Three Critical Questions For Leading Change
I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process. You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.
Your team is out in open and you are eating your lunch on the ground. The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.
In first scenario you as team leader say to your team in stern voice get up and follow me right now. A few people respond but the majority stay in place. Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.
The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move. Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind. The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.
The third scenario is you say to team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe. Everyone moves and no one is hurt.
In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore especially with next generation workforce. The second scene was perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading. The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.
The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story. Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change. What is the Problem? How are we going to Solve it? Why is this important to You?
Leading Change
The greatest mistake organizations make during difficult times like we are currently experiencing is to try to manage change rather than leading the process. Sometimes survival is the only critical issue and then you do whatever you have to do to stay alive.
Most of time though we look very short term and develop a bunker mentality that’s only goal is to ride out this storm until things get better. This means of course reducing expenses through personnel reductions , delays in capital investment, marketing and of course training and development. Especially, all those bad trips and conferences that congress is railing about.
Leading change recognizes the brutal facts that the fundamentals of global economics have been permanently changed. Effective leaders will use the urgency and severity of this current cycle to reposition their entire organizational culture for success in the 21st Century and beyond. The future is incredibly positive for all those who are willing to embrace it. No going back!
Execution
It is amazing to me how all of the most respected people in the field of leadership are so consistently saying the same things about the most important things that all organizations need to be doing. It really started when Steven Covey wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People followed by Jim Collins Good to Great and now every bestselling book on leadership prioritizes the same factors.
Execution is a great read by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. They define execution as the discipline of getting things done.
They start with the number one issue of the day the personal character of the leader. If you are not able to execute your own personal priorities then you will never be able to establish execution as a priority for your organization.
In the spirit of Good to Great they insist that the leader must never delegate their most important responsibility of getting the right people on the team. This factor more than any other will determine if you r people can consistently move beyond creative development and project planning to actually get the job done.
The next priority is to create a culture of discipline where execution is valued. A great insight is that we don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Translation, at some point in time we need to stop talking about the problem and start doing something to solve it.
Finally, after the leader has set clear goals and priorities you must evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Then it is extremely important to reward the doers who are actually getting the job done and this will move execution to the top of your leadership core values.