Need for a Pause during Change

You are in midst of an adrenalin pumping, emotionally involving, and intellectually stimulating change period.

How should you respond to brief sub-periods of inactivity or pause during such times? Rather, should you be actively keeping aside such ‘pause times’ during change periods?

I contend you should keep aside such ‘pause times’.

It helps you re-calibrate, re-prioritize, re-focus, and re-energize yourself.

Now let me take this a step further. Should this only be at individual level or should you be extending this to teams/groups too?

I think teams/groups also need to find a space for ‘pausing’ and re-energizing themselves. Just having a bit of fun might provide a good outlet for anxiety involved in process.

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Sourav

Hacking Culture

How do you ‘hack culture’? You might first ask me what ‘hacking culture’ means.

 

Well! It’s about creating a significantly different, and not an incremental, vision of culture – and finding non-traditional ways to move towards that vision.

 

Now, let’s get back to ‘how’ question.

 

You could use 2 different approaches to ‘hack culture’.

 

On one hand, you could get a large group of diverse people in a room – and ask them to throw caution to wind and come up with innovative ideas. In this approach, you are providing no structure/tools to think innovatively.

 

On other hand, you could provide people in room some structure/tools to help them start thinking differently.

 

First approach may work in a situation where team itself brings very diverse perspectives to table –probably because of their diverse backgrounds. Secondly team members are accustomed to a lot of change – and hence will not be too wedded on to the current culture.

 

Second approach may work in a situation where people in room might have very similar thoughts/ideas - probably because of similar backgrounds. Secondly team members might have a seen a long period of certainty – and so are probably emotionally attached to the current culture.

 

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Sourav

Teamwork and Collaboration

How does one move an organization from a culture of ‘individual heroism’ to one of ‘teamwork and collaboration?

Let’s assume that there’s enough leadership momentum to ensure the change kicks off.  Hence there is sufficient dis-satisfaction with current state, there is a concrete enough vision of future, and first concrete steps have been identified.

Using a change management lens, you will further need to:

·         WHAT - Identify performance Metrics and Execution Plan– think of the change as a project.

o   What are some of key metrics/milestones you want to measure and track?  Given we are talking of culture change, these metrics can both be ‘observable behavior changes – in individuals/teams’ and ‘business outcomes’.

o   What’s execution plan including RACI? Do you want a week/month/quarter wise execution plan?

·         WHY - Identify changes in attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets required – Our views on teamwork and collaboration are strongly shaped by our upbringing and education. Further our workforces are diverse in nature.  It is important to converse with employees on what are prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets, identify ones that are limiting, and agree on new ones that need to be pursued.  

o   E.g. – An Individual Heroism culture might be based on belief ‘I can win it on my own’. On other hand, a more collaborative culture might be based on belief ‘2 minds and/or 2 hands always work better than 1’.

A powerful way of ‘anchoring’ this conversation is through examples of how old/new beliefs have played out in failures/successes in similar other companies/situations/sports, etc.

·         HOW - Identify Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities – employees/teams will need to make shift.

·         WHAT - Identify role of Leaders and Managers and hold them accountable for it –

o   What role should these 2 critical role holders play? Do you want them to set the tone, role model, encourage, and/or reward appropriately?

o   Frequent communication is a critical aspect of entire change process. What kind of communication plan do you want to have for leaders and managers?  ‘Examples’ and ‘success stories’ can provide further clarity and positive momentum to change process.

·         WHAT - Roles and Responsibilities – how will these change for individuals and teams?

·         WHAT – Assimilation –for any group/team which needs to be restructured as part of change efforts – there additionally needs to be a focus on their assimilation into new group/teams.

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Sourav

Change, Change, Change

Last year, at start of winter, I was at Great Wall of China. I was prepared for chilly cold but then strong icy winds took me by surprise. I was in for a rude shock when I tried making my way through a small tunnel gate and realized that wind behind me was making me run.  On my way back, I knew I will have wind against me and will have to make quite an effort to get on other side of tunnel gate. I took some time to gather my breath and then ran through tunnel gate with wind hurtling against me. But I managed to make it to other side. I went to the nearest shop, with watery eyes and stone cold hands, and ordered a HOT CHOCOLATE (those who know me will know that I never usually have HOT CHOCOLATE). But I did that day, because I needed body heat.

So what’s the point? Why am I recounting this instance?

When you come across a changed situation, you need to be able to keep your composure, gauge what’s different, plan your reaction, and react. Sometimes you need to do things that you usually will not do.

But calmness and composure are essential to maintain through change. If I had lost these two on that day, it might have taken me much more effort and consequences could have been much more difficult to undo.

Maintain calm and composure through change. It might actually help in being responsive, adaptive, and decisive.  That’s my point!

 

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Sourav

 

Staying at the Top

An organization has done things right (in retrospect all successful organizations seem to have got things right) and succeeded beyond expectations. It is now widely recognized as a success story. What next?

The road to the top is exciting, but staying at the top seems a bit trickier. You don’t necessarily have someone to benchmarking against. An oft used strategy when an organization reaches the top is to ‘Defend its territory!’.

But does only territorial defense lead to success in the long run? What were the behaviors which enabled success in the first place? It was about exploration and gaining territory. Given that there were larger players around, survival required exploration and hence the company focused on it. But when you are the largest player around, not exploring doesn’t visibly threaten your existence in the near future. If you happen to be in an industry not characterized by sudden technological breakthroughs or obsolescence and customer preference changes the temptation to maintain status quo becomes higher.

How does a market leader attempt to maintain status quo?

It might try to ‘standardize’ everything which it thinks led to its success. The focus shifts to ‘reliability’ – everything must be predictable. How do you ensure reliability? Implement stringent systems/procedures. Page loads of process manuals are created and an army of audit processes are instituted.

What happens to the focus of management in such a scenario? Think of a situation where not much happening is in the external environment and consequently not many organizational changes are required within. In such situations, the focus of management exclusively shifts to figuring out errors/deviations and correcting them.

Hence you have a system where in search of reliability and predictability, systems replace people instead of supporting people in their work. Status quo is maintained and with not much harm because the winds of change are not there.

Let us delve deeper into what happens to peoples’ behavior in such cases. The system runs definite risks:

• Of ‘filtering in’ only particular kind of employee profiles during selection. One manifestation of this might be that the system would filter in people whose natural competence/preference lies in ‘defending’.
• Of ‘filtering out’ quickly anyone who doesn’t fit the bill. ‘He didn’t fit our culture’ is what is said in such cases.
• Of behaviors undergoing standardization. You might subsequently create clones who over a period of time get institutionalized and soon start glorifying their institutionalization. ‘If you are not like us, you are worth nothing’; ‘We are the best’! are oft heard statements in such cases.

There is a difference between a successful company and a company that exhibits success enabling behaviors.

Are the behaviors listed above representative of a company that exhibits success enabling behavior? At the least, the company (the market leader) would undergo a tumultuous phase when the winds of change arrive and its survival depends on doing something more than just defending/maintaining status quo!

What are the success enabling behaviors that a company can exhibit – behaviors that increase the odds of a company succeeding even under adverse external conditions?. That’s something I would delve into in a subsequent post.

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Sourav

Roots!

“People have more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carry forwards parts of the past”

This line stared at me from the page of an old notebook that I was sorting through today afternoon.

The line stuck!

How do people who get displaced behave? I have heard people displaced by partition keeping some relic of their past with them. People who migrate to different countries retain some relic of their past or keep on with some tradition of theirs which survives across generations and hence acts as a link to their roots. A friend once told me what he had encountered in Trinidad: 3^rd/4^th generation migrants from India who carried relics of their past (including some old and dusted photographs) and who practiced some of their old Indian traditions but who could not remember which part of India their roots lay in. He supposedly encountered similar things in Mauritius – descendants of Indian origins with French names which were pronounced like Indian names. Indian parents in Fiji supposedly call their children “putra” and “putri”.

What are the implications of this observation for change? For people to change, they should be able to carry forwards parts of the past – if you threaten to annihilate their identity (and our identities are past based) or what they identify with, in all probability they would not budge.

An example from the past comes to mind.

A year back a colleague and I were conducting a workshop. We were trying to anchor the group towards using “certain kind of situations” to make decisions (a new approach in our context). There was a section of the participants who wanted to stick on to the old approach – decisions on the basis of past behaviours. This section of participants had been practicing this old approach for a long time and it provided them comfort. They consequently resisted our efforts to introduce a new approach. They finally agreed to move when the group decided that decisions have to be taken on the basis of responses to “certain kind of situations” (the new approach) but the evaluation would have to start from analysis/understanding of “the past behaviours” (the old approach). J .. people had more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carried forward parts of the past.

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Sourav