“I want to make a career change and know I need to work on my mindset if I’m going to be successful.”
“Our staff have to become truly responsive to customers.”
“My marriage is in trouble if I don’t adjust how I run my company.”
You get the idea. These are paraphrases of things clients have said to me over the years. To take the lyrics of She & Him slightly out of context: “Change is hard–I should know.”
The Ultimate Change?
I have lost count of the times a business owner or general manager has looked me in the eye and said, “I want to change the culture.”
For an organization, that direct approach almost never works.
(And yes, I know I’m the guy often paid to help clients see a positive perspective.)
Culture change is perhaps the hardest task. It is the ultimate accomplishment for organizational improvement. And, despite what I said earlier, it really is at the core of any work I do with a client.
But to tackle it straight on is to attempt the impossible. A 1990 article from the Harvard Business Review, “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” explains it:
Leaders can’t direct everybody to change. But they can point the way, give people space to solve their problems, and cross-pollinate those success stories and practices throughout the organization.
You can’t move to a new place without any traction. Your people are the traction.
How to Change
Which brings us to another HBR article, this one from 2017: “All Management Is Change Management.” Trying to increase a metric like sales? To decrease a metric like turnover? Implement a new policy? It’s all change.
The article suggests that managers
skip the months spent creating a comprehensive plan to make the company more change-oriented. Instead, focus on some important goals that are not being accomplished. Have teams carve out some sub-goals they will aim to achieve in a few months. They should be asked to test innovative steps they think will make a difference and to learn from the process. Maintaining a short time frame for these experiments permits the rapid testing of many modest innovations. Of course, these are steps to advance major strategic goals, but the emphasis should be on executing specific changes — with each success followed by a new round of more-ambitious goals to tackle.
Robert H. Schaffer
If I understand the author, managers should spend their time helping others stay disciplined on the most important things: setting goals, focusing on the innovative things they can control to reach those goals, seeing if it worked and sharing that with others.
Hip Socket’s Approach
It sounds an awful lot like the 4 Disciplines of Execution, a process I use with many of my clients trying to change. Part of the genius of the 4 Disciplines is that it forces you to think through what’s important … then think through what is under your control to achieve that important thing … then think through how to measure and hold yourselves accountable to progress.
That’s a lot of thinking, isn’t it? It’s why, when people are wanting to change themselves and their teams, they hire coaches.
Hip Socket, I like to say, helps clients wrestle and grow. The wrestling happens in our conversations and workshops, as we help clients think through what’s true and what’s important for them. Change happens after that awareness.
I love talking about this kind of work. If I can help, please reach out.