Lead for Change

The timing for this post is convenient, as it comes so close to my post about upper management standing up for the little guy.  I'll wrap up with what I've learned from my "Improving Your Business Through A Culture of Health" class from Harvard with this post, as I've already started my next online class!  Next up, a UPenn class on Gamification - stay tuned.

I think something that many don't consider is that there is a difference between leadership and management.  Leadership is about establishing a direction and coping with change.  Management, on the other hand, is about predictability and results.  These two are often at odds with each other, or at least butting heads every so often.  Yet, these two also need to cooperate if a business is to move forward.  It is unfortunate that firms have the tendency to be over-managed and under-led.

Culture is defined as the shared assumptions, values, attitudes and patterns of behavior that you see within an organization or group.  It is 'the way we do things around here', whether consciously or unconsciously.  Culture is established in an organization through what I've started to call the three E's of expansion.  The first E is enablng.  This is when leaders speak, act, create policies and establish procedures within an organization.  Employees observe what their leaders do and determine what is important and valued through this.  The second E is enacting.  This is when employees begin to do those things that they thought their leaders showed them were important and valued.  For example,  imagine a leader who talks about how important work-life balance is, but doesn't take vacations themself and works crazy long hours.  (I don't imagine that it will be a challenge to think of examples of this sadly....)  Unfortunately, the spoken message of work-life balance may fall on deaf ears since the employees can visibly see their leader not taking vacations and working long hours.  The message they are receiving instead is that spending more time at work is what is important and valued.  From here, we come to the third E, elaborating.  This means that as more employees begin to enact what has been enabled for them, the culture of no vacations and long hours becomes more and more a part of the organization.  As you can see from this example, it is incredibly important that leaders within a company are making the effort to model good behaviors for their employees.

One quote that I pulled from this class refers to the idea I just presented.  I want to share it here:

"Managers may inadvertently reproduce a culture, even when they desire or espouse to to wanting to change it.  Part of this is due to the underlying assumptions that managers have about human behavior and how people are motivated to get refied in an organization's formal systems, it's incentive systems, in the everyday norms of who's recognized, who has voice, who doesn't have voice.  What happens is that if people are treated consistently in terms of these basic managerial assumptions, they come eventually to behave according to the way those assumptions would predict.  That is, in many ways we bring about the world that we theorize or assume."

I've talked a lot about how challenging changing culture can be, especially when that culture has been so deeply ingrained in its workers.  It is WORK.  I am not trying to tell people that it will be easy.  Any proposed interventions need to fit and build on an existing culture.  They need to meet organizations where they are and have realistic goals.  If an organization is successful in making a change, it is then imperative that the leaders then monitor, reinforce and readjust as they experience changes.

In this section of class, the professors discussed much of John Kotter's work.  Kotter offers an 8-step process for leading change.  The steps, taken from Kotter's website, are as follows:

1. Create a sense of urgency - help others see the need for change and that it needs to happen now
2. Build a guiding coallition - leaders who can guide, coordinate and communicate about the change process
3. Form a strategic vision & initiatives - clarify how the future will be different from the past; show initiatives that can help make vision a reality
4. Enlist a volunteer army - large-scale change needs massive numbers of people to rally around a common opportunity
5. Enable action by removing barriers - remove inefficient processes + hierachies; establish freedom to work across levels and generate real impact
6. Generate short-term wins - 'wins are the molecules of results'; collect + communicate, early and often to energize volunteers
7. Sustain acceleration - press harder after first success; as credibility increase, so does the ability to improve systems, structures and policies
8. Institute change - speak about the connection between the new behaviors + organizational success; make sure they continue until the new behaviors become strong enough to replace old habits

This process is being open about the fact that culture change is a challenge, but it also allows individuals and organizations to see that there is a path that can be taken to start inching forward.

Again, we still need more individuals that are higher up within organizations to take a stand, like Tim Bray from Amazon, and create the sense of urgency that can set the beginnings of change in motion.

-Vicky