The Business Sensei

The Cardinal and the Sparrow: Effective Organizational Change

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some legs. One of those legs is Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Cardinal Raymond Burke of the Roman Catholic Church was in the news recently, although perhaps not entirely in a way that he would have liked. The good Cardinal recently suffered a significant and dramatic change in status, sort of the equivalent of an admiral being demoted to swimming pool monitor: from Cardinal and head of the ecclesiastic church, he is now the patron of the Knights of Malta. This is not, to put it mildly, an upward career move. Indeed, one might well imagine that the Cardinal and the Bluebird of Happiness are not exactly on speaking terms right now.

The question, of course, is why did this happen? The ostensible cause is that the Cardinal did not agree with Pope Francis. While that may, in fact, be the proximate reason, the real reason is a bit more subtle. It has to do with the often messy and awkward process of organizational change. The world is constantly changing, whether we are looking at the religious landscape of the Church or the business landscape. Businesses rise up and achieve success within the environment in which they are founded. Many of them then go out of business or fade into the background: still important, but no longer dominant. Think Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, to name three, with Google possibly preparing to become a fourth.

Organizational change is never an easy thing. The larger the organization and the more deeply entrenched its culture and behavior, the more difficult it is to change. Few organizations are larger and have a more deeply entrenched culture than the Roman Catholic Church. Change can be a lot like trying to turn the QE II: it’s not something that happens easily or quickly. But Francis is making it happen. How?

To begin with, he is moving slowly. He is not trying to change the church all at once, but rather in small steps. He raises issues and then builds on them; he first suggests different ideas and gets people thinking about them. He then starts to act on those ideas and concepts.

Part of what makes change difficult is that an organization became successful by doing things a certain way. They have learned how to succeed, and everyone knows that nothing succeeds like success… except, of course, when it doesn’t. But trying to change those comforting habits is challenging: like throwing away that old coat that fits just right, the change simply feels wrong.

The first step, therefore, is painting a picture of the future: tell people what change will look like. This can be done through vibrant and dramatic speeches or through quiet questions. What matters is that it happens. Once people know where you are going, they are much more comfortable following you. It’s when they don’t know, or don’t want to know, that people dig in their heels. You have to make it easy for people to follow.

However, no leader can change a large organization on their own. There are simply too many people, too much psychological inertia. It is critical to get other organizational leaders on board. Show them the future and help them become comfortable with it, so that they will then share that vision with their followers. The more people who come on board, the more people will come on board: once change gets large enough, it starts to snowball.

But what about those who hear and refuse to follow? Often, they need to be removed from power: politely, calmly, and firmly. There can be no doubt, no question that the snowball will run over anyone who is refusing to move. Provided that people know which way to start moving, this approach can be remarkably effective at convincing those who have doubts that they should jump on the bandwagon. The catch, of course, is that you can’t get rid of too many or move too fast: scare people too much and they freeze or panic. If people are scared by the change process, they will swiftly become scared of the change itself.

By demoting Cardinal Burke in such a public fashion, Pope Francis is sending a very clear message. By finding a place for him, albeit a minor one, Francis is also recognizing his years of service. It is not always necessary to get rid of those who won’t change; rather, leading change involves moving them to places where they can still help the organization but can no longer impede the change process. Instead of being a focus of attention, they become boring and unimportant.

If you want to lead change effectively, you need to show people the future. Paint the picture that will get them thinking about how the world, or at least the company, can be a better place. Ask the questions that will get people to become unhappy with the status quo and start thinking about how change could be a good thing. Show them the way, recruit followers to spread the message, and strategically replace those who won’t move. Don’t be afraid to turn a few brightly colored cardinals into boring sparrows.

The Leadership Blueprint can help you with organizational change. Find out how.

Change Narratives

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

I live in a small town west of Boston. Halloween is a big deal here. It doesn’t matter which night of the week Halloween falls, that’s the night the kids are out trick or treating. Naturally, the kids prefer it when Halloween falls on a Friday or Saturday night so that they don’t have to worry about going to school the next day, but the idea of celebrating Halloween on the nearest Friday or Saturday night is anathema. Witches have more flight capability than the idea of moving Halloween. It just doesn’t happen.

My son, though, came up with a different approach: he asked me what would happen if there was a snow day on Halloween. Would that mean a full day of trick or treating?

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?” was my response.

I’ve always heard that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The converse is apparently not true. In 2011, we got a Halloween snowstorm. Not only did schools close on Halloween, they closed for the next two days as well. So much for the odds.

But Mother Nature’s little treat quickly revealed itself as a trick: due to downed trees and power lines, Halloween was postponed, and ended up being the evening of a school day after all. Halloween moved and no one objected: when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

A year later, we had Hurricane Sandy. Some towns kept Halloween on schedule, some moved it. The force of the story is very strong: Halloween is supposed to be on October 31st. Even though there was still storm damage, the cultural habits produced different results in neighboring town. The kids, of course, made out like bandits: they got to go trick-or-treating twice!

This is the problem most organizations face when it comes to implementing effective and lasting organizational change. So long as enough force is applied, the change will happen. As soon as the force is removed, people revert to their old behaviors. They might not even wait for the force to stop. Sometimes a crisis can force permanent change, as happened at IBM when Lou Gerstner took over. A crisis can also force the sort of permanent change that happened at DEC: they were acquired by Compaq. Waiting for a crisis to force a change to occur is a very risky way to approach organizational change.

In chapter one, we discussed the process of unfreezing a culture in order to make change possible. What we are going to look at now is how change affects the narrative of the organization and how to frame the changes in the context of the existing narrative. Not only does change reactivate all the issues we’ve already discussed, it introduces a whole new set of cocnerns that need to be addressed if you want people to become active agents of change instead of opponents of it. While these new questions can manifest in a variety of ways, the seven canonical versions are:

• What will this do to the organization?
• How will my place in the organization change?
• How will this affect my job?
• Will I still enjoy working here?
• Will this hurt our product quality?
• Will I still measure up?
• Would I be able to get a job in this new organization?

Let’s look at each of these questions individually.

What will this do to the organization?

In other words, “I have an image of the organization, based on the vision and the stories and my experiences here. What is going to happen to that organization? Will I still be proud to work for the new organization?”

Fundamentally, people base their perceptions of the organization on their experiences. The organization is as they have found it to be. The longer they’ve been there, the more deeply immersed they are in the culture of the organization. It’s become something solid, something predictable. Now that is all changing! Like living in California during the Loma Prieta earthquake, it’s very disconcerting to have the solid ground under your feet suddenly not feel quite so solid. For several weeks after the quake, whenever the cat jumped on the bed, I would awaken bolt upright. Don’t make change in your organization feel like that!

In constructing the story for why change needs to occur, we have to connect the existing values of the organization to the new values. It’s a sequel, not a completely new story. People need to be able to see that at the end the values of the organization and the underlying culture they are part of will still be there. They may be different, but they’ll be there. By connecting the dots, by telling the story of how the current values and vision are transforming into the new values and vision, people can feel comfortable with the change, rather than worried or anxious. Anxious people resist; comfortable people join in the process. Resistance is a sign that you’re going too fast.

If there are organizational values or processes that are going to disappear, again, connect that to the story. You’ll recall that in chapter one, we discussed the process for getting employees to convince themselves that change in necessary. In inviting people to talk about why the current situation isn’t working, include those things that are changing: “How is this process getting in the way?” “What are two or three better ways of getting this done?” Your goal is to have people telling you why the values or processes need to change or disappear, rather than you fighting to convince them.

In conducting serious organizational change, sometimes a few sacred cows need to become hamburger. The less sacred they are when that happens, the easier it is for everyone to swallow.

Microsoft Yawn

Microsoft president Steve Ballmer put out a long letter detailing changes taking place at Microsoft.

After wading through the announcement, I was reminded of some of the restructuring announcements that IBM used to send out back in the late 1980s: long, boring, and ultimately pointless. It’s impressive to see how much Microsoft has really taken on IBM’s mantle… although perhaps they’d have been better off if they’d done something new instead of picking up what IBM got rid of!

Unless he’s trying to produce a sleep aide, Ballmer’s memo leaves a great deal to be desired. Effective organizational change requires clearly defining the outcome, painting a bold, exciting, and engaging picture of the destination. In other words, it requires a vision. Without vision, we don’t know where we’re going.

Vision, however, requires far more than vague statements like, “Helping people achieve their full potential.” What does that mean? If the Microsoft Surface is any indication, it might well mean “buy an iPad!”

Microsoft’s original vision, “A PC on every desktop,” had power. It was bold, it was exciting, and it was measurable. Yes, measurable. They could see their vision coming true and see how their actions mattered.

Now, though, Microsoft is wandering around lost in the wilderness of defining full potential. Ballmer’s memo fails to excite, fails even to provide context or any real vision. Instead, it reads like the rearranging of the proverbial deck chairs, done more out of a belief that if enough things get changed something will happen; for example, the deck chairs will look better… Hardly the stuff of inspiration!

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.

CMG Director of Publications

Following Prince Charming

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a solution to that.”

I was sitting across a table from Joe. We had just finished dinner and he was trying to convince me to join his new company. I had some doubts about the feasibility of what he was proposing.

“I really know this area,” he continued. “And I’ve already worked out several possible solutions. It won’t bottleneck the project.”

You couldn’t fault his confidence. He was calm, focused, and intent. He spoke with a definite air of authority. He knew how to start companies and he knew he knew it. A lack of self-esteem was not one of his problems.

Over the next two years, some odd events took place.

Although we had regular code reviews, somehow Joe’s code was never looked at. It’s not that he refused or said, “I’m the CEO, no one looks at my code.” Rather, he confidently reminded us of his expertise, and was always very willing to help others, or at least have the code review time be focused on more junior engineers.

Joe finally decided that writing code was taking away from his ability to do other CEO-like things. When we eventually got a look at his code, it was rather like a software house of horrors. He did things to software that should never be done. We now knew why we were seeing those weird bugs and mysterious problems.

As we came closer and closer to our ship date, we realized that one of the earliest problems had never been solved. Joe was working on that. He was always so calm, so confident, he projected such authority, that we never doubted that he’d deliver.

He didn’t.

Why hadn’t we pushed sooner for a solution? In hindsight, it seems like the obvious thing to have done. Yet, it never happened. Joe didn’t share information, especially information that he thought was valuable to him. He simply didn’t share so smoothly and with such charm that no one ever noticed.

The company folded. Joe, however, did extremely well for himself.

Joe looked like a leader. He acted the way leaders are supposed to act: calm, confident, authoritative. He was not, however, a particularly good leader. But he was very good at keeping anyone from realizing that until it was much too late.

Lest you think that this is a phenomenon reserved to small tech startups, let us consider a certain giant pharmaceutical company. In 2001, Pfizer’s board appointed Hank McKinnell CEO. McKinnell was widely perceived to be strong, confident, and charming, if sometimes abrasive. Rather than the last being seen as a negative, it was seen as strength: He was someone who could get things done. McKinnell had no lack of self-esteem. Karen Katen, the other candidate for CEO, was seen as quiet, but effective. However, she lacked, at least in the board’s estimation, the necessary authority and toughness to get things done.

Five years later, McKinnell’s confident, strong, charming, occasionally abrasive, style of leadership led Pfizer into serious financial trouble. The board forced McKinnell into retirement. However, don’t be too quick to offer Hank a hanky. He did quite well for himself. He did so well for himself, in fact, that Pfizer was hit with several shareholder lawsuits over the size of McKinnell’s compensation package.

A New Jersey woman once learned that her next door neighbor had been arrested as a spy. She famously commented that, “She couldn’t be a spy. Just look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

The pretty colors of the hydrangeas are a superb way of distracting people if you’re a spy. The moral equivalent of those colors can be a great distraction when you’re not exactly the best leader around. If you can look enough like a leader, you can often win the rewards that go with leadership and dodge the consequences of failure. Sometimes, you can dodge the consequences all the way to the top. The company, however, doesn’t get to dodge the consequences of that poor leadership: just ask Pfizer. Following Prince Charming can be extremely expensive for the organization.

So how do you tell the difference between a real leader and Prince Charming? It’s not enough to just look at results. Joe and Hank had a history of results. It’s just that when it really counted, their companies suffered while they profited. So, you really have to ask yourself some important questions:

Are Prince Charming’s methods sustainable? What is the burnout or turnover rate in his team, division, or department? The higher they are, the more likely you’re dealing with Charming.

What happens to his team, department, or division after he’s promoted or moves somewhere else? Does productivity increase? If it does, you should be asking why it wasn’t higher when Charming was in charge.

How does information move through Charming’s department? Is there a great deal of open discussion, a sharing of information, perspectives, and knowledge? Does the leader seek out input and invite people to challenge his ideas? If so, you have a real leader. If not, Prince Charming is in charge and odds are he’s so full of himself that he’s not going to listen to anything he doesn’t want to hear. Quite simply, a good leader facilitates discussion by asking questions and periodically summarizing the discussion. Prince Charming is too full of himself to do that. He’s only interested in what he has to say.

When you follow a real leader, the entire company benefits. When you follow Prince Charming only one person lives happily ever after. What steps do you have in place to make sure you have the real leaders in your company?

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Force of Nature Change

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?”

This was my response to my kids telling me how wonderful it would be if school were to close on Halloween. Not only would they have more time to finish their costumes, but they were imagining the fun of an extended afternoon and evening of trick-or-treating.

While it may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, the converse is apparently not true. Here in the northeast, we got a Halloween snowstorm. Not only did schools close on Halloween, they closed for the next two days as well. So much for the odds.

But Mother Nature’s little treat quickly revealed itself as a trick: due to downed trees and power lines, Halloween was postponed, and ended up being the evening of a school day after all.

Now, the fact is, if someone had proposed moving Halloween in our town, the uproar would have been fast and furious. But when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

When you are Mother Nature, that approach works extremely well. Unfortunately, attempting to be a force of nature as a way of creating change tends to work somewhat less well. Mother Nature, it turns out, holds the exclusive rights on being a force of nature.

Which brings us to a company known as Mandragora. Mandragora had long been very successful in its markets, and was facing a number of new competitors. They were also finding it extremely difficult to compete against some of the newer, smaller, and more nimble companies they were facing.

Change was necessary! And change was instituted. Like a force of nature, Mandragora’s management team announced sweeping changes to how the company was organized and how it did business. There was the usual grumbling and complaining, which was, of course, ignored. Forces of nature do not listen to grumbling and complaining.

Indeed, the force of nature approach initially appeared to work. Changes did occur in how people worked and how they approached customers. But over the next few months, behavior drifted back to what it was before the change.

A new change was announced. It too had short-term success before people returned to their old ways of working. So it went, with each change initiative lasting for less and less time before returning to the status quo.

Mother Nature never gets tired and never runs out of resources. The same could not be said for the management team at Mandragora. Eventually, having exhausted all other options, they decided to ask for help.

Solving their problem wasn’t terribly difficult, but it did require respecting Mother Nature’s patent on the force of nature approach. Rather than simply announce a new change initiative, the first step was to enable the employees to convince themselves that the status quo wasn’t working and that a lasting change would be a good idea.

Once that was accomplished, the employees were further drawn into the change process by being asked for ideas and suggestions on what should change and how to make the changes work. Where the force of nature approach had yielded unenthusiastic compliance, employees were now taking the lead. As an unexpected benefit, employees also identified several change opportunities that management had missed. The management team incorporated that information into the evolving vision of how Mandragora would look after the changes were complete and fed it back to employees, increasing their enthusiasm and eliminating many of their concerns about the process.

Still, though, when it came time to begin implementing changes, there was a certain amount of reluctance. The solution was to provide opportunities for employees and managers to practice the new ways of working.

Naturally, the initial response to that step was, “It’ll take much too long!”

In fact, it took less than a fifth of the time that had already been spent in failed change attempts and a similar fraction of the cost. Providing practice opportunities meant that employees had time to become comfortable with the new paradigms and see how the changes would improve their lives. Practicing with management reinforced the message that “we’re all in this together.”

Throughout the process, employee concerns were addressed promptly and effectively. Mistakes were handled by identifying and fixing causes as opposed to fixing responsibility. Fixing responsibility, it turns out, does not fix problems. Fixing causes, however, does.

This time around, the changes stuck.

Now, if you happen to be Mother Nature, the force of nature approach can be a natural way of doing things. Mother Nature is also rather unconcerned about outcomes or how much havoc she inflicts along the way. For the rest of us, however, taking things slowly is a much faster way of accomplishing our goals.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Sir CEO and the Green Knight

As published in the CEO Refresher

One fine day, Arthur, the CEO rode forth upon his trusty steed. At his side hung his magic sword, Expostfacto. Expostfacto was widely considered to be a sword with a sharp legal mind. Arthur had made his fortune renting camels, which he parked every day in a large camel lot.

The sun was shining. The birds were singing. Suddenly, a dragon came roaring out of the sky, heading straight for Arthur. Flame billowed from the dragon’s mouth. Arthur drew his sword and with one swift blow, buried the dragon in a shower of subpoenas.

So it went, as Arthur spent many days enjoying the freedom of facing foes instead of sitting in stultifying board meetings, where, regretfully, it was seen as déclassé to employ the full might of Expostfacto upon annoying board members or customers. Against the power of Expostfacto, each foe swiftly fell under a massive pile of paperwork.

So it went until the day that Arthur encountered Maldive, the Green Knight.

“None shall pass!” quoth Maldive.

Many blows were exchanged, with Expostfacto screaming its legendary battle cry, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,” a phrase which has become familiar to all internet users. Eventually, though, with a mighty blow, Arthur struck Maldive’s head from his shoulders. That should have ended the fight right then and there, but Maldive was an internet marketing scheme. He simply put his head back on and continued the fight. Eventually, Maldive knocked Expostfacto to one side, and placed the point of his sword at Arthur’s throat.

“I could slay you now,” said he. “But on your honor, I will spare you if you can answer this question: What does every engineer desire? Swear on Expostfacto that you will return in a month. If you have the answer, you will live. If not, you die.”

Ignoring Expostfacto’s muttered comments on possible loopholes and the inadvisability of signing anything, Arthur took the oath to return in a month with the answer or without it.

Arthur rode across the land searching for an answer to the question. He called together all his senior managers and asked them, to no avail. He even posted the question on Twitter and Facebook, leading to some very interesting answers and suggestions, particularly from certain ex-politicians in New York and California. However, since Maldive had asked about engineers, Arthur knew those answers couldn’t be true because an engineer wouldn’t know what to do with one even if he found someone willing to go on a date.

By day 29, things were looking quite bleak for Arthur. As he rode through the frozen lands of Nadir, he encountered a strange looking man. The strange thing was that the man did not appear to be in a rush. As a CEO, Arthur was quite used to people rushing around following his orders. He could always tell when things were getting done by how much people were rushing.

“Who are you?” asked Arthur, puzzled at the sight of someone so calm and relaxed.

“Merlin,” was the reply.

“Merlin the Magician?” asked Arthur.

“No, Merlin the consultant. What seems to be a problem?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said Arthur who, like most CEOs, became very cautious at the sight of a consultant.

“Good,” said Merlin, who turned back to whatever he was doing, completely ignoring Arthur. This was a very unusual experience for Arthur, who was not used to being ignored by anyone.

After several minutes, Arthur said, “Well, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

There was no response.

“I’m going now,” said Arthur.

There was no response.

Arthur started to ride away. There was still no response from Merlin, who seemed quite happy to let Arthur leave. Arthur had not ridden very far before he stopped and turned back.

“Do you know what every engineer wants?” asked Arthur.

“Why do you ask?” replied Merlin.

Before long, Arthur was telling Merlin exactly why he wanted to know and what would happen if he didn’t find out. I wasn’t long before a price was agreed upon and Arthur had his answer.

“That’s it?” exclaimed Arthur. Reflecting on it further, he said to himself thoughtfully, “But that’s what everyone wants!”

The next day Arthur showed up at the appointed time for his meeting with Maldive.

“Well?” said Maldive.

“Is it money?” said Arthur.

“No.”

“Is it a fast car?”

“No.”

“Sex?”

“We’re talking about engineers,” responded Maldive. “If that’s the best you can do, then prepare to die.”

“Wait,” said Arthur. “What engineers want is the freedom to make their own decisions.”

There was a long silence.

“I see you encountered Merlin,” growled Maldive. “Very well. But I doubt you will learn from this experience!”

And so Maldive turned and rode away.

Arthur, meanwhile, departed for home in a very thoughtful mood. What, indeed, did it really mean that people want to make their own decisions? Obviously, if he allowed all his employees to make their own decisions, surely chaos would result. No one would know what anyone else was doing! There would be no coordination between departments.

The moment Arthur returned to his office, he discovered the true meaning of chaos. Thousands of emails needing his attention; projects stalled because he hadn’t been around to tell people what to do; irate customers complaining about badly maintained camels (even camel renters have some expectations!); employees angry and frustrated because they couldn’t get anything done in his absence.

“I knew I should never have taken a vacation,” Arthur thought ruefully to himself. “This happens every time! It’s even worse than when I’m in a meeting or on a call.”

As Arthur dove into sorting out the confusion that came about from his taking his guiding hands off the corporate reins, he kept wondering how much worse it could really be if he allowed his employees to make their own decisions. Would it really be worse than what he dealt with every day? Arthur decided to experiment: instead of solving the problems in one department, he gave them limited decision making power. They could approve all expenditures, including customer returns or gifts, up to a fixed amount. After a couple of false starts as everyone got used to the new arrangements, Arthur found that that department was suddenly taking up much less of his time and energy. Moreover, the increased productivity of his employees more than made up for the occasional decisions that Arthur might have made differently. Indeed, simply by building some structure, Arthur found he could permit much more freedom and limit the downside of the occasional mistake, and create almost unlimited upside. At the same time, he also found that he could now focus much more on the strategic direction of his company instead of spending all his time putting out fires.

Best of all, as Arthur spread these changes throughout his company, he found that work didn’t come to a halt whenever he wasn’t available. Productivity increased because employees no longer needed to look busy in order to appear to have a purpose; instead, they could actually engage in purposeful activity. Sure, there were still moments of frustration, but on the whole, employees were happier and more motivated than he had ever seen them. Motion does not equal progress, Arthur realized. Progress equals progress.

In the end, the ability to give people the freedom to work as they would like to work comes from building the structure to enable them to know what to do. Without structure, there may a lot of motion, but very little progress. What will you do to change that?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Goof Gas Change

As published in The Business Enterprise

“We’re going to make this company great!”

As the villainous Boris Badenov spreads his goof gas, America’s most brilliant scientists are transformed into idiots. Even the smartest investigators are not immune. In desperation, the country turns to the one person, well, animal, who can save them: Bullwinkle J. Moose. Bullwinkle, it turns out, is immune to goof gas because he is, quite simply, simple. Bullwinkle cannot be affected by Boris’s goof gun because Bullwinkle has no intelligence to start with.

Moving from the world of cartoon satire to reality, we come to sunny California, and Clovis, the CEO of Clovis Systems. One fine day, Clovis announced a major restructuring.

“We are good,” he said, “but as a company, we need to be great.”

His particular choice of words was inspired by the title of the book that had inspired him to action: Jim Collin’s “Good to Great.”

The only problem with “Good to Great” is that you have to recognize the implicit assumption: that you’re starting from “good.” If you’re starting from “pathetic,” well, it doesn’t work quite so well. In fact, Clovis Systems was immune to “Good to Great,” for reasons eerily similar to why Bullwinkle Moose is immune to goof gas.

To make matters worse, Clovis’s approach to the whole concept of moving to greatness was lacking. “Great” is an impressive sounding word, but what does it mean? The answer depends on the person and the organization. By never defining what he meant, by never painting a picture of what “great” would mean, Clovis doomed his efforts from the start. But even if he had conveyed a clear destination, that wouldn’t have been enough.

Clovis made his announcement and then he didn’t follow through. If you want people to change, you need to do more than just tell them about the change.

To begin with, Clovis needed to help his employees recognize that some major changes were even necessary. From their perspective, things were pretty good. Having Clovis announce a major restructuring out of the blue looked to them like goof gas. All Clovis managed to do with his announcement was generate confusion, and confused people don’t move forward: they dig in their heels and try to stop moving until they can figure out what is going on. Therefore, Clovis should have started by talking with his employees about the disadvantages of the status quo. What were they unhappy about? What would they like to see done better? What was getting in the way of their doing their jobs?

Only by getting his employees thinking about what was wrong would they become open to the idea of change.

Once people start to think about change as desirable, the next step is to get them to think about it as possible and is something that they are capable of bringing about.

Trying to persuade them rarely works. The more you push, the more they resist. Instead, it’s time for a new set of questions. What would help you make the change? How have you made successful changes in the past? What resources do you have to help you make the change? What resources do you need? What strengths do you have that will make this work? What strengths does the company have?

Notice that every one of these questions focuses on the positive: on why the change is possible. If you focus on the negative, then all you’ll get is a litany of objections. While it’s important to identify and overcome obstacles, first you need to convince people that they are capable of overcoming those obstacles! Focus on success, not on failure.

Once Clovis had his team thinking of change as desirable and as something they could do, then it’s time to get concrete. If you wait too long, you’ll lose momentum, so it’s important to take advantage of the enthusiasm while it lasts. How will we make these changes? What do we need to do? How will we get started? How will we know we’ve started? How will we know we’re making progress?

Sometimes, if it’s hard to figure out how to start, it can help to forget about the how and focus purely on what you want to have happen. Get people talking and brainstorming and see how many different ideas you can generate. Do it right, and you’ll be amazed how many different approaches you’ll have.

Periodically, pause and summarize the progress you’re making. Echo it back to your employees. Let them see the small successes from the start. Each success builds momentum and keeps people believing that they can succeed. Recognize that people will make mistakes and that’s not a problem. Make it easy to recover and move on; you want employees to admit mistakes and correct them, not hide them out of fear of punishment.

Finally, keep everyone in the company moving forward together. When people move as a group, they support and encourage each other. When you leave people behind, the others stop to help their friends, or they insist on going back to get them. Either way, you lose forward momentum. If you already have strong teams, take advantage of their strength. If you don’t have strong teams, think of this as an opportunity to build team work. In either case, provide coaches, opportunities to practice the changes, room for experimentation, and vivid images of what the results will look like. Done right, not only will the mediocre teams become strong, but the strong teams will become excellent.

Clovis claimed he was serious about making his company great. However, he never did the work or committed the resources to make the change happen. In the end, he was breathing goof gas.

The Accidental Leader

As published in Corp! Magazine

Does this sound painfully familiar?

The team leader left the company or was transferred elsewhere. No one knows anything about the new person coming in. Everything is up in the air. It’s almost impossible to get any work done because everyone is too busy wondering what’s going to happen next. Is the team going to be kept together? Will the project be cancelled?

Or how about this situation:

You were just assigned to take over a strong team. The former leader, well-respected by the team, is leaving. When you get there, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm. Everyone smiles and nods, but the suspicion is palpable. No sooner do the first words leave your mouth when you have a sinking feeling that whatever it was you said, it was exactly the wrong thing.

Although it may seem that the difference is which side of story you happen to be on, in reality, the situations aren’t really any different at all. In both cases a once functional team is tossed into a state of chaotic uncertainty. From feeling comfortable and secure, suddenly everyone is wondering if there’s another shoe about to drop.

Oddly enough, when the new leader comes in, the situation often gets worse. Rather than allaying people’s fears, too often those fears are increased. It’s not that the new leader is trying to scare people; it’s just that whatever she says, it just doesn’t seem to come out quite right.

At one company, the new executive director was welcomed with great fanfare. Thus, she was totally unprepared when her modest proposals to improve how the company delivered products ignited a firestorm of protest and resistance. This was a very painful situation, although I was able to help them work things out in the end. Still, though, perhaps we might want to look at a more upbeat scenario.

At another company, the new president decided to try something different. When he took over, he didn’t tell people how things would be; rather, he asked them how things should be. Rather than set deadlines, he asked employees what deadline the previous, successful president would have set for their projects. Rather than set new rules, or even focus on existing rules, he asked people what sort of structure would most help them. Rather than try to Impose His Mark on the organization, he took the time to understand what mark was already there. Rather than fight the natural resistance people have to change, he invited the rest of the company into the change process. The transition ended up going remarkably well. What was even more interesting was that along the way he took a fair bit of heat from his board that he was not “acting like a leader.”

He ended up being one of the best leaders the company ever had. Despite initial beliefs to the contrary, it was no accident. By now, you might even recognize the company.

Most leaders respond to a chaotic situation by trying to impose order. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, at least in theory. Chaotic situations are unpleasant and without some sort of structure, nothing is going to get done. Despite this, when order is imposed too rapidly, suddenly everyone is fighting for chaos.

The secret to taking over a new team, indeed, to dealing with any team or company in a chaotic situation, is to move slowly. Speed comes from being in the right place at the right time, not from rushing to get things done. When you take the time to find the most serious pain points, the places where people are most scared or most upset, and you resolve those situations, you build the trust you need to succeed.

How do you find those points? Ask the team. Involve them in the process. Don’t impose order; rather, create order.

Are people concerned about deadlines and how changes in product schedules might impact them? Invite them to help set the deadlines. Is product quality an issue? At one training company, the fear was that the changes would compromise the quality of the training being offered, which would, in turn, drive away clients. The solution was to stop fighting about it and instead identify the metrics currently being used to determine quality: both the official ones and the ones that staff members used privately. Once those metrics were brought to everyone’s attention, then the new CEO could help the staff members see how the new training would actually surpass the old training. Sounds simple, but the experience was anything but!

You impose order when you walk into the situation and tell everyone what to do. You create order when you find points of maximum leverage and invite people to suggest the order they want you to provide. The second may be slower, but, paradoxically, it gets you to where you want to go a lot sooner. How will you create order in your organization?