Posts Tagged ‘managing change’
That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It May 22 2012 3 responses
So, let me say at the outset that I’m reasonably confident that this is the world’s first leadership development blog post that includes a story about roasted cauliflower. (I Googled “roasted cauliflower leadership” and the top result was this recipe from Northern Michigan’s News Leader.) Here’s my back story.
One day last week I was working from my home office and went into the kitchen to get some lunch. My amazing wife, Diane, had a baking sheet full of raw cauliflower out on the counter. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “Making some roasted cauliflower for lunch. Want some?” I think I made a face, semi-politely said no thanks and that she must be the only person in North America who was making cauliflower for lunch. She kindly reminded me that I’ve demonstrated over the past couple of years that I actually like cauliflower and noted the different occasions that proved that point.
That’s when I said, “I’m still working with my long held story that I hate cauliflower and I’m sticking to it.” So I went for a sandwich and missed out on tasty cauliflower with peas and Indian spices.
The lunch-time lesson got me thinking about that phrase we hear so often, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” It’s usually offered in a lighthearted kind of way but like most jokes there’s often a deeper truth that lies underneath.
How to Coach Leaders to Really Change March 19 2012 one response
There was a great article in the New York Times on Sunday called “Helping Managers Find, and Fix, Their Flaws.” It details the seminal work of Harvard’s Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey and how they’ve leveraged their research to help leaders make lasting changes that make them more effective. My guess is a lot of leadership coaches soaked up that article because Kegan and Lahey’s books are go-to resources for just about anyone who’s a serious player in the coaching industry.
One of their big ideas is that leaders often have competing commitments. For instance, I might be committed to leading at a more strategic, big-picture level. At the same time, I might have a commitment to making sure that everything that comes out of my shop is absolutely perfect (i.e. done exactly the way that I would do it myself).
How can leaders overcome those competing commitments and move on to whatever their next level is? I’ll share two ideas that my colleagues and I teach in the “Flow of Coaching” segment of the Georgetown Leadership Coaching Certificate Program. Both of these are consistent with the approach that Kegan and Lahey use with their clients.
The first idea is what we call a Self Observation Exercise. The second is what we call a Behavioral Practice. The first often sets up the second.
Is Your Organizational Development Plan Ready for “Connect and Collaborate”? March 1 2012 2 responses
I’m about halfway through “How” by Dov Seidman, and I find his overarching point compelling — that in a world of radical transparency, how we do things matters as much as or more than what we do. My big takeaway so far is that organizations and society are shifting from a command-and-control model, toward one that relies on connection and collaboration.
Examples of connect and collaborate replacing command and control are everywhere. Some of those examples, like the Arab Spring protests, involve the highest of stakes and don’t come without resistance from those who’ve had historic control. Other examples are sort of silly, but still telling.
For instance, you might have heard about NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski tweeting from the track of the Daytona 500 earlier this week. A car had collided with a maintenance vehicle and 200 gallons of fuel caught fire. (Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt.) While he was parked on the track, Keselowski pulled out his smart phone, took a picture of the fire and tweeted it to his 65,000 Twitter followers along with commentary about what was going on. When the race resumed a couple of hours later, he had more than 200,000 followers. Did he break NASCAR rules by tweeting from his car? The people in charge, knowing a fan builder when they see one, apparently didn’t care. As someone observed, Keselowski is a “digital native” and completely gets how to use technology to build a community. So did the Google exec and others in Egypt who used social media to organize the Tahrir Square protests.
For those of us involved in supporting leaders in creating the organization of the future, this is a seismic shift. Based on my own experience, I would argue that we’re going to have to look outside our own demographic cohorts to make this work. Here’s why I say that.
How to Coach a Future CEO February 21 2012 no responses
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I’m a fan of Ford CEO Alan Mulally. He started in the top job at Ford about five years ago and, he has led the company to quarter after quarter of profitable growth. He’s accomplished that through any number of ways. Probably one of the biggest is by changing the culture of the company’s leadership team.
Of course, you change a culture by inspiring people to think, feel and act differently. It’s a process of winning hearts and minds. As the New York Times reported this past weekend, Mulally just turned 66 and is expected to retire in the next couple of years. The front runner to succeed him is an executive named Mark Fields who runs Ford’s business in the Americas.
In reading the story on Ford and Fields, I was struck by the evidence that Fields has changed his style as a leader over the past five years. Of course, that’s concurrent with Mulally’s time at the company. Prior to Mulally’s arrival, Fields was a high flier (literally and figuratively) who had gotten himself in trouble when it was revealed that he was using Ford’s corporate jets to fly back and forth to his Florida home at the same time that he was cutting thousands of jobs at the company and shutting down manufacturing plants.
As Fields himself said, “There was a ‘dead pool’ about me. People were saying, ‘When is Fields going to get shown the door?’ ” Five years later, however, he’s a poster dude for what great coaching and role modeling can do to turn an executive’s career and life around.
What Do You Make of This? October 12 2011 no responses
One of my idiosyncratic sources of fun is inserting random lines from movies into everyday conversation. Kevin Bacon shouting, “All is well. Remain calm!” right before the riot runs over him at the end of Animal House would be an example. Another one is when the Lloyd Bridges character in Airplane is looking at a report on a big piece of paper and turns to Jonny asking “What do you make of this?” Jonny grabs it and says, “Oh, I can make a hat, or a broach or a pterodactyl.”
It’s amazing how much the Lloyd Bridges question, “What do you make of this?” comes up in day to day life. For instance, when an organization is going through a big change, “What do you make of this?” is a pretty germane question. People’s answers will depend on the framework and context they have. That’s where leadership plays a critical role.
Change usually involves the end of something which usually means that at least some people are losing something that matters to them. The leader’s job is to start some conversations that focus on “What else can we make of this?”
An executive I know was promoted to be the CEO of his organization. He’s following a much beloved leader. Like most organizations these days, they’re facing a tough operating environment. It’s natural that the people there might focus on the downside of losing a leader they love at a time when it’s hard to meet goals. The new CEO is asking the question, “What else can we make of this?” When you ask that question, the possibilities open up. You give people the opportunity to come up with new options and new ways to view the roles they play or could play.
In his book, Managing Transitions
What do you do to help people focus on the possibilities?
How to Get Fired in Less Than a Year September 23 2011 4 responses
There are a lot of things you could say about the board of directors at Hewlett Packard but being afraid to pull the trigger is not one of them. With its dismissal of Leo Apotheker, the HP board has fired three CEOs in the past six years. Apotheker lasted 11 months at HP. He came to the company from the enterprise software giant SAP and had a vision of transforming HP from primarily a hardware manufacturer to a software services and cloud computing leader.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post called How to Save Your Change Management Program from Cancellation. Of course, the first step to keeping it from getting cancelled is to avoid getting cancelled yourself. Apotheker is the second high profile CEO I can think of to get fired this year after less than 12 months on the job. The first was Jack Griffin, the former CEO of Time Inc.
Together, the stories of Griffin and Apotheker represent the top two reasons managers fail as determined in a study conducted by the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In Griffin’s case, it was failure to demonstrate the relationship and interpersonal skills needed to lead significant change in a complex environment. I shared my lessons learned from his tenure in Five Ways to Avoid Being Fired in Five Months. The headlines back then were:
1. Do Your Homework
2. Pace Yourself
3. Genuflect When Necessary
4. Build Allies
5. Don’t Paint Targets on Your Back
One or more of those factors may have been in play at HP. Based on the reporting around Apotheker’s case, though, it sounds like one of the big reasons he got the boot because of the number one reason managers fail – ineffective communications skills and practices.
How to Save Your Change Management Program From Cancellation September 21 2011 4 responses
Earlier this week, I was leading a workshop for a group of leaders in a company that’s been around for a long time. They’re at the beginning of an enterprise wide, top to bottom reimagining of the business. There’s a mix of excitement, ambiguity and uncertainty in the air. Everyone knows that big changes are needed. What’s not clear is whether or not, after years of success doing things a certain way, the necessary changes will take root.
As luck would have it, I’d just heard a story on NPR that offers a lot of clues about why change management programs fail so I shared it with the group. The story was about the annual Fall premiere week on the television networks. The Variety TV editor, Andrew Wallenstein, pointed out that every year dozens of new shows are launched in the same week and every year more than 75 percent of them are cancelled after the first season. It’s not so much a program quality program as it is a math problem. This year, for example, 58 new shows are launching during premiere week. Given that most people only have so many hours a week that they can dedicate to watching TV, most of the new shows never gain an audience.
It costs a lot of money to produce a TV show. You’d think that the networks and producers would want to improve the odds of a return on their investments by spreading out the premieres over the course of the year and giving more people a chance to actually watch more of the shows. Pretty simple fix, right? So why have they been doing the same thing every year for the past 50 years? Wallenstein offered the answer.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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