner. I worked on this project along with a fantastic, smart group of OD professionals: Editor-In-Chief John Vogelsang, Judy Vogel, Annie Viets, Lynne Valek, Cathy Royal, Matt Minahan, and Dave Jamieson. I edited the chapter on Employee Engagement with Annie Viets and the chapter on Change Management.

Here’s the blurb about the book from Amazon:

The role of human resources is no longer limited to hiring, managing compensation, and ensuring compliance.

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Why should companies care about octopi? It turns out that there’s plenty to learn from these creatures about adaptability, change leadership, and business ecosystems.

Rafe Sagarin, author of Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease, is a fan of the octopus. Not only are these creatures highly intelligent and capable of problem solving, they also have the ability to camouflage in sophisticated ways. When moving from one area of the ocean to another, they rapidly change color to match their surroundings. To the human eye, it’s almost too fast to see: octopi blend almost instantaneously with the fauna behind them.

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Irene Brank worked as director of life and annuity operations for the life division of First Allmerica Financial. She faced one of the most difficult of situations someone could face: managing employees facing almost certain job loss during a company closure. The 250-plus employees in the life business had to service existing clients while transferring knowledge to an acquiring company.

The potential for harm was great: en masse departures, careless work, or even retribution and sabotage were possible if Allmerica failed to help its employees with the consequences of closure. To meet the challenge, leaders of the life division decided to embark on an ambitious learning initiative.

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Social networks are hot topics these days. But the allure of Facebook and LinkedIn also holds a trap: they can lure us into thinking that building and maintaining our connections ties is simply a matter of using our smart phones to “bring people to the square” (as in the Arab Spring), communicating through Twitter, or attending the latest networking meeting.

To make informal networks a force for institutional learning and innovation, we must get beyond the idea that network creation is finding each other in the virtual hallways of social media.  We need to bring focus to our networks, identify the value we wish to mine from them, align around that imperative, and then take joint action to pilot and perfect new products and services.

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It was a great crowd on May 5, 2012 at the PMI Mass Bay Professional Development Day. We talked about how to provide successful change leadership on projects. Specifically, we discussed:

• The one method that makes a change initiative 10 times more likely to succeed.
• The six ways of creating change in organizations.
• How PMs can use the six way to help create change.
• How PMs can choose the best fit for their projects.

Take a look at the slides and see how they can help with your next change initiative!

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Years ago, I coached a new manager who did the worst thing possible. In his insecurity about his new role and desire to succeed, he forbade his direct reports from having any conversations with others in the organization without him in the room.

It was a disaster. The direct reports felt micromanaged and untrusted. They told others that their new boss was a controlling, egotistical jerk. They certainly weren’t going to follow him anywhere.

This new leader did, by the way, see the error of his decision and improve his behavior. However, he started on the wrong foot by failing at one of the central jobs of the leader: building trust.

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This excellent, undervalued article should get more attention. According to Grenny, Maxfield, & Shimberg in MIT Sloan Management Review, applying 4 or more of the following helps increase the likelihood by ten times that the change will stick.

Their model says that there are three ways to influence: at the individual, social, or structural level. Then, there are two ways to engage people: through motivation (helping them gain motivation for the change) or through ability (helping them gain the skills needed to support the change). All together, this creates six ways to influence change. Using four or more increases the likelihood of success.

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