Author: Peter de Jager

Leadership Lessons: Implementing Change – Phase 3 – Understand the Status Quo

Written by Peter de Jager on November 4, 2015. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Leadership Lessons: Implementing Change – Phase 3 – Understand the Status Quo

Editor’s note: We will be showcasing each phase of Peter de Jager’s methodology in weekly posts. Click here for phase 1 and 2 and check back every Tuesday to read the next phase.

Creating something new, is always an act of destruction. When implementing change you replace the old status quo known to everyone, with a mere vision of a goal in the future. Having respect for the existing Status Quo, builds respect for you.

How long did it take to establish?

Some status quos have been around for only a few months, others for years. The older the status quo, the more likely it will be difficult to remove. The older a status quo, the more it’s been proven as being valid. It’s easier to buy a new car, than it is to buy a new home. It’s not because of the smaller financial cost, it’s because of the larger emotional investment.

What investment/sacrifice did people make to achieve it?

How much have people invested in this status quo? Did they build it on their own time? Was it something that ‘cost’ them personally? The more they’ve invested in the past, the more difficult it will be to move them forward.

How many people subscribe to it?

Is this a corporate-wide ‘status quo’ or is it something that only a handful of people share? Is it a part of the corporate culture or just a local way of doing things? One of the measures of the size of a change is how many people will be affected by it.

What Values does it encompass?

If the status quo is also a part of personal values, or beliefs, then it may pose additional challenges. Example: Getting rid of the corporate Christmas turkey may be more difficult than changing the accounting system, because the turkey connects with ideas of gift giving, Christmas, bonuses and friendship. Culture is supposedly something difficult to identify, if you examine an organization in light of relationships, then culture becomes more visible. It also becomes visible of course… when you inadvertently try to change it.

What mythologies support it?

Each corporation re-enforces its beliefs/status quo through stories. e.g.. Nordstroms and the late night delivery of a customer’s parcel through snow reinforces the concept of a certain level of customer service. If your goal was to change customer service levels, then that particular story would have to be addressed somehow. Even if only because the staff would remember and look to that story for support of the status quo.

Who are the Heroes & Heroines?

Who are the people in the history of the corporation who have become major influencers, even if they are no longer around? What stories are connected to them? What were their beliefs regarding change?

Leadership Lessons: A 7 Phase Methodology Phase 2 Establish Rapport

Written by Peter de Jager on October 29, 2015. Posted in Articles. 13 Comments on Leadership Lessons: A 7 Phase Methodology Phase 2 Establish Rapport

Editor’s note: We will be showcasing each phase of Peter de Jager’s methodology in weekly posts. Click here for phase 1 and check back every week to read the next phase.

As someone involved with ‘selling’ the change, remember the lesson from sales. People buy from people they like. Do they trust you? Change management is an exercise in diplomacy.

Don’t have all the answers.

Change ‘agents’ have a tendency to outline the entire change. They see the change as something they ‘own’ and must, therefore, dictate the exact ‘solution’. A system written with the users input will ALWAYS have a better chance of success than a solution foisted upon them by an isolated IS. The role of a ‘change agent’ is to make change possible, not to define the change to be adopted.

Support empowerment

Empowerment means giving the target audience the option to make decisions. The flip side is that you, the change agent, must give up the desire to make all the decisions. The more you leave in the hands of the target audience, the more you build their sense of ownership.

Don’t ask for ‘buy in’

When you ask for ‘buy in’ you’ve already failed. It means you’re presenting them with both a need to change and the ‘solution.’ To be more precise, you are presenting them with your solution. You’ve invalidated any empowerment you may have created.

Seek out their ‘vision’

Again, this meets their need for ownership in the change. We resist change most when it leaves us powerless when we have no control over our future.

Identify influence leaders, early adapters, and resistors

Influence leaders are those whom others look to for guidance; they are not necessarily those early adapters that take to a new change first. Your time is best spent getting influencers to change, rather than catering to the early adapters or resistors. (Of course, sometimes you’ll be in a situation where the biggest resistor is also the biggest influencer.)

Change thinking: ‘Change Agent’ vs. ‘Inflictor of Change’

The term ‘change agent’ creates an image of a person on a mission. Another phrase more in keeping with the reality that change hurts is ‘change inflictor.’ It forces you to keep in mind your primary task is to disrupt the status quo. When you think like a ‘pain inflictor’ then you have one strong objective – reduce the pain. Consider your local dentist. His single goal is to minimize the pain experienced during a specific ‘change’. By showing concern for people’s reluctance to leave their status quo behind, you also reduce their resistance to the proposed change.

Leadership Lessons: Implementing Change – A 7 Phase Methodology – Phase 1

Written by Peter de Jager on October 21, 2015. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Leadership Lessons: Implementing Change – A 7 Phase Methodology – Phase 1

Editor’s note: We will be showcasing each phase of Peter de Jager’s methodology in weekly posts. Check back every week to read the next phase.

How should we implement change? It’s a simple enough question, surely there’s a simple answer — especially since we get to do it so often. Every time we implement a new system or install a new process, we’re implementing change. Surely there are some things that work, and some things that fail? Surely we’re intelligent enough to sift out the good from the bad? Perhaps.

We have a problem. We need to understand the deep mystical secrets of change implementation.

We know some of these secrets involve the target audience;

Making it their change, not your change; providing support during transition;
Celebrating small successes etc

Sounds like motherhood and apple pie. Perhaps that’s why we ignore them so often. But Robert Fulghum was very successful with a simple little book entitled ‘All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten’. Perhaps we need to follow his advice and pay attention to the obvious and the simple.

Perhaps when it comes to Change, all we really need do is paraphrase Fulghum and state “All I really need to know about Change, I learned in my last failed implementation!” and add this commentary as a warning… “I ignore them at my own peril!”

When faced with Change, any Change, our immediate response is “How will it affect me?” Will it destroy a way of life, or just disrupt a sense of comfort? Will it threaten jobs, or will it just be perceived as threatening jobs? Does it matter if it is a perception rather than reality?

Everyone shares these simple, personal, self-preserving questions. Answer them and you’ve solved the problem of implementing Change. Ignore them and you guarantee yourself a difficult, if not impossible, transformation.

There are no silver bullets in change management. No guaranteed, money back solutions. Your change strategy will depend on the present situation, your history, the future you’re trying to create and how difficult you make the journey from here to there.

Related Article: Leadership Lessons: Change in Seven Questions

The bottom line is, there is nothing you can say to someone you’re about to layoff that will make them feel better. If you’re looking for such a solution, then you‘re looking for the Holy Grail, it doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to get a target audience to accept a new way of doing things, a new system or a new set of standards, then there are partial solutions. Solutions that allow the target audience to gain some control over their destiny while implementing the necessary changes.

The following list of questions and suggestions are intended to entice you to think about the whole situation, past and present, not just the uncertain future you’re trying to build.

Phase I: Understand the Change

Before we implement change, it’s imperative we understand all the reasons for it. We must become experts in the change being proposed or reacted to, because people will look to us for answers. They might even look to us for guidance. At the very least “Is the change necessary?” will be asked by everyone impacted by it. It would be nice to have an answer.

What/Who is the Foreign Element?

The foreign element is the event, or person, which will disrupt the ‘way things were” otherwise known as the status quo. It’s dangerous to assume that the ‘foreign element’ is obvious to everyone. If the foreign element is misidentified, then the change will be more difficult to manage. This is sometimes another way of asking “What’s the real agenda?” If assumptions are made about why this change is being made, and these assumptions are wrong, it is likely the type of change implemented will not address either the real issue or that hidden reason for the change.

What happens if we don’t change?

What are the consequences if nothing changes? How certain are we that these consequences will take place? If the target audience does not believe the consequences will occur, or if the consequences have no noticeable positive or negative impact on them, they will not be motivated to move forward. People need to understand the real necessity for the change. Most people, when they understand the need to change is real, are unlikely, for reasons of self-preservation, to resist the change as strongly as those who believe the change is unnecessary.

Who is affected by the change?

Closely tied to the question of consequences. Will *I* be affected? If I’m not affected? Why should I change? It’s possible, and it happens often, that one way to reject change is to live under the belief that it doesn’t affect me personally. Identifying the ‘target audience’ is crucial to any change project.

When will the change take place?

The more imminent the change, the more people can relate and respond to it. Sometimes the only way to get people to accept that a change is ‘real’ is to attach a firm date for implementation. We’re all busy, our plates are filled with projects and important to-do items. If a change doesn’t have a deadline, if a priority has not been assigned, if budgets are nonexistent, then the change itself doesn’t really exist and it will be ignored. Distant change is less ‘real’ than imminent change.

Why now?

What forces this change upon us at this point in time. Why not next year? Why not last year? What makes it important that we act now? What is it about this foreign element that causes it to affect us today? If this change was really important, why didn’t we address it sooner? All of these questions, if answered properly, provide justification for the change. They legitimize it. If the answers aren’t readily available, you’re communicating to the target audience that this change is arbitrary.

How will the change affect us? Today? Tomorrow? In the long run?

This is another key question. Another version is “What’s in it for me?”

Leadership Lessons – Five Ways to Build a Box

Written by Peter de Jager on September 8, 2015. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Leadership Lessons – Five Ways to Build a Box

Despite the classic status of the quote “Think outside the Box”, it contains a subtle flaw. As a description of what the creative process is all about, it’s a brilliant distillation of the basic concept “think differently.” However, as a recipe for being creative, this famous quote is a dismal failure. A standard response from someone hearing it for the first time is… There’s a box? What box?

As an example of this response in action, consider the following little exercise. Separate your group into teams of 2-3 people and hand each team a new deck of playing cards. Instruct them to build on the table in front of them the tallest tower possible in five minutes. During this time they may not ask you any questions.

A typical team will manage to create a tower one card high, an extraordinary team might deliver a tower three cards high, and every now and then a genius team will emerge. They’ll build a tower 10-15 cards high. They’ll do it by forgetting that they’re playing with cards and instead, realize they’re playing with stiff pieces of construction paper, perfect for bending, tearing and mutilating into perfect paper building blocks.

Those that don’t escape from the constrictions imposed by the label of “playing cards” fall into two distinct categories; those that never even think of bending or tearing the cards and those that do think of this, but hold back because “you don’t bend or tear playing cards”. The latter group is at least aware that they’re constrained in a “box” defined by the rules for handling playing cards. The former group is oblivious to the box around them. A box that is, for the most part, self-imposed.

The advice “think outside the box” requires that we’re aware of the boxes surrounding us. A good step in that direction is recognizing that many of those boxes are self-imposed and that we can identify the behaviors that erect some of those boxes. Here are a few common self-constraining thought processes.

We don’t listen to our own wisdom.

As a consultant the most common problem presented to me for a solution is best summed up in the following client statement, “Peter, it hurts when we do this…” When faced with that problem statement it’s tempting to respond with the punch line from the child’s “Dr. Dr.” joke… “Then stop doing it!”

The fact is that we know how to solve many of the problems that face us. All we need do is accept that our existing behavior is not resulting in the desired outcome, and there we should find another course of action. The box is endlessly repeating an action we know doesn’t work.

We don’t listen to the wisdom of outsiders.

The “not invented here!” syndrome is endemic. The irony is once again that we recognize we’re unable to get out of our rut of thinking, yet we resist any injection of an external idea. The box in this instance is a double box. At the first level, the box is a lack of an internal solution. On the second level, the box is the notion that to protect our ego we must reject external suggestions.

Only those from out of town possess wisdom.

This is the exact opposite of the one above. There’s a strongly held belief that unless you’re from far away you can’t possibly have a solution to a local problem. It’s as if geographical distance bestows wisdom on the person giving advice.

Now I don’t want to totally eradicate this notion as I make my living being the “out of town expert”, but the reality is that the person sitting in the cubicle next to you is just as likely to have a solution to your problem as the jetlagged talent from seven time zones east of you. Frequent flyer miles do not boost IQ.

The simple isn’t complex enough.

We demand that our solutions are complicated and costly. If the problem has posed great difficulty in the past, then the solution cannot be simple. The reason for this is itself simple enough. If the solution is simple, then we must be at fault for not discovering it ourselves. We insist that solutions to our persistent problems be complicated and costly to protect our egos.

Here’s a simple example from the allegedly complicated world of organizational ethics.

If you’re willing to have your actions published on the front page of the Globe and Mail, then your actions are likely ethical.

Now, that’s not a perfect solution to most ethical problems, but it solves the vast majority of ethical issues.

Repetition devalues Truth.

This one is closely related to “simple isn’t complicated enough”. The great truths, the classical answers are often considered clichés, “Do unto others, as you’d have them do unto you”, “To thine own self be true”, “Look before you leap”, “Think globally, and act locally”. These are all simple, commonly repeated phrases. Just because they’re common doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, degrade the wisdom they contain.

All of the above thought traps restrict our problem-solving ability. By needlessly constraining how we see the world, they limit our ability to think our way towards solutions. The irony is that these aren’t imposed on us. There’s no one to blame for ourselves, and that brings to mind a sixth box building strategy – we’re seldom ready to consider that we’re the source of our biggest, most intractable problems.

Leadership Lessons: Poor Managers Thwart Good Organizations

Written by Peter de Jager on August 27, 2015. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Leadership Lessons: Poor Managers Thwart Good Organizations

Over my career, I enjoyed full-time employment with eight different organizations, and with the exception of the last one, in each case I joined a good organization and then ultimately quit a poor manager. The last one is the notable exception because that’s when I quit to start my own organization and no manager, good, great or brilliant could have kept me on the payroll.

Over the years, as I’ve listened to friends and associates relate their work experiences and soaked up a myriad of stories from the workplace, I’ve come to the conclusion that my “joining and quitting” behaviour wasn’t that unusual. We join organizations and we quit managers. This isn’t an idle observation; it’s an incredibly costly one. How much of our turnover is due, not to official management philosophy, but instead to either ignorance of that philosophy or simply due to a single manager’s inability to manage?

If we take the time to carefully examine how people become managers, this isn’t that surprising. We promote ‘doers’ to supervisory positions and rarely make any effort to train them how to ‘supervise’ rather than just ‘do’. Perhaps more to the point, when we first become managers, we’re typically oblivious to the fact that ‘management’ is a fundamentally different task compared to anything we’ve done in the past. This can lead to incidents worthy of the most amusing TV sitcoms.

Many many moons ago, (yikes… about 325 moons ago to be precise) I was promoted from an analyst position to a supervisory role, for the next 2-3 years I stumbled along the rocky road to management, inflicting pain and anguish on myself, my staff and my clients. Why? Because I really had no clue what it meant to be a ‘manager’ of people.

As a manager, my department was responsible for an awful lot of work. Even though I had six people reporting to me, I operated under my old belief that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”. Have you ever seen someone trying to do the work of six people? People would see me barreling down the corridors of the organization and dive out of the way, for fear of being run over. The “do it myself” philosophy is a successful strategy for a hands-on problem solver, but for a manager? It was a disaster. A manager must learn to delegate, and it’s not something that’s intuitive.

By doing the work myself, I was communicating very strongly that I didn’t value my staff – people quit managers for that reason.

Once I grasped I had to rely on other people, I started to give them assignments, but I didn’t trust them. It was my department, I was responsible for getting the work done correctly, so I micromanaged them. This is a euphemism for what I really did. I perched on their shoulders looking at their work. I constantly kibitzed. I reached for the keyboard. I interrupted. I intruded. All with the best of intentions. What it took me a long time to learn on my own, was that what a good manager must do, is give up control, in order to allow their people to work. Yes, as a manager I was responsible for the work, but that did not mean I had to have full control from minute to minute. As a worker that makes no sense, as a manager it’s our new reality.

By micromanaging I was communicating very clearly that I didn’t trust my staff – people quit managers for that reason.

Even with the rudiments of delegating under my belt – I was a very busy person. There was lots for a manager to do. People to see, reports to write, information to gather etc. etc. That didn’t leave much time for inconsequential meetings with my staff and certainly no time for one on one meetings. I prioritized what I thought was the important stuff, and left no time for my staff. I was a manager in absentia. I didn’t realize that until I made the time to know more about my people, that I’d never be able to create a team, instill loyalty or give my ‘human resources’ a sense of purpose.

By not making time for my staff I was communicating very loudly that I wasn’t interested in their well-being and growth – people quit managers for that reason.

Those are just three mistakes made by a somewhat reasonably intelligent person thrust into a management role without training. There were other mistakes I made, and some that I intuitively avoided. I never chastised an employee in front of others – but I’ve seen new (and sadly older) managers do that. I never broke a promise to an employee, but I did inadvertently play favourites. I gave the most interest assignments to the most capable – without realizing that that created resentment amongst other staff members – and without realizing that interesting assignments are the best training tools at my disposal and the very best way to motivate people to excel and to build loyalty.

It requires no mean intent to be a bad manager; all that’s required is ready made ignorance. The cure is a minimal continual dose of management training provided before, during and after the transition to managing people. People quit bad managers. Regardless of how good the organization, no matter the public image, it’s the person we report to who has the greatest contribution on our daily work experience. Bad managers drive out good employees.

By the same token, a good manager, one who treats their employees fairly, honestly and with integrity will retain staff in all but the most tyrannical of organizations. Even though Gandhi wasn’t a traditional manager he had it right, “Be the change you want to see in your organization” – even if his ‘organization’ was the entire world. His wisdom still rings true, for better or worse it is individuals who create the world/organizations we live in.