Changing your change

I have often blogged about the need for being planful when it comes to change. Of course those that know my approach to plans’ also know that I look upon a culture change plan as a guide rather than a set of hard and fast rules.
This is because I know that when it comes to culture change you are constantly testing the mood of the organisation, seeking feedback, and generally working with what you have in front of you. In the case of culture change your plan will be constantly updated as you learn what worked, what the organisation responded to and of course as the culture begins to change, that in itself will mean that the way you work with the organisation begins to change.


Lets play that last part through again and expand on it. When you begin to engage with your organisation about a change in culture you will inevitably engage in a way that works at that time. If you don’t engage in a culturally appropriate way then it is likely that your people will not grasp the message that you are trying to convey. So for example if you have a very formal organisation with a lot of top down and you want to change to a more flexible organisation with less hierarchy it may seem appropriate to engage with them in a style that matches that flexible ideal doesn’t it?
But that wont work for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if your people are used to formal announcements and you decide to wander round and have casual chats they will see that you are having casual chats and wont see that you are announcing change: because thats not the way that ‘things are done around here’ (which is the simple definition of culture). Secondly, you don’t truly know what a ‘flexible’ culture will mean yet. You may have some ideas and you may think you know what you want, but once you start to engage your organisation in a new idea of culture you cannot be 100% sure what shape that ideal will take in reality. This means that if you say ‘this is how it is going to be from now on’ and you find a couple of months later that its not working then you aren’t going to look good.
This means that you start by engaging in a way that works at the time, but make it clear that this is not what you are looking for in the future ( a perfect way to initiate a change in culture is to hold up the now and say this is not what you want). You engage people in the idea of the culture before the reality of the culture (Unless you are a dictator and we’ve explored that theme before).


As your culture change programme roles out you will then begin to engage in more and more ‘flexible’ ways if flexibility is the theme of your culture change. You will be learning what flexibility means for your business and re-defining it on a day to day basis. You will be engaging with ideas from your people, many of whom will have some great insights into what they need from you in a ‘flexible culture’.If you aren’t then you are not being flexible!


One of the tests that I suggest to my clients is to constantly ask themselves if the new process, new approach, new system, communication etc is in line with their proposed ‘vision’ and ‘culture’. By constantly testing how you do things, you keep your culture change intentions top of mind, but also you are ensuring that the current reality doesn’t stay that way by accident and habit.


Culture change is best seen as a journey, so treat your plan as a road map that is changing and learning as you and your people are.

Lost your mojo?

I've written before about the need to engage your people early in the change programme. The need to create momentum through involvement and engagement is also a well established practice. This simple rule of 'engage and involve early' works particularly well if the organisation knows it needs change and has an energetic and engaged population. But what if they aren't. What if your people have had such a long period of stagnation that they think their current reality is normal. What if people are short on ideas and energy. 
What if your organisation has lost it's mojo?

Many organisations become skeptical of change and their leader needs to re-build trust ensuring that this time the change will happen and will deliver what it promises. Teams in this environment will often participate in the debate about what needs to change and have ideas about how to improve the organisation but will do so with a large degree of skepticism. In this case the leader can engage in debate and involve the organisation in the 'how' if they have a determination to follow through and make the outcomes happen. In effect they are tapping in to ideas and energy that the last leader didn't tap in to.

But an organisation that has been doing things the same way for so long that the majority aren't able to see the need for change and can't see past the existing way of doing things, requires a different approach. The question is 'what approach?' 

• Does the leader not only flesh out the vision but bring to the table how it is accomplished? With all the risks that a 'one man crusade' has?
• Do you 'have a clear out' and bring in fresh blood? An approach favoured by many but with inherent risks. (lost knowledge, commitment of those remaining, mood of the organisation etc)
• Do you seek out the few who do aspire to something better and create your guiding coalition from those voices? The risk if they are not current managers, the potential for alienation by their colleagues, their managers and the pressure to conform is obvious here. 

So what's the answer? Well as always in change there is no one route. Everything is contextual to the situation you find yourself in as a leader. The answer will likely rest in a combination of all three, at least:

• The new leader will certainly have to signal change, and be ready for that to be met with resounding silence at best and outright rejection at worst. Be ready to be on your own here!
• Assessment of the key post-holders in leadership positions, how invested they are in the current reality versus their willingness to come on a different journey, along with their capability of operating within the new vision, will mean that new blood may be required in key areas that are the drivers of change.
• Involve those with potential in the redesign and give them roles where they have an opportunity to influence and explain to others. It doesn't matter where they sit in the organisations hierarchy, if they influence those around them then they are gradually going to build a tipping point with you. 
• Of course you will have to give those who are dead set against the change a chance to get off the bus, whatever level they sit at. Some may self select by request and some by action. If this is managed well by the new leader with empathy and respect then the rest of the organisation, those who want to come along, will appreciate your actions. 

Most importantly prepare for this being a long haul journey, with a lot of hard decisions and lonely days before you start to see results.

Seven questions about your culture change

Why not ask yourself these questions if you are CEO/GM and have a change programme under-way.
A. How is the change progressing?

1. We started out with good intentions but everyone is really busy you know.
2. We all said 'we need to do that' but nobody took an action.
3. When we defined the plan nobody asked 'what can we drop?' (meaning the answer became 'the change actions')
4. It is something I only ask about at the end of the month. The rest of the time I focus on results ( replace results with $s, sales, volume, turnover as appropriate)
5. We are hitting every change target, with a fully resourced plan regularly supported by expert help.

B. How engaged are your people in the change?

1. We will tell you when we've told them what we've decided
2. They loved the fancy launch but think that was it
3. They are jaded by all the initiatives we start but don't finish
4. Those that are involved love it but the rest don't know whats happening
5. Everyone is on board and has personal actions to make local changes to meet our cultural aspirations

C. If asked, how many people could explain the culture change initiatives?

1. 100% of those standing beside our vision statement at the time you asked
2. 100% of those who could find the handout we gave on day 1
3. 100% of those that can find where we've hidden it on the intranet
4. Isn't it okay that we all express it our own way as free thinking people?
5. Most of them, as we regularly refer to in in our routine communication and link our day to day activities to it, but i know its a journey

D. Talking about comms, how often do you update everyone on the progress of change?

1. What do you mean by update?
2. We gave them the initial handout, surely they will just go do it?
3. Every time the big boss is in town as he/she likes that sort of thing.
4. Quarterly. There is a paragraph in amongst our four page reporting of results ( replace results with $'s, sales, volume, turnover etc)
5. We have an interesting and varied comms plan that includes videos, email and magazines to show what our people have achieved, supported by our weekly note that shows progress against the plan

E. How are you measuring the change?

1. Measuring?
2. We will know we have got there when we get there
3. The ultimate measures will tell us all we need to know ($s, sales, volume, turnover)
4. The culture change is supposed to develop a culture of measuring success so we haven't done it yet
5. We have a comprehensive system that tracks input measures designed to prove we are doing what we said would take us there along with staged success measures showing improvements in key results along the way

F. Who is responsible for your culture change?

1. HR
2. Me
3. Everyone is responsible
4. The management team
5. Everyone is held responsible for their action, with the senior team knowing that they are there as a cohesive, guiding coalition. My role as CEO/GM is to always carry the torch whenever I talk to anyone.

G.How seriously are you taking this culture change

1. Who? Me?
2. Well its really about the results first (replace results with $'s, sales, volume, turnover etc)
3. Its all fluffy stuff really so I let HR take it seriously
4. At the end if the year I will take it very seriously (when the other results are in)
5. As CEO/GM i know that if I don't take it seriously nobody else will. I see this change as vital to keeping ahead of the competition

The Legal Minimum?

There are few businesses out there that have not had to restructure at some time or another. Sometimes its because their market has gone downhill and they need to ‘retrench’ and at other times its because they need to grow and re-invest in technology. Either way jobs change and some jobs are removed or ‘dis-established’.

When these situations occur good companies have always worked things through with their employees and managed the change with integrity and with respect for those whose lives will change. Of course, not everyone does it well and in my ‘leading through transition’ workshops I give a few examples that I have seen where distinct lack of empathy was shown.
Its because of those businesses who don't see the benefit of managing change well (and there are many), that laws are put in place. Whatever country you are reading this from I know that you will be subject to some laws that are meant to protect employees from poor management practice. In New Zealand we are no different and have laws that require us to consult with our employees on the proposed changes that an employer wants to put in place. I can see the good intentions behind that idea. A good employer should want to engage with their workforce to work the changes through and would want their ideas in how best to implement the change. In the past, before such legislation, I have tried that approach and honestly explained the problem and opened up discussions with the workforce. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work and that is the first of the two problems with the legislative approach to managing restructuring.
The first thing that crosses anyones mind when you say that you have to bring about change in the business and that means some jobs have to go or change is that people are immediately concerned about ‘me’. What do you think would happen if you tried engaging in a decent wide ranging conversation to explore all ideas and options when you are thinking ‘this could mean I lose my job’ or ‘this could be a nice tidy sum and early retirement’? Natural human instincts of self preservation come in and you don’t have an honest conversation at all. The only person that you have such a conversation with is someone who is not affected. What happens when engage with the workforce in this way is that they soon say ‘You are management! Its your job to sort these things, why haven’t you done it?’
And soon you are back to the original approach of management coming up with a proposal and then talking it through with the workforce.

And then the second problem with the legislative approach comes in. The thing about the law is that it is open to interpretation. In fact there are people whose whole livelihood depends on their ability to interpret it differently and win. That means the law is never truly fixed and you are always looking at the last case and the last interpretation. This means that every time you start a consult you are spending a lot of your time trying to avoid being the next test case because going to court costs a lot of money with those guys who enjoy debating the law that you didn’t intend to break in the first place.
And how do you avoid being another case? By managing your proposal and process as tightly as possible. In fact in many cases the employer choses to follow a line of doing the legal minimum. Its often easier, as the less you say the less likely you are to get in to trouble. In addition you minimise risk by working the possible restructuring down to the tightest option. That means there is not a lot to discuss with the workforce as there are no real options. In fact I have sat with employers who have moved away from the smartest decision for the business, and in the long run their people, because that choice could result in a challenge in court.

Simplistically the less you say and the tighter the options you offer, the less likely you are to be really consulting and that defeats the higher intent of the reason for the legislation in the first place.

Why has this happened? Well, the courts have got wary of people who use restructuring as a way of managing performance and that means many of the actions in court and the decisions being made are to make it tougher on employers who may be trying this. Of course it is another story to consider why it could be easier to manage a restructuring than to manage poor performance but lets leave that aside. The point is that some employers try this route and the more they do so, the tougher the courts will make their testing of cases to see if it was a true consult.
Can we change it? I’m not sure whether we can unless the legislation is overhauled, but it may help if employers restructure when they need to restructure and manage performance when that is required!

The Quake Test

In the last month New Zealand has seen some of its biggest earthquake damage in over 80 years. The impact in Christchurch has been significant and many buildings have come down, homes have been ruined, businesses destroyed and many lives changed forever.

Earthquakes are not unusual around the world so it was not a surprise that Murray McCulley, our minister for foreign affairs, spoke to the UN Assembly and mentioned the fact that, compared to many other countries, our structures and infrastructure did not fail as catastrophically as has been seen in other countries.

You might wonder why a change agent would write about earthquakes!

What occurred to me most, in watching the scenes from Christchurch, was how many of the tales told were about the response of the people and the way that they responded to the disaster, managed the disaster, and supported each other after the disaster.
What I saw was another reminder that when the structures fail, the ability to operate is down to the people. What I also saw was that the structures that did not fail had been designed for the conditions that they operated in. They weren’t designed for downtown London or the Chinese countryside. They were designed to work in New Zealand for the conditions that prevail here. They were designed to work for the people that needed to use them. The structure was for the people and not for itself.

It reminded me that in organisations we spend a lot of time on the way we are structured and we spend a lot of time restructuring, but that the structure itself delivers nothing. People do.

Now I am not saying that you shouldn’t care about the structure of the organisation. What I am saying is that your structure is there to pull people together in to groups or teams of common purpose to enable them to easily and effectively work together. It helps define boundaries where boundaries are needed. It should help define relationships so that people understand the connection between roles.
Organisational structure is not real. It is a self imposed concept and like all concepts it is designed to help give meaning and understanding to the people who need to use it.

Therefore the structure is not there for itself it is there for the people. The structure cannot be right or wrong or have a voice (as in the organisation says). It does not create or deliver. It cannot innovate or design or invent.

Structure shouldn’t be defined to ‘give a manager a job’ or to ‘create hierarchies of power’. It shouldn’t be redefined just to remove numbers from the business, nor should it be an alternative performance management tool. I have unfortunately seen it used for all of these and inevitably it doesn’t reap many benefits

Structure should be there to align, group, connect and make efficient work paths. And the unstated word there is people. Structure is there to support people.

The best test of a structure, and its suitability, is whether it supports the people within the conditions that the organisation finds itself.

Perhaps we can call this the ‘Earthquake test’.

New Broom, Soft Bristles?

Everyone knows the concept of a ‘new broom’ going in to an organisation and making sweeping changes to how things are done.
For some this starts with a refreshed vision/mission and roles on to new company values, some rebranding, followed by changes to the way the business operates (systems and I.T etc). For other’s it can just be that the new boss does things differently and people get used to the changes over time; the vision, mission and values are still on the walls but gradually fade, gather dust and fall off, while the new boss introduces methods, approaches and systems that they prefer and have delivered for them in the past.

Whether you’ve been part of the ‘Industrial Strength Hoover’ approach or the ‘Urban Decay’ methods of bringing changes to a business (and if you have definitions somewhere in between please share) then you will know that the arrival of a new boss or the leaving of a new boss can be an interesting time for employees.

In recent years I have noted that it is almost impossible for a new CEO/GM/MD to do anything other than adopt a new broom philosophy. In addition it is noticeable that there is an expectation that the sweeping starts very soon after their arrival. This creates some interesting changes scenarios for the business.
Firstly the business often goes in to hiatus when it is clear that a new boss is arriving. This hiatus continues until the new boss announces what they intend to do. The hiatus seems to occur because people ‘just know’ that changes will happen with a new boss, so initiatives that take a lot of effort are ‘delayed’ and changes that were part way through are put on hold. People hunker down and do the basics.
As a change agent this is an interesting time to observe the culture as it is an indication of what is culturally embedded but it is often a ‘lowest common denominator’ impression. At this point the new boss comes in and sees that lowest common denominator and rapidly comes to the conclusion that old vision/mission and values are not working (rapidly because that is the expectation these days) and low and behold they see that a new broom is needed.
If the new manager then acts soon after their arrival and takes the ‘industrial strength hoover’ approach then many good things are swept away and lost. This is sometimes because the manager had not seen them in action because of the hiatus and sometimes because thats what happens with an industrial strength hoover. When this happens people at least know where they stand (big announcements are part of the industrial strength hoover) but often those that have been there a while suffer the ‘we’ve done this before’ feeling as similar things come out in the new vision/ mission values.
If the new manager adopts an urban decay approach people have to be light on their feet and swift to learn what is acceptable and expected. Hiatus is swapped for confusion and concern as people try to work out what bits of the old are acceptable and which aren’t.

There are many other impacts on an organisation as a result of management change, but the real question is ‘how do you reduce the negative and maximise the positive?’

I believe that new leaders need time to observe and learn about their organisation. There are many conversations required before people stop treating them like a new boss and really speak their mind. The new manager has a lot of testing (and often indirect) questions to ask over a number of weeks to find out what parts of the vision are working, whether the organisation is functioning in line with that vision and whether departments/ divisions and teams are aligned, playing their part , etc. They need to stand outside and observe the culture in action and see what is positive about it and what isn’t. They need to assess the capability and fit of their people, the systems, processes and ways of working. They need to signal to the organisation that they are looking and learning and that they want everything to continue as it was before they arrived and that includes initiatives and change programmes.
They need to manage the tension between the board’s desire for swift and immediate action and the need to find out what the right actions are. They cannot take forever to decide but nor can they decide in their first few weeks.

They need to be a new broom with soft bristles.

What Restructuring Isn't

At some point every leader considers restructuring their organisation/their division or their team. Getting restructuring right is one of the biggest challenges of any leaders life (and if you are sitting there thinking ‘whys that, just give everyone a new organisational chart and its done’ then we need to talk). In this blog I will share a few quick comments on what restructuring isn't

A Panacea
Structure change isn’t a way of solving all of the organisations problems. It doesn’t dissolve inter-team conflict. It doesn’t improve communication between people or solve interpersonal issues.It doesn’t speed up work flow or improve efficiency. It doesn’t deliver better results, new ideas or new products. It doesn’t make poor performers good performers.
Structure is a just a way of grouping people together to deliver the purpose of the organisation. Each part of the structure should exist to deliver something that contributes to the overall purpose. For the structure to work everyone should be clear what the purpose of their little bit of the organisation is there for. Structure is just another tool in your process armoury. If you have inter-team conflict take a look at the leaders. If you have poor communication between people, take a look at your leader’s and your communication systems. If you have inefficiencies or work flow problems look at the processes that you use. Once you’ve improved processes you may find that your structure needs changed to reflect the change’s to the process. Improved work flow often means a change in purpose for an individual or a group. And that's a good reason for changing structure.

A Pay Grade
Structure should never be built around existing leaders to justify their salary or worst still their existence. I’ve seen many structure changes go wrong because a group of employees were added in to the reporting line of someone who ‘needed more to do’ or ‘needed protected from the owners’ etc. If you want to build a shared services area then do so, but understand what comes along with running shared services. But don’t make HR report to your finance director because they ‘need somewhere to live’ or because she only has three other reports. The purpose of a finance director isn’t often compatible with the purpose of HR (unless your people policies are all about compliance and risk). Where teams live in the structure tells them what you think about them. A Sales division is exactly that, a group of people whose role is to sell. Similarly Marketing, Manufacturing, Finance etc. Structure is just a way of grouping people with a common purpose. That commonality means something and to many people it is part of their sense of belonging. Move people to somewhere that they know does not have a shared purpose and it means that you did not care where they belong and watch the performance plummet.

Spring cleaning
Structure change isn’t a way of getting rid of people that are not performing. You have performance management systems for that. I cant tell you how many times I have been given a list of people ‘to go’ as part of a restructuring. These people have apparently been under-performing ‘for years’, but for some reason their annual appraisal says otherwise. All this means is that their manager doesn’t want to have the hard conversation with them or to coach them in the area they aren’t performing in or to follow the due process of performance management according to the company rules and national legislation. Makes you wonder why they get a managers pay doesn’t it!

Easy
Structure change isn’t easy. It isn’t about a new organisational chart being handed out and then everyone shuffling desks. You can’t just move people from an under-performing division to one that has been performing and hope that they catch the performance virus. Structure change isn’t something that will ‘sort itself out eventually’.
People need to understand ‘why’ the change. They need to understand that their purpose has changed and not just their boss. They need new expectations. If you don’t give them all this they will keep on doing what they were doing and that will produce the same result (at best) that you had before the structure change.
There are risks in structure change. Go in to one without a risk analysis at your peril.
You need a plan, for no other reason than for your people to see that you are in control of this, you do know what you are doing and you should be trusted to make decisions about them. You also need a plan so that you know where to turn to when there are hiccups (there will be).
You need good, solid, robust communication and feedback channels.
You need patience for the long haul. Structure change takes a while to bed in and to work.
You need empathy for the people whose lives you are throwing up in the air.


In my time I have seen organisational reputation improve as a result of structure change. I’ve seen employee engagement increase immediately after a structure change. I’ve seen increased business results after a structure change. These were nothing to do with the change, but the way the change was managed.

Restructure the right way for the right reasons and I hope that you too can get the right results.

Caught, Taught,Mandate or Free will part 2

In our last blog we talked about culture being caught or taught. In this follow on blog we explore the dilemma of mandating culture or allowing full freedom of choice.

Mandate or Free Will

One of the interesting things about culture is that it will always vary team to team, department to department, division to divisions and region to region.This is inevitable given the varying styles of leadership and the context that surrounds each team etc. The question when you are planning culture change is ‘how acceptable is that?’.
When it comes down to it you cannot mandate all aspects of culture at the individual level (unless you are a totalitarian state or a religion). People will always make their own choice, so lets put that aside and consider your approach to changing the culture you have today.

Some CEO’s gravitate to a mandating approach more than others. It will depend on their natural style or their previous experiences. Those who work in a shared service or business support environment often veer to the mandate because they are the ones who see and suffer from the variations between business units/regions etc. At the other end of the scale is a view that says ‘let each business unit choose’ but then the question is how far does Free will go? Division, department, team? At some point you have to draw a line and say ‘This is the way we do things around here’.

Once again the amount of mandate and where the line of choice is drawn depends on what your business needs and why you are trying to change the culture. If you need a consistent face when you go to market you may need to mandate how that is. If you are investing in a major IT upgrade you cannot afford people to choose whether they adopt or not.

Its the same with culture, look at the needs of the business and then look at the culture you are describing to meet those needs, the values that you are promoting and the behaviours you are looking for. The extent of mandate should be driven by how far away you are from that now, how big an imperative it is to be consistent and how destructive your existing culture is. If you let the business talk, rather than the personal preferences of you and your leaders, then it should tell you how you go about the culture change.

If you get it right, explain it well, demonstrate a need that all can see, help people align, make it easy to live by and get rid of the problems that the old culture had then caught, taught, mandate, free-will will not be a question that you need to ask because no-one in your organisation would want it any other way and they will say to new employees ‘Thats just the way we do things around here’

Caught, Taught, Mandate or Free-will?

The challenge of culture change and how to bring it about is a topic most CEO’s and GM’s will have to grapple with at some point in their career, if not for all of it. These days, your ability to change an organisations culture is a factor in rising through the ranks of ‘C’ level and GM roles.
It is no surprise that there are therefore many perspectives on the topic of culture change. One of the common ones is whether culture is caught or taught and another is whether you should mandate culture across the business or allow each division, department, team and individual to choose their culture. In this two part blog we will look at both of those perspectives, starting with caught versus taught.

Caught Versus Taught
Ultimately culture is caught. New employees are told ‘how things are around here’ by their colleagues and their team-leaders. But we are talking about culture change. If you are looking to change your culture it means that there is something unwanted about the current culture and that's the culture people are catching.
In culture change there is a phase where both cultures exist. One will be in reality and the other will be a concept. As a leader your job is to guide people to the culture you are looking for. Yes you can be an icon of the new culture and hope that people will catch it, but if you are in an organisation of hundreds or more you will find that a difficult prospect.
Some CEO’s subscribe to the ‘Build and they shall come’ approach to culture. This approach assumes that if the vision is so compelling and the values so motivating that people will adopt them. The problem with this view is that your existing culture has a life of its own and like all life-forms it doesn't want to die. It also exists in habits people don’t know they have, expectations that leaders won’t even realise are counter-cultural until they have to explore them, and practices and policies that have been around so long that they aren't in the manual any more.
I call this the culture buffer. Unless you are building a culture for a new business start-up you will be facing this, and the older and more established the business the tougher the buffer is.
So do I say taught over caught for culture change? Well it depends on what you mean by taught. I have seen programmes that seem more like indoctrination because the delivery has gone so far as to define the 24 expected behaviours and 32 competencies that every role is expected to adhere to in order to live the culture. This approach makes it impossible to be the unique person that your were actually employed to be so it is soon ignored as it just too hard.

In my view the amount of catching and the amount of teaching is a balancing act that depends on your existing culture (how entrenched it is, how far removed from the culture you need etc), the degree of change that is required to make it happen and then the stage that you are going through e.g. you will do more teaching in the early stages of rolling out a culture, but less when it is clear that influential people have caught the virus and are out there passing it round.
The teaching should be done in a way that allows people to align the best of themselves, guides them when choices are to be made and encourages them to strive on your behalf. Involvement is everything in the teaching phase. One session on one day will not be enough. You need multiple involvement activities, strong communication channels, managers that change processes to align them to the culture (so that culture truly becomes ‘how we do things around here’) and leaders that live it, integrate it in to every vision, business plan and strategic objective.
Teach it, involve in it, align to it and then you can rely on it being caught.

Do you have a hidden agenda?

How many times have you heard that you or your organisation has a hidden agenda? If you are in any form of leadership position I would be surprised if you’d not heard this before. If you are not at the top of your companies tree I am sure you've heard conversations about what 'management' are doing behind the scenes.

It can be really frustrating as a leader when you hear this if you think you don't. Many managers just ignore it when they hear it and dismiss it as the ‘normal scepticism that employees have for management’.

When I hear it I treat it as a clue to the culture of the organisation.

So before you ignore that ‘scepticism’ let me ask you whether it is possible that you actually do have a hidden agenda…….unintentionally?

Many organisations have active yet unofficial ‘information networks’. These networks aren't communication networks, they are more akin to the skin mounted monitors used in hospitals. They don't tell the doctor what the patient thinks but whether the patient’s heart rate has risen or when their breathing changes for example. They let the doctor know how the patient is feeling.
The information networks in your company are extremely sensitive to changes in management activity, just like the hospital monitors. When regular meeting patterns exist and there are no unusual comings and goings they tell the people in your organisation that 'everything is the same'.
But when extra or unusual meetings begin happen, consultants start to arrive, or senior team 'awaydays' take place, they are noted by the networks and the signal that 'something different is happening' goes out.
Especially if you have not said what they are happening for.

Riding on the back of those signals is that most human of conditions; speculation.
In the void of an unintentional hidden agenda people will naturally fill the gap based on past experience e.g. what happened last time the management team disappeared for days and had many closed door meeting (was that a structure change by any chance?).

From your perspective as a manager you are doing management work. You are 'planning' or 'reviewing' or even 'thinking about things', 'haven't decided anything yet' or 'have nothing to declare at this stage'.
What that means to the information network is that activity has increased without a similar increase in communication. If you haven’t said what is going on then what you are doing is, in the truest meaning of the word, ‘hidden’

Be aware that a 'hidden agenda' is often a sign that your people are filling a communication void with speculation. It can therefore be a clue to the health of your routine information channels; it may mean that they are blocked, or too loose with information, not delivering consistently or uninformative, used sporadically when you do have an agenda or a one way transfer of information. You may find that it is a combination of these in different streams of the business.

But don’t ignore the clue or the next time you stand up and say something in all honesty you will still be accused of having a hidden agenda.

The Road to Nowhere

I was recently talking with a senior partner of a renowned Auckland architectural firm about the things they find in their project reviews. I have been lucky to work beside some of their team at the conceptual stage when they are thinking about the cultural impact and intentions of the design (of course the culture side is my interest)

I enjoy their approach as they like to get inside their clients heads & really understand how they think about their business. That means they are very interested in the post project review because there is nothing better than looking at the actual impact of the design and comparing it to the intended impact to help them learn for the future.

In the case of one space they had designed they found that the expected working improvements had not fully materialised because people were using the new spaces the way they had in the old building. Aside from observing that this is culture in action (that's the way we always do things), I was interested in why this was the case. After all the space had been designed to create new thinking by providing opportunities to work differently.

Like all projects this one had a significant front end effort in creating the strategy and setting cultural and performance goals had. However there appeared to be a gap between the strategists strategising and the users using.

It occurred to me that this was not unusual whether it be the business strategy, marketing strategy or in this case a project strategy.

Strategy is meant to guide inform your people as they make decisions, yet in many organisations it doesn't do that as much as it should. Not because the strategy is wrong or the people ignore it but because the strategy isn't properly translated in to plans, reviewed against actual results and, certainly in the case of cultural objectives at least, communicated repetitively and regularly so that it sticks in the hearts & minds (that's where culture lives). Without understanding your intentions people will do what they think is right and that tends to be what they already know.

It's like buying an expensive map before a road trip across the breadth of the country and then navigating by road signs. It's not effective & the risk is you get sidetracked down roads that take you nowhere.

Developing good strategy takes some effort; lots of leadership time, expensive collation of data & market intelligence, weeks of analyst time and a pile of charts, slides & reports. So why waste that all by not following through in the role out as thoroughly?

So is the cost & effort involved in creation of strategy replicated in the role out, the time to explain, clarify, revisit, update, measure & publicise in your business? Your division? Your team?

And do you take a leaf out of the architects book & review the actual impact of the strategy so that you can learn and improve at least & refocus at best?

Or do you start out with a great strategic intent and take the road to nowhere?

Change is like a Creme Egg

I gave up eating chocolate in 2001. When I refuse a piece of chocolate and tell people that some of them ask me if I miss it and I say ‘no’ and they seem surprised. I gave up for health reasons but I didn't find it that hard really because I was brought up in the UK and didn’t like the flavour of New Zealand chocolate. At first I found that strange, after all Cadbury’s chocolate was Cadbury’s chocolate wasn’t it. But i found out it wasn’t made the same way down-under where it is warmer and the chocolate melts easier.

This weekend I read an article in the New Zealand Herald about Cadbury’s creme eggs. I used to love creme eggs1 at Easter, so you could say that this was the one thing I missed about chocolate. It seems that Cadbury's can no longer make creme eggs here in New Zealand and are bringing them in from the UK.

And people are complaining. They don’t like them.

At first I thought ‘What? the UK eggs are miles better!’ and then it struck me that it was really coming down to what people were used to.

Over the years thousands of Kiwis and Aussies had learned a definition of what a creme egg was and got used to it. It was ‘how a creme egg should be’ according to everyone down-under. It was the culturally accepted definition of creme egg. And then Cadbury’s tried to change the definition and hit the culture buffer.

The culture buffer comes up in all organisations that are trying to bring about change. The culture buffer is the difference between the way you want the organisation to be and the way it currently is. Its the difference between what you have got your people used to doing and what you would like them to do. Its the old attitudes against the new.

Its called the culture buffer because you have to put effort in to get past it and break through. Its a buffer because it is highly resistant, not because the old is bad and the new is good or that the old is good and the new is bad, but because it’s what we have got used to. Good or bad doesn’t come in to it.

So when you are planning change, be ready for the culture buffer. Remember that it was your organisation that taught people to accept the current culture and that took years of previous management effort. Just like it will take some time to convert Australasian creme egg lovers to an UK style egg it will take time to convert your people. And of course some will never convert, whatever you do.

Forrest Gump said that 'life was like a box of chocolates' and maybe he was on the right track for culture change......except its just like a different creme egg.



1 For anyone who does not know what a creme egg is here is an NZ advert from 1992

So you want to lead change?

As 2010 begins to gear up for action and organisations look to move on and forget about the hard ending of the last decade, the word ‘Change’ will inevitably be part of the agenda.

Improving Performance, Improving Culture, Structuring for Growth, Values role outs, Merger, Acquisition, the list is endless and it is all change. That means that all round the world there will be leaders facing leadership of change. Leaders like Tony, who I met recently and asked me ‘What does it take to lead change?’.

Tony had read all the books about what he had to do to run a change programme, so he was up to his eyeballs in project management theory, low-hanging fruit and Kotters eight steps. He’d done a few leadership courses and was up on motivation and communication too.

But Tony had been through a few change initiatives, as a receiver of change, before he was promoted. He’d observed that some leaders don’t manage changing their operation as well they had managed it before the change. He’d also noted that not all of them had survived leading change on a personal level.

Hence his question ‘what does it take to lead change?’

So I gave him three things (anyone can remember three things)

‘Guts, humility & resilience” I said. If you want to make change happen you will need these in abundance. Let me explain why I chose these three.

Guts
Few leaders in the corporate world have total carte-blanche to do what they want in their division or business stream. There are organisational ‘ways of doing things’, company values, vision and mission, standardised training programmes, etc. But when you take over a division or department you are still expected to improve it and make it perform better.
This leaves many leaders a little stuck; ‘How can I change this place if we’ve already done everything that we normally do?’
The answer is that you do what really needs done. What really needs done is often hardest to do. Thats often why its not been done yet. It means taking a risk. It means pushing against the accepted way of doing things. It means dismantling things that may have been put in place by those who have since been promoted to higher levels (they might not like that!). But surely thats why its called change!
Real leaders of change look at their part of the business and see what really needs done and do it, knowing what they up against. That takes guts.

Humility
When you start a change programme you will know what you want from it and where you want it to take your business. Even the smallest change needs a Vision doesn’t it. You will also see what needs changed to get there, what systems processes and structures etc need changed. At the beginning you will have a vision and a plan. Once you get started on change you will find that there will be reason’s to change the plan. You will find that the people in your department may have a better idea that still delivers the vision. You will find that at some point you will make a wrong choice or say the wrong thing. You are the leader though. You can keep going on your way, you can ignore the new data, new idea, the mistake you made, the thing you said that was wrong. Or you can have enough humility to acknowledge that you don’t know everything, can make mistakes, occasionally get your words wrong. The great thing about a bit of humility is that our employees prefer a leader that acknowledges their mistakes more than they prefer working for a robot. Change Leaders need a lot of Humility.

Resilience
Most people know that real change is never easy. There will be many people who are willing to argue that you are wrong to be even trying it. There will be many hurdles to overcome in getting there (ask anyone who has run an IT project change) and things will go wrong at some point. Some days you will wish you had never started. There will be many days that a leader of change will feel alone. But once you’ve put your vision out there, marshalled your teams and rallied them round the new direction, put the plan in action, you cant stop the change (its like a ripple on a pond).

Some let the change peter out and don’t follow through on everything that is needed. These are the programmes that add up to the large failure statistics for change programmes worldwide. These are the ones that leave staff disillusioned and change weary and ultimately more resistant to future change (why put yourself behind something heart and soul if your leaders don't!).

The one person that has to keep going, has to show faith, has to keep positive, has to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and say “whats next on the plan?’ is the change leader. That takes resilience.


So if you want to lead change, make sure you stock up on Guts, Humility & Resilience.

Ready to play Poker?

Preparation for successful change is vital, particularly if you are restructuring. If you are changing peoples jobs you are changing a big part of their life so you need to be sure of the proposed changes, whether they be the purpose of the role, it's scope or the big one-whether the role is actually needed.

That prep takes a little time if you want to manage the change well. Its not always about having the decision worked out fully (and of course your local laws on consultation changes of employment will govern a lot of that), its about prepping your managers for the questions they will face, the risks that might occur and the impact on people of a change.

I am not going to blog on that today, but the aspect I wanted to raise was the impact on your managers of walking around with all this information in their heads before the change is announced.

Its hard going to meetings and keeping the intentions of those meetings secret. Its hard to manage the questions that come your way; the ‘What are you up to boss?’ questions. Its even harder to look at people whose lives you are affecting without that showing or the new reality that is in the managers head from creeping in to the conversation. I have heard managers begin to talk about duties, that were being worked up in new job descriptions behind the scenes, as if they were a reality. I have known managers who began thinking that people had begun to suspect something, so in turn they began to suspect that people were looking at their files. I have met managers who tried to hide every moment of he day so that they did not bump in to anyone in the corridor in case they were asked a question.

If your organisation recognises that people truly are their biggest asset, you will be aware of the impact of change on the receivers and you will possibly prep leaders in how to deliver announcements of change, manage bad news etc (if you don’t then contact me!). So if you are doing that its maybe not a big leap to recognise that you need to prep your managers for the pre-announcement phase. How they handle themselves, how they deal with the possible stresses of knowing what they know and how they deal with curious questions that come their way before they are ready.

Not everyone has a poker face. Not everyone can separate themselves from the emotion of the change, not everyone can handle questions smoothly on the run. Not everyone is a born change manager (managers don’t do this every day, thats what people like me are for).

Are your managers ready with their poker faces? Or do they need prepared?

So you think you survived the recession?

As governments around the world begin to announce that the ‘corner’ is about to be turned and that the worst of the recession is over, you would think it a good time for organisations to breath a sigh of relief and relax a little. Lets face it, a number of your companies have gone and some businesses will have seen competition disappear.

But before you break out the champagne its maybe time to take stock and ask ‘how good a shape are we in?’ Here are four quick “health check’ questions that you may want to ask of your business or your team, however big or small.

Body Mass Index
A lot of businesses survive recession by cutting. Taking out staff numbers, reducing spending, stopping maintenance etc. If this goes too far this can leave you without the right people to take advantage of the opportunities that will now present themselves, with plant/equipment downtime just as you need it or systems that are more out of date than the competition. Sure, you had to do this to get through the bad times, but don’t ignore the choices you had to make. If you made them for good reason you knew the possible impact that they had. Now is the time to look hard at those choices and see what you will need to do in the coming months to get back in to shape so you can last in the long run. Of course if you didn’t take the opportunity to look at the shape of your business and get clear on what is core for your organisation you may be unhealthily slow to recover and need to shed a few kilo’s just as everyone else is getting in the starting blocks!

Flexibility
Those that survive hard times often do so because they have improved the agility of the organisation. Often rules are relaxed to allow opportunities to be taken. Bureaucracy and red tape are trimmed while people are encouraged to ‘go-get’. There are two sides to this as times improve. One view would be that you want agility at all times, and the other would be that too much agility means increased risk (shortcuts, compliance, not checking etc.). If you’ve learnt to be agile, you may have tested your old rules and systems to see what you really need to run your business and now you know what the new rules for the organisation should be. Before you put back the old constraints it is a good time to test what you might have learnt.

Eyesight
During good times it is easy to lose focus on what is core to the business by picking up whatever come the way of your business because they represent an opportunity to make a bi more profit. During leaner times you need to be really clear on the focus of your business or team to maximise what you are really good at, and where you can succeed in the marketplace. Did you use the recession as an opportunity to tune up your eyesight and get a focus on where you can succeed in the marketplace?

Blood Pressure
How have the people in your organisation come through the last year? I’ve heard from people who are covering two jobs and doubling their travelling! and others who have been doing very long hours. Is everyone coping? are they tense or overstressed? People who are tired, worn out or stressed tend to ‘just get by’ and lose their sharpness. At the very worst they start dropping off with health issues just as you need them to be fighting fit. If they’ve lost their vigour it may be time to re-motivate them or it may be time to take a look at the working hours habits that they have built up for you in the bad times. If you want to be healthy in a year’s time, nows a time to check the pulse and see if its strong!

We'd love to hear your ideas on a health check list for teams/organisations that are coming out of the marketplace!

Shifting the team viewfinder

I sometimes wonder if we are living in the 21st century. Not with what we see on the Tv or in the news, but when I see some of the issues that arise in the workplace.

I’m talking about inter-team strife.

Does it happen in your business? Do you have a few teams that should work hand in hand but don’t? Do you have examples of silo’s that do more than think differently, they work against each other?

A few years ago I was running a change programme that involved the down-sizing of two teams who worked side by side for different managers. One team handled customer problems and the other handled customer bills. Often the problems that the customer team faced from customers was the bills. Often the problem that the billing team faced was with customers not paying the bill. You would think that with such an overlap of issues the teams would find some benefit in working together wouldn’t you? Their team areas were a mere ten feet apart yet the gulf often felt like the great wall of china!

To improve the situation we decided that the downsizing project would also involve the moving of some of the better team-members between the two teams. The idea was that with better understanding of what each team did, we would reduce the friction and improve the cross silo working. When the appointments were announced I was working close by the team-space and I witnessed one of the candidates nominated to move teams proclaiming that they would ‘soon sort out those ------ next door!’ I wondered what we had let ourselves in for. Had we just moved the battlegrounds?
A month later I witnessed the same person talking in their new team. They were complaining about the team next door! A complete shift in perspective in four weeks!

I realised then how tribal people still were and began to notice similar behaviour in many places that I worked. Teams often have practices that amount to rituals. These rituals make a unique team and differentiate them from other teams in the organisation. Some teams have different uniforms from others. Most teams have different locations that are close to tribal lands (and you know when you have entered and you aren’t one of the tribe don’t you!). Teams meet and discuss issues and often these are with the team whose function adjoins them. These issues are often ‘stepping on our turf’ by doing our role instead of what we perceive as theirs. And sometimes the tribal leader joins in!

Sound familiar? So what do you do about it?

A lot of people try and deal with team friction through rules or discipline or by trying to create empathy between people. This might work to a point, but my view is that if they are behaving tribally you’ve got to think tribally in your solutions.

One of my favoured approaches when dealing with team friction is best explained through looking at the history of the land of my birth. Everyone knows that the Scot’s tribes are called clans, but not everyone knows that smaller clans were called Septs. The Septs swore allegiance to a bigger Clan and in times of war they rallied to the standard of that clan and stood side by side with other Septs and faced a common enemy. Then they went home and went back to fighting with the Septs that they had stood shoulder to shoulder with!

If you’ve got two tribes who are in conflict, one of your problems is that they see each other as the enemy. When they see another tribe as the enemy everything they do is seen in a bad light, everything they do is wrong, everything they do is something to be suspicious of. Lets face it history has taught them that’s the truth and their viewfinder is turned that direction and focused that way.

If you want to change the situation you’ve got to move the focus of the viewfinder. That focus is a ‘common enemy’ (just like the Scottish Septs). I look for a focus outside of the organisation such as a competitor. Most organisations have someone that they compare themselves with, competition for their market share, someone looking to sell to the same customers, someone whose product is too similar etc. The focus has to be real and something that everyone in the organisation knows about. It’s likely to be unwritten, but soon get told when you join. Its unlikely to be part of your vision or mission, but it will be part of your organisational chatter!

By getting each team to focus outside of the organisation at someone else that they need to win against you have a starting point for the team’s to see that there is something to value in each other. Something that means they need to work with the other team. Once a team starts to value another team then you have the chance for the other steps in moving from team conflict to team alignment.

Don’t fight the tribes! Just shift their focus and watch as the alliance begins to form and conflict begins to diminish.

As you sow so shall you reap?

Have you ever seen a change initiative struggle? Or have you ever had difficulty getting the traction or keeping the momentum behind an idea that you are trying to implement with your team or business? Most of us can see what needs changed, some can see how to initiate that change, but not all of us can see how to maintain the change once the programme is going.

You’ve probably heard the maxim ‘What gets measured gets done’. I’ve always found that it is one of the keys to maintaining momentum in change. Keep an eye on the progress of all the measures associated with, not only the targeted outcomes of the change initiative, but the inputs and activities that you have decided will drive those changes. This means that you always have something that keeps people connected to the change and reinvigorated when necessary.

But I’ve often found that measures are not enough and that the maxim is not always true, and that leads me to think that there is another side to this maxim.
A few years ago I was asked to talk with an organisation that was well down the path of changing their business model. They had moved from a regional sales model to a national model and like most organisations at that time were able to do so with the advent of improved telecommunications and call centre technology. That meant that they could make their change while still maintaining their regionalised employees. This should have meant that they got the best of both worlds, local knowledge where required and minimising of downtime that would happen in a purely regional call centres .
They had put in all their measures throughout the call centre’s but were not seeing any real traction. In fact what they were seeing still reflected a regional approach to sales and support. The natural conversation was around changing mindsets and how to do that.

Then I asked the question ‘How are the regional GM’s rewarded?’.

I’d noted that they had retained the existing structure with the previous regional GM’s leading the staff in the regional offices to meet the new national vision and measures. I was beginning to wonder if, from the staff perspective, there had been no change (same boss, same office, same job etc.).

The answer to the question was ‘ Their bonus is based on the sales and service figures for the region’. It turned out that there had been some contractual difficulty involved with changing the GM’s reward structure so it wasn’t changed. After all these were senior people, they’d bought in to the strategy and the vision hadn’t they?

On such a decision and such a sweeping belief a highly expensive change initiative was floundering. By assuming that leaders would put the business before their pockets they’d missed the basic’s of incentivised pay. The leaders were leading the organisation in line with the incentives first and the national measures second.

So the measures meant nothing, because the incentives weren’t linked to the measures.

Look at your organisations struggles today and ask yourself ‘am I rewarding the things that I am asking my leaders to deliver?’ If you want profit don’t just reward on market share or volume. If you want engaged people do you have some reward linked to the measures or actions involved in your engagement strategy. If you want quality make sure you don't just pay on output.

Our maxim should be ‘Incentivise what you measure and it gets done’.

Low hanging fruit give you stomach ache?

Taking the ‘low hanging fruit’ is a well established change management phrase. The idea is to tuck some 'easy' results under your belt to get some traction in your change initiative.

I'm all for building belief throughout the organisation by demonstrating that the promised change is happening. It's core to all my change work, as many people aren’t instant converts and need to see change to believe in it. But the trouble with stock ideas that anyone can latch on to, is that people can think they know what the phrase means without having any depth of knowledge behind the meaning. Watching CSI doesn't make you capable of investigating a crime for example, even though you will hear a lot of ‘real’ terminology. I wonder whether ‘low hanging fruit’ has become misunderstood or misused?

The key to low hanging fruit is to know that the fruit is good for you. Just as nature can hide poison in a pretty casing, organisational low hanging fruit may look tempting but may not be helpful for the change you need.

How often have you seen a new leader declare that a particular thing is to be changed & then find themselves embroiled in associated issues? Often an obvious change has many less obvious threads attached to it e.g. connected processes, IT patches or previously agreed HR entitlements. Picking that first thread can quickly start to unravel the organisation and take up too much of the leader’s time. Soon you find that change then dictates the changes that follow and ultimately, more patches, more process fixes and addendum's to HR agreements and not the reengineering the leader envisioned, promised the board and was brought in for.

So how can ‘low hanging fruit’ go wrong and how can you avoid it?

The world we live in expects results rapidly and sometimes immediately (I coach executives in their first 90 days and find that many organisations believe that 90 days is way too long and want strategic decisions in weeks!). This can mean that there is pressure to achieve a quick result and quick results are sought in the ‘obvious’ rather than ‘the best’. Picking the obvious low hanging fruit may mean that you stay on the outskirts and don’t walk further in to the forest and find the more nourishing options.

If you want to avoid the problem you have to remember some good change principles. One of those is diagnosis. Whether the change is to processes, culture, systems, structure (and if you want real change you cant do one without the other, but lets not digress), you need to take a good look at what the organisation does, how it does it and why it does it that way. Unfortunately diagnostics take time, effort and a bit of investment, and all of those are often in short supply. But don't let that get in the way of the principle of taking a good look at the business before you kick off the change.

If the benefit of low hanging fruit is to demonstrate that change is happening so that your people engage with change and therefore get more impetus to the change then each change that you make needs to be one you’ve promised and each change must be an obvious contribution to the overall purpose of the change programme.

To state that simply, why pick a peach when you’ve promised an apple pie!

So get clear on your vision, diagnose what you have, look at what needs changed and lo and behold the really beneficial low hanging fruit will become more obvious to you.
Then when you pick it, everyone will know why you’ve picked it and your change programme gets the credibility that low hanging fruit is meant to get you.

And no stomach aches!

Why is the important word

When you embark on a change programme you set out with the intention to succeed, don't you? As a leader you have thought the change through and know what you are going to do (change the structure, implement a new system or process etc.) and you've had to build a business case to justify the spend against the return and benefits for the company. You get the green light to go ahead and start to implement your plan and make the change happen. Then you find, as the new structure is in place or the system starts to run, that the benefits are not coming or months later you are asked to review the change against your forecasted benefits and you can see it's not happening. People aren't really doing their new role in the structure or using the system the way it was designed. They are doing something else. Have you been here before or seen this happen? You should have, as it happens in 90% of change programmes.

In troubleshooting such programmes I come across frustration and confusion in the minds of so many managers. Some just want to get rid of the people who aren't doing the job and others up the stakes and make non appliance of the new system a dismissible offence. Others start to tinker with the structure or the system to apply band-aids as it obviously cant be working. Leaders point to nicely drawn business structures and organisational charts and ask "Why isn't it working?".

The key is in that word "why".

Often when leaders go out with their change they explain "what" is going to happen and sometimes "when" it will happen. Many forget to fully explain "why".

A study of students in the USA found that some tended to favour "what" questions, others "how" questions and another group favoured "why" questions. In my experience of change, everyone is a "why" person. Without a clear understanding of "why" the change is happening people don't really buy it. Even if they appear to have no choice (you take the computer off their desk and give them a new one with the systems fully loaded) the project doesn't deliver to its full potential. If they don't fully acknowledge the "why" they will never fully engage in the "what". This is why I.T people often find that users have their own favourite pieces of software loaded up and use that rather then the expensive system the company implemented. This is why people continue to do the old job even though the structure clearly shows that the job is now different.

Change challenges our certainty. We go in to work every day certain that we know what will be there and what we are there to do. We get used to it and in many cases it becomes part of us and who we are. When someone comes along and challenges that certainty, many people will hold on to what they know until they are sure that they understand "why" they need to change. If you don't provide any "why" or a robust "why" some will not let go of their current certainty at all, willing your change to fail so that they can get back to what they know is right or at worst actively working to subvert your change to prove you wrong.

Those that do come along because you have their trust, may not grasp the change with both hands and embrace it and engage in it. They may not even realise this themselves.

It's as if the word "why" is a filter to their beliefs. If the "why" is fully understood then the "what" will be too and the "how" will follow as they engage in your project. The less clear the "why", the more cluttered their filter and the less likely that the what and the how will have a smooth path to delivery of your objectives.

If your organisation is on the path of change, walk round a random sample of people and ask them "why were we doing this?". Any organisation that is set to successfully achieve the change will have consistency of reply and will find people happy to explain it and their part in it. The greater the variety of the answers, the more faces expressing confusion and the lack of certainty or willingness to discuss the change the less likely it is that the change will deliver.

And if your first 5 people say "what change?" you have real problems!