Category Archives: Change Management

Trusting people who think differently

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I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last 48 hours about the idea of trust.  It is a difficult concept to unpack – you know it when you see it or feel it, but it is hard to explain. I often have clients who say “we just don’t trust each other”, or “the leadership team has trust issues”, but when it comes to explaining what that means, they struggle.  “Oh,” they say, “it isn’t that I don’t LIKE so and so….  and he/she is a nice enough person, but….” and they trail off.

We often have a natural trust for people which whom we have a shared affinity.  Republicans hear and trust Fox News to be ‘fair and balanced’, while Democrats look at the Huffington Post as a source of ‘truth and honest reporting’.  I think in the workplace, operations people often ‘trust’ other ops people, because they understand how they think and what they are trying to accomplish.  When the sales person enters the room, there can be a natural distrust of their motives because they think and act ‘differently’.  Trusting someone who is different from you is a much bigger step than trusting someone who is similar.

Unpacking this concept and learning how it influences us all in the workplace, in our relationships and in life is a difficult task, but it can shed light on how we all behave, and explain the choices we make.  Think about it for yourself – what happens when you extend your trust to someone who is quite different from you?  Do you feel a little queasy?  What happens in the interactions you have with that person?  Are they warm or cold? Are they generative or practical?  If they feel a little distant, you may not be really opening yourself up to trusting them.  Try it tomorrow – you might be surprised by what you discover.

Changing the Way We Change

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I’ve been writing for a while now about the need to change the way we change in organizations.  The notion that change can and should be managed has resulted in “change” becoming a rote exercise in project management. I think we have developed some wonderful insights, tools, techniques, and approaches to infusing project plans with better communications, better training, and a better understanding of managing stakeholders. The results in terms of adoption are great.

But when it comes to culture change, or what we like to refer to now as “engagement”, something different is required. Culture is socially constructed through dialog between people, and it emerges through shared experiences. It requires different techniques to cultivate and grow.  As Peter Senge said, we need gardeners, not mechanics, to truly change a culture.

Sue Morhman is hosting a webinar on changing change through the Center for Effective Organizations.  It looks like it will be interesting – check it out if you have a few minutes:  Change Management is Obsolete: Learnings from Research and Practice about What’s Next.

Cultivation takes time, variety, and attention.

Cultivation takes time, variety, and attention.

Change and Management – do they go together?

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Since the early 1990s, when “Change Management” became two words we use together comfortably, the idea of managing individuals through change in the workplace has matured considerably.  We now have maturity models, processes, templates, and detailed plans complete with measurements that assure us that our change efforts have been successful. I would suggest that much of this work has greatly enhanced how we manage technoogy and process projects. Focusing on how and when we give people training, how we communicate to them about what’s coming, and how they provide feedback, following the traditional ‘transmission model’ of communications, has its usefulness.

However, when it comes to changing ‘how we work’, management is an ambitious term for what is naturally a messy and turbulant process. Cultures emerge, grow, change, and die over time through collective efforts (or lack thereof) from all sorts of forces. Even worse for the management-minded, culture resists measurement – as soon as you turn a telescope on it you it moves (changes) and eludes you.  That makes it exciting for social scientists and frustrating for management scientists – although often frustrating in a ‘good way’ 🙂

I suggest we need to bring together social sciences and management sciences to effectively think about this phenomena.  But….. social scientists will need to wrap their heads around the manage pespective that values ‘hard numbers and proof points’, and management scientists (and practicioners) will need to be open to different ways of seeing and valuing progress.  It remains to be seen if that’s a gulf that can be crossed in managemnet consulting and in industry, as well as in academia.

 

Do you trust employee surveys?

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In the last three months, three major clients have asked me questions about the validity of their employee engagement, satisfaction, and cultural surveys.  They weren’t concerned because the scores were so low. They were worried because the survey results were significantly  higher (read: better) than they would have expected based on their own gut instincts about how things were going.

Employees are getting saavy about how to answer surveys to reduce the amount of noise and churn in their lives. And…. there are some things that are simply best left unquantified. The idea that data is emotionless and factual is sometiems a fiction, a wishful hope, a belief that makes us feel comfortable but doesn’t necessarily reflect organizational experiences.

If your gut is telling you your survey results are a little too rosy, it is worth asking some questions, digging in, and opening up to alternative forms of understanding satsifaction, engagement, and culture.

Decision making is about people making choices….

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We need to stop trying to use strategy, scorecards, and process definitions to dictate what decisions people should make, and instead focus on helping people understand how to make decisions when faced with problematic situations.  It is not possible to predict all of decisions a person might have to make in the course of a day, so teaching them how to use your strategy to make aligned decisions is more important than trying to anticipate all of the questions that might come up and committing the ‘right’ answer to a policy, procedure, process, edit, values statement, strategy picture, or any other artifact that gets buried in a knowledge base somewhere and never sees the light of day.

decision making