“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present the decline will be fast.” – Peter Drucker
The Choice for Effective Change Management
Understanding change management is crucial for organizations facing rapid transformations. Some colleagues recently shared some great articles on innovation culture. In particular, one article, about building your innovation toolkit, resonated with us.
Effective change management for growth with innovation involves a choice to be made. It’s primarily a choice between growth or comfort. Because as it turns out, most organizations don’t have an innovation problem. More often than not, organizations actually have a fear of failure problem.
It’s this fear of failure that will cause any growth, innovation training , change management or culture improvement initiative to, as they say, “die on the vine.”
Our thesis is this: A strong culture is always a product of an active, engaged and high intensity senior leadership team.
A strong culture is always a product of an active, engaged and high intensity senior leadership team. – The Innovation Garage
What Leadership Signals Indicate a Need for Effective Change Management?
It’s important to understand, when someone reaches out to us to discuss building or changing culture or building their capability on innovation with innovation training, product and service design, project management or supply chain, the discussion often flows like this:
Senior Leader: Can we meet in the next week?
The Innovation Garage: Sure. How can we help?
Senior Leader: Well, you see, it’s our culture. It’s become problematic. It’s the context of our change management for our team.
The Innovation Garage: What do you mean by problematic?
Senior Leader: You see, our culture needs to change. We don’t have strong and engaged employees. We are stuck. We need to be more like X, less like Y, change ourselves to become like Z.
The Innovation Garage: So, how do you think your culture became this way?
Senior Leader: It goes back as far as I can remember. Seem’s we’ve always been this way. Fighting fires and being reactive. Our senior team tells me that It’s just that our people aren’t the right ones. You know, we don’t have the right people on the bus.
The Innovation Garage: Two questions, that will be helpful for us to think about. They may or may not be difficult to answer. May we ask them?
Senior Leader: Sure. Go ahead.
The Innovation Garage: First, who put the people on the bus?
Senior Leader: We’ll, we, me, I mean our leadership team did that. Hang on a second, but you see, things have changed.
The Innovation Garage: Ok. We understand that some things have changed. Second question, who’s driving the bus?
Senior Leader: As I told you, you don’t seem to understand. Our business conditions have changed. It’s the economy. Our product and our services have become commodities. Advances in technology are killing us in the marketplace. So, we need to make some changes.
The Innovation Garage: Ok. How would you like us to support you with those changes?
Senior Leader: I think we need an innovation training.
The Innovation Garage: Sure. We can absolutely put a plan together for that. Just so you know, we always start with the leadership team first. It’s most helpful for the leadership team to be highly engaged in these matters. All our data shows that having the leadership engaged increases everyone’s odds of success. So, when can we meet with you and your extended team to get some alignment and help you build out your vision for the future?
Senior Leader: What, you mean right now? It turns out that all the leadership team calendars are full. You see, our leaders have many important initiatives underway. They just couldn’t find time to attend. Besides, that’s not what we really need. These sessions would be just for the employees. You know, for those that aren’t on the executive team. You see, we’ll already have an approved plan to make some structure changes. We’re planning to decrease staff 20% over the next 6 weeks in a series of reductions. After that, we’ll be on our way.
The Innovation Garage: On your way to what?
Senior Leader: Rightsizing the business. It will be tough, but it’s necessary. Remember, we talked about the economy, and how we are commoditized. We’ll make the changes in the organization. Then, a couple of weeks after that, we can bring you in for the motivational talk. You know, talk about that innovation and growth mindset stuff, and that will jump start our new initiatives. Your motivational talk will start the change of our culture. Then we’ll be moving in the right direction.
If you’re smiling as you read this, the sad part is, this conversation happens much more often than you might think.
_________________________________________________________________
What Are the Organizational Tensions and Scenarios in Play for Effective Change Management?
Growth and comfort do not coexist. – Ginny Rometty, President & CEO – IBM
Cultures just are. They are like a garden or farm field. Cultures can be extremely hard work to maintain. They can be covered in weeds by neglect. Or, left fallow by an active decision not to do anything and yielding next to nothing.
First, cultures can, and will, just evolve. Entirely on their own.
If left alone, the soil hardens and the weeds begin to show up.
Or, they can be plentiful. Yielding much for all involved.
It is this tension between growth and comfort that has to be acknowledged and understood by the organization. It is important to understand how organic this process actually is. There are also two scenarios that typically manifest.
Scenario one is the desire to recover a culture that once felt high energy, exciting and innovative. Scenario two is to build a new culture from the ground up.
In either case, to recover a culture or build a new one, the soil has to be worked. Work that takes commitment, time, and tremendous amounts of leadership energy. Cultures will evolve organically. Most often, in one of two ways because of tensions between scarcity and abundance.
What is the Linkage Between Scarcity and Abundance Mindset for Change Management?
Fear, reactive management, low executive intensity, and the worst of all, the scarcity mindset. Scarcity, meaning that the entire leadership team AND organization as a whole becomes completely convinced there will never be enough of what is needed to get the work done. They focus on the need to reduce costs and reduce staff. They’re stuck and think that’s all they can do.
The company, its employees and its culture make a decision, based on fear of the unknown, and become a fallow field. The fallow field that doesn’t produce anything that matters. Sometimes, as change management consultants, we find ourselves in the middle of that fallow field. We end up looking around for what to do next that will help the organization.
The second method as to how cultures evolve, involves a mindset of abundance. There is a significant amount of effort to maintain what you have or to rebuild it to something new and different. With this mindset, the team recognizes that they have all they need to be successful. The psychological mindset is to recognize you already have what you need. It’s only a matter of structuring the puzzle pieces together to build it.
What Does the Change Management Process Look and Feel Like?
The reality is, that what comes next to develop that farm or garden field and its growth potential, has to make some noise. Some really loud noise. Think about what happens with that fallow field in farm country.
Picture yourself standing in that field looking around. It’s quiet. Then off in the distance, you hear noise. Low and slow at first. Then some squeaks and creaks of the field gate opening. You hear the tractor and the plow, getting louder. Then, lots of noise. The noise of the machinery that will begin to plow up the field.
Here, the plow hits the ground, breaking up the soil.
You need something similar in the culture. Something to break up old ways of thinking. Something that changes reactive management styles. As the soil is worked, the ground turns over to get oxygen and fresh nutrients into the soil. Then, high quality seeds need to be planted. Seeds that need to be cultivated to grow. To have a good culture, it takes time. A lot of time. It is hard, very hard. The change management effort requires a lot of tending, weeding, and pruning.
What Executive Intensity Traits are Important for Change Management Success?
We talk about the quest for culture change, but few leaders may have the energy, drive, and desire to make it real for their teams. Perhaps they just don’t know how to do it So, what do the leadership traits look like?
- A leadership team makes it their personal mission to maintain or build up the culture they wish to see for their organization.
- The mindset is rich with diversity, stimulus and abundance.
- The leaders in a strong culture see opportunity around every corner.
- They look for ways to grow the organization by net margin, offerings, or uniqueness compared to others in their respective industries.
- They also encourage failure to happen. Early and often. Because failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.
It truly is a quest. It is the organization’s version of The Hero’s Journey.
The Five Traits of Leaders to Create Their Growth Culture
- They are high intensity – Meaning, you can tell from their own personal energy level, they are ready for the quest and understand the mission and hard work ahead.
- They take extreme ownership of the process and the outcome – They are highly engaged. They make a few well informed and very fast decisions. They drive to the mission for their organization.
- They like to learn – As they learn, alongside their teams, they become smarter.
- They Manage by Walking Around (MBWA) – They are close to the work and their teams. They make a habit of walking around. They talk to others getting a “real time” feel for how things are going.
- They will experiment and pivot – Trying new things, understanding the results and adapting.
They ares marter in tending the soil of the organization. Smarter in figuring out quickly what is working and is not working. In the end, they cultivate a culture that enables others. A culture to drive engagement and provide abundance. These leaders focus with intent on developing an environment that becomes the key enabler to build long term growth.
Ready to Learn More and Get Started?
Take that first step by reaching out to us here, or drop an email to i[email protected], or visit our services or events page.
At The Innovation Garage®, We help organizations grow. Providing education, tools, technology, and expert consulting in change management for strategy, innovation, and supply chain. Guiding leaders from organizations across the world to intentionally self-disrupt their offerings and organizations. We deliver world-class education, tools, and technology on how to craft business operating systems focused on long-term profitable growth.
All contents Copyright 2012-Present The Innovation Garage, LLC.