If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the fifth in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.
 
I think the most common coaching topic that comes up in my coaching practice is time management. It is a fairly broad topic, and comes up in a variety of ways that may not, on the face of it, seem as if they relate to time management. Consider the following examples:

• The team member who regularly works late because much of her work day is spent helping other people and taking care of their priorities – so her own deliverables are taken care of after hours. This person has a boundaries issue, but it becomes visible because of its impact on her working hours;
• The colleague who bounces around from unfinished task to unfinished task and has 10 windows open on his screen because he is distractible and has not developed the habit of task completion;
• The person who drops a high impact deliverable that she is working on to attend to a request from her boss’s boss – a request that makes absolutely no impact on her own KPIs, and which causes her to miss a critical deadline. This person lacks the assertiveness to clarify and manage the expectations of people in positions of power;
• The team member who spends all his time in meetings – some of which do not require his personal attendance – and then works late regularly and often misses important family and parental occasions resulting in immense guilt and a sense of loss around these key occasions. He has not clarified his key priorities, probably accepts meetings mindlessly and is also not using the resources available to him.

All of these issues can be dealt with using Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants approach to time management (see The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and First Things First). I am going to take you through my own version of this approach, the basis of which is the following:

1.  Consider what you have on your plate in terms of the following dimensions:
a.  Importance - there is only one thing that makes a task important: there is direct line of sight between the task and your goals. Not your boss’s goals, not your CEO’s goals, not your global head office’s goals. Your goals! And this includes your personal goals, like taking care of your health, being a good parent and a supportive spouse. This implies that you have tasks that are important (to you) and tasks that are not important (to you). Now before you get all anxious and stop reading, I am not about to suggest that you will not do those tasks. I am simply going to encourage you to think about them differently.
b.  Urgency – the more pressing the deadline for the task, the greater the urgency.

2.  Once you have decided where each task goes, you can decide how to tackle them.

The diagram below explains how to identify and deal with what is on your plate, and to allocate it to the correct quadrant.

​3. Quadrant of Deception

These are tasks that make no contribution to your goals, but they shout so loudly that you are deceived into treating them as important. It is your Quadrant 3 activities that erode the time that should be spent in Quadrant Two. It is important to defend yourself from them. These activities include:

• Many of your emails;
• Interruptions to address someone else’s concerns;
• Requests from people who outrank you (your boss’s boss or the global head office) – especially last minute requests or demands;
• Many of the meetings to which you are invited;
• Many of the reports that you compile.

There are 3 main tactics for dealing with activities in Quadrant 3:

• Delegate: are there meetings that you do not have to attend yourself? Can you ask a team member to deputise as part of their own development or because they are as capable as you of representing the team? “I won’t be attending that meeting myself. I am sending Douglas. He has the authority to engage on this subject and contribute to the decisions you will make.”

         Do you have to perform Quadrant 3 tasks yourself, or can you ask a colleague to take care of them – in which              case, say “I will be passing this on to Nqobile to do. You can follow up with her. Let me know if you have any                  problems.”

• Relegate: this means that you move these tasks to a later part of the day or you give them a lower standard of attention. For example, it is appropriate to look through your emails at the beginning of the day – not to clear them, but to establish if there is anything that must go into Quadrant 1. All the other emails can be relegated to later parts of the day. Perhaps you can attend to some emails every couple of hours – in between your more important work. And please switch off your email alerts! You don’t need them. There is no danger that you will not get to your emails – but if you have an alert popping up on your screen, and a vibration on your wrist and a ping from your cell phone, all you are doing is raising your blood pressure and exacerbating your ADD! Also please remember that the vast majority of your emails can be dealt with via a quick one-liner – most often it really is not necessary to write an email as a formal business letter!
• Negotiate: this is about managing other people’s expectations. When you receive a request (or demand) from a person who outranks you, it is completely appropriate to say “Sure I can do that for you. Can I get it to you by Friday?” You do not have to explain why. And when you get that 4.00pm email for the piece of work that is required back by 9.00am the next day, it is fine to say “Got your email. I can get that work to you, but it won’t be by 9.00am. It will be with you by the end of the day.” Again, no reason is required.

It is not mannerly or collegial to assume that someone has nothing better to do with their evening than sort out someone else’s bad planning. And if the person making the request really needs the work urgently, they can come back to you and politely ask you to pull a rabbit out of the hat. You will also have made the point that it should not be taken for granted that you can attend to last minute requests.

The same is true of interruptions. If you are busy with an Important task, it is fine to say to your colleague “I need to finish this (you don’t have to say what it is). Can we talk at 2.00?” And then be sure to be available when you said you would be.
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Remember that the standard required for activities that make no contribution to your goals is good enough. Do not over-engineer these tasks. They do not deserve or require a higher standard. Accurate is important, but perfect is not.

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the fourth in a series of monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News, in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team. 

Taking a coaching approach to managing and developing your team is a journey. As with any journey, we need to figure out where we intend going and how we think we might get there. You will notice that I have used the language of “intentions” rather than the language of “goals”. The reason for this is that the beginning of the coaching journey is about exploring possibility and not about creating certainty. Furthermore, developmental activities such as succession planning and career planning are also about opening up possibilities – for the organisation and for the individual – rather than about creating certainty and single-minded commitments.

It may be useful to think about the beginning of the coaching journey as a series of conversations. The first will be a conversation intended to get to know and understand your team members’ values and motivators.  The second conversation will be around understanding their hopes and dreams for their best life. The third conversation aims at coming up with a development plan with each team member. Let’s look at each conversation individually.

Conversation 1: Values and Motivators

I begin all my professional coaching programmes with an intake interview that has clients telling me their life story. I begin the process by asking them to tell me about their life from the earliest time they can remember (usually around 4 or 5 years old). I am listening for the following kinds of information:

• Key events, achievements, disappointments and people from whom they have learned important lessons. I will often stop them to ask “what did you learn from that” or “what did you learn from her”? This may tell you something about their fears (things they have learned to avoid or mistrust) and hopes (things they have learned to move towards because they are rewarding);
• Key decisions they have taken and their reasons for taking these decisions. Here I may say “Please tell me more about that decision. What made you make that choice?” This will often reveal values – and you can note these quite tentatively as something you might check later.

It is important to remember that some team members may initially be uncomfortable with revealing too much. That’s ok. The purpose of these conversations is to build trust and this happens over time. There is no need to press a team member who wants to move away from talking about childhood events. Move onto topics that they are more comfortable with. Even these will tell you something important about people’s hopes, fears, values and motivations.

If it makes you more comfortable to have a set of questions than to have the conversation meander, you can create a short agenda for yourself. This is a good habit to have early in your coaching, because it calms your own anxiety about “doing it right” or remembering everything. If you do this, hold your agenda lightly and be prepared to take little detours.

You might end this first conversation with a summary along the lines of:

• This is what I’ve heard …;
• It seems to me that the following is important to you …;
• It sounds as if you enjoy … and dislike …;
• What resonates with you? Where am I off the mark?
• Is there anything else you’d like me to know?

Expressing appreciation for your team member’s willingness to share is a good way to end this conversation.

Conversation 2: Hopes and Dreams

The purpose of this second conversation is to get a sense of what they hope to experience at the peak of their career, and what living their best life might look like. This is a far more useful conversation than the usual “tell me about your 5 year plan”, which generally elicits the answers that they think you want to hear.

There is an important caveat here. As managers and leaders, we are working with people who are free agents. We do not own them and we should not expect that they want to be with us forever. They are whole people who are on their own journey, part of which they are sharing with us. We should expect that one day they will move on and make choices that advance their own hopes and dreams. We need to be ok with this. While they are journeying with us, we want to create an environment where they can learn, grow and make a valuable contribution.

Ask questions like:

• What do you hope the peak of your career will look like?
• Tell me about 3 to 5 dreams you have for your life.

It is also useful to see how these hopes and dreams align to your team members’ values. Imagine that one of their dreams is to retire early, yet a clear personal value is contribution. It would be interesting to find out what is behind the dream.

You will then want to discuss the critical skills that your team members need to develop in order to get closer to their dreams. What skills do multiple dreams have in common? Team members can go away and do this privately and bring it with them to the third conversation.

Conversation 3: The Development Plan
The purpose of this third discussion is to reach agreement on the following:

• What are the skills that the team member needs to develop in order to move closer to the realisation of one or more of their dreams?
• What work opportunities or projects would help them to develop these skills? How could this person’s role or responsibilities be adapted in order to support them in learning these new skills?
• How else could they learn these skills? A mentor? A course? Some reading? A personal project outside of work?
• How will you coach and support them in the acquisition of these new skills? How often? When?

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the second in a monthly series of 12 articles first published in SA Coaching News, in which I will share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.
 
Learning is Everything: Learning Never Ends

Your role as a manager coach is to enable ongoing learning amongst your team members (both collectively and individually), and this necessitates ongoing learning on your part. We all learn differently, and we learn best when we seek learning in accordance with our own learning styles. Our team members learn best when we help them firstly to become aware of their preferred learning style, and secondly when we pitch our coaching conversations in accordance with these styles.

David Kolb introduced us to his learning styles in 1984, and he describes 4 distinct learning styles that are described here: https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html. It is not the purpose of this article to explain the 4 learning styles, but to discuss how you can use your understanding of your own and other people’s learning styles in a practical way.

Essentially, Kolb proposes that there are 4 learning styles:

1. Those who learn by feeling and watching (Diverging) – these are people who gather information and form ideas from different points of view; they are interested in people and like to gather ideas and information; they struggle to move into specific action because there are so many possibilities;
2. Those who learn by thinking and watching (Assimilating) – these are people who value ideas and concepts over people; they spend a lot of time understanding something and often put themselves under pressure to know everything before they will do anything;
3. Those who learn by thinking and doing (Converging) – these are problem solvers who use their learning to solve practical problems (often technical ones) and enjoy experimenting with new ideas; they may avoid tackling interpersonal or social issues ;
4. Those who learn by feeling and doing (Accommodating) – these are people who tend to take a practical and experiential approach to solving problems, and tend to be quite comfortable diving into action based on gut instinct and a willingness to experiment in pursuit of solutions; they will follow other people’s views or ideas rather than thinking things through for themselves, including thinking about possible consequences.​

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. In this monthly series of 12 articles, I will share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.

You Can’t Fix What you Can’t See

“Everything was going so well. I was coaching at every opportunity. My team seemed to be on board and enjoying this new way of working. Work was progressing well, and then the system broke and there was panic all around us. The board was on my boss’s back, my boss was on my back, month-end was looming, the team was like rabbits looking into headlights and I just lost it. I’m not proud of myself, but I went right back to being the manager I had always been.”

This has happened to every manager who every tried to develop a new way of leading. After all, your natural style (like your personality) is a product of both nature and nurture – on the one hand, your personality has a significant impact on your natural way of managing (nature), while your experiences of being managed will also have impacted on your style (nurture). In many ways, the easier influences to manage are those related to your experience – you can evaluate how you have been managed in the past and choose to adopt or reject various practices based on your values and what you have learned about what brings out the best in people. It is those practices and behaviours that you default to when you are at your worst that will trip you up.

There are multiple challenges with default behaviours that sit within your personality. Firstly, they are often unconscious, and you only realise you have done them after the fact – when you go “Oh crap, I did it again!” The second issue is that they tend to be defensive behaviours – that is, they are unconsciously intended to protect you in some way (and they may well have been very effective in the past). If they are intended to protect you, it implies that you are experiencing something that you regard as a threat – to your survival, reputation or status Thirdly, the nature of the threat you experience will vary according to your personality – and so will the resulting behaviour.

Personality, however, is not an excuse. As a leader, you do not have the liberty to dismiss your bad behaviour as “that’s just how I am”. You have a responsibility to constantly be working towards self-mastery, and self-mastery cannot come without growing your self-awareness, so how do you do this?

Personality Profiles and Emotional Intelligence Assessments

I love the enneagram – but that is only because I have used it for years and I speak it fluently (although my knowledge and understanding of it grows every day). And there are also other great personality profiles such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strength Deployment Inventory, DISC, INSIGHT, and many others. In addition, the Emotional and Social Competencies Index and other emotional intelligence indices will also give useful insight. All of these provide great insights into how you are likely to behave under pressure – but the more useful information is WHY. Why do you behave in that way? What is your fear – since all defensive behaviour is, by definition, fear-based. When you understand what you fear, and why you fear this, then you become better able to modify your responses in terms of thoughts, emotions and actions.

Great Place to Work® is a global authority on building, sustaining, and recognizing high-trust, high-performing workplace cultures. The organisation has created a Trust Model© built on 30 years of research and data collected through their Trust Index© Employee Survey, which is taken annually by millions of employees in hundreds of organisations worldwide. One such organisation is Daimler Financial Services.

In 2015, Mercedes Benz Financial Services South Africa (MBFSSA) scored in the bottom quartile of companies in its Daimler region (Africa, Asia, Pacific). When the survey was repeated in 2017, MBFSSA came 1st in the region! This is a huge cultural turnaround in a very short time. How did they do it?

I interviewed the current CEO of MBFSSA, Joerg Essig, and asked him how he did it. His story is especially encouraging in a country where changing organisational culture is a national imperative. We speak of the ANC, national government, State Owned Enterprises, and a host of organisations in the private sector that are feeling a groundswell of public pressure to change in favour of a more ethical and transparent culture.

An organisation’s culture does not need to be outright toxic in order for change to be desirable. When Essig arrived at MBFSSA, he came into a culture in which there was a lot of hierarchy. “At all levels people had belief in the hierarchy with the consequence that people didn’t speak up, raise their voice or deliver at 100%. We had so much unused capacity. People were delivering at maybe 70 or 80%. There were lots of issues regarding opportunities, race, fairness, credibility and respect.” This situation could probably have continued for years without much negative consequence. After all, it doesn’t sound too awful – and business results were fine. However, various audits revealed that there was insufficient quality and attention to detail.

Any new leader worth his salt will spend the early days, weeks and months of his tenure listening, gathering information and making observations before forming clear opinions and plans. Essig sought and listened to input from people all over the organisation. There were the “official voices” of his managers, and the “unofficial voices” of those in non-managerial positions. Something didn’t add up. There was lack congruence in the information.

Of course, this is completely normal – whenever there is a new leader, you can expect to find that people will craft the message they want that leader to hear according to their own agenda. You will find that there are people invested in preserving the status quo (especially at a senior level), and those who are invested in change – so who do you believe?

When Essig read the comments from the 2015 Great Place to Work® survey, he was able to put 2 and 2 together. It was clear that something fundamental needed to change and that he needed to unite his Exco team around the change. After all, MBFSSA had once upon a time been the benchmark in the wider international organisation.
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Not only did Essig want to see the business reclaim its former glory, but it was also essential to transform the company in order to take it into the digital future and deliver results. “We needed to leave a sustainable legacy. International assignees come for 3 – 5 years, but what they leave behind is not necessarily sustainable. How would we make this transition to a digital future, create something sustainable and not personality-based, in a declining market with this atmosphere? We really needed people to be willing to show up 100%. We were going to need them to dig deep, work awkward hours and be on their toes to move from a mediocre to a high performance culture,” says Essig.
This was not the first time Essig had needed to change an organisation’s culture. He speaks of the fact that his own leadership values are in line with the kind of workplace Daimler Financial Services (the global business) seeks to achieve. The common theme throughout has been the sense that the department or company was not performing at 100%, so the main driver in each case has been the need to deliver results while and through creating a positive culture.

I asked Essig what the key ingredients are in his approach to changing culture:

1.       Make it easy for your people to have lots of personal encounters with you. “Be as close to the people as possible and as time allows. Walk around. Speak to people. Show that you care, that you are interested in them as people and in their business.” This is classic MBWA (Management By Walking Around, as recommended by management guru Tom Peters). “I would ask people about how it was going, what are the challenges, etc. You can’t underestimate the impact that this has on the other leaders. They see what you are doing and start to do some of the same. It is interesting how so many people find this way of leading closer to people’s hearts than commanding. So people jumped on the bandwagon very quickly. Those who didn’t join in discovered they were in the minority and would either face consequences or would take themselves out of the organisation.”

2.       Get your leadership team aligned behind the change. This can be a real challenge to achieve and to sustain. “We had lots of discussions with members of the team who struggled to align; we had to be open and honest and trust them to deliver. We had to give them support and encouragement and a certain amount of choice in terms of aligning themselves with what we were trying to achieve.” In any culture change, those who are unable to get on board often take themselves out of the organisation voluntarily. If they don’t, they need to be helped to leave and move to an environment where they fit better.

3.       Make culture change a project. Essig ensured that a Great Place to Work® project team was put together of people from all parts of the organisation, charged with looking at how systems, processes and structures needed to change in order to align with the desired culture. Make sure that this team is empowered and has a budget. It needs to have real clout.

4.       Talk a lot about what is important. “We have shorter meetings now, but we have more of them. Our monthly Town Hall meeting is an opportunity to share information, celebrate successes, talk about target achievement, people on the move and people development, birthdays and anniversaries. Now I don’t do all the talking any more. I only have a minor part, and all sorts of other people from all levels stand in front of 150 people and lead and moderate the meeting. Project leaders talk about their projects. GPTW people talk about their project. At our 20th anniversary we had a Town Hall with senior international guests. It was entirely moderated and presented by non-managerial employees on a big stage to 200 or more people. I felt so proud of this.”

5.       Celebrate successes. Reward and recognise team members publicly when they do contribute. “You have to speak for your great people so that they get the recognition they deserve.”  Daimler Financial Services has regional and global awards. It has become a feature of the organisational culture that leaders and team members in MBFSSA make compelling submissions about their colleagues for these awards.

6.       Create a family feeling. Make a real effort to include every member of the organisation. Raise their expectations and give them the sense that every one of them can contribute. This was more important in South Africa that in other countries where Essig has worked: “This family feeling does not exist in this society. There is nothing else that brings all of us together.” It was important to create a family feeling in MBFSSA that transcends racial and social divisions. This belonging and family feeling causes loyalty and energy. Where this safety exists people will step out of their narrow job descriptions and get engaged. “Now we have a choir who we use in Town Hall and other celebrations. They run it themselves. You don’t have to do for them – just give support and a budget and they do for themselves. Give them the responsibility and they will fill in the space.”

7.       Be courageous and model the behaviour you are looking for. Essig was looking to create a culture in which transparency and openness are a feature. This meant that he had to demonstrate this openness. “We did some brave things in this context. We had no Q&A. We started a box where people could ask anonymous questions. We would open this publicly and answer questions openly. Some questions were personal and nasty, but we answered as well as we could in the moment. Colleagues found this brave and acknowledged this openness. The box is still there but is empty because people now ask their questions more openly and more appropriately. Now everyone knows how bonuses are calculated, and can see month to month how we are doing – and how they can contribute to target achievement.”

8.       Be consistent. What you start you must sustain. “There are some moments of truth where you have to really walk the talk – it is difficult to recover when you have been seen to not uphold your talk.”

9.       Learn. Understand that you will make some mistakes. “There are always some things that one might do differently with hindsight – people who might be given second or third chances; situations one should have handled quicker or more decisively.” These are learning opportunities for both the leader and the team.

“Changing culture is a lot about ego – you need to be credible, and you are credible if you are authentic. Some people will need to get their ego under control because it can get in their way in terms of connecting with people. You also need to have people around you who will give you honest feedback.” You can’t allow your ego to get in the way with this.

The point of this story is that it is possible to change an organisation’s culture in a relatively short time. What is crucial is that this change be led by a person who is absolutely clear on what a more positive culture looks like, brings a key team of aligned change leaders along for the journey, uses organisational conversations as an opportunity to regularly and consistently keep culture and culture change top of mind at every level in the organisation, and makes sure that desirable behaviour is recognised and rewarded and that people are skilled to act in alignment with the desired culture. This is true regardless of the size of the organisation.
 
Sources and recommended reading:

Great Place to Work®: https://www.greatplacetowork.com/
Harvard Business Review January – February 2018: this issue has several articles on Culture and Culture Change

Everything we do or don’t do leads us towards or away from our vision. Behaviour is not neutral – particularly not behaviour that represents how we do things around here. All endemic behaviours that are observable in organisations speak to the prevailing culture in that grouping.

In South Africa (and we are not special – this is happening around the world), we are confronted with daily headlines that repeatedly remind us that all is not as it should be. We read of the likes of Bell Pottinger and KPMG – stories that describe a company culture that supports and encourages behaviour that speaks to a lack of integrity; our own government appears to be rotten to the core, where corruption and capture are simply how things are done around here; companies that sanction dishonesty in pursuit of market dominance and billings. One can be forgiven for believing that the rot has gone too far and that the patient is doomed to die of gangrene.

Changing the culture of an organisation is difficult, but it is not impossible. If you have been handed what appears to be a poisoned chalice – think of Cyril Ramaphosa, who appears to be sincere in his wishes to clean up the ANC, and Nhlamu Dlomu who has been afforded her own special opportunity to fly KPMG, South Africa – you will need to think very carefully about what it will take to bring about the change that is required to restore trust in your brand and create a positive culture.

This is not the preserve of the seriously tainted organisation either. Successful organisations with strong brands can also succeed despite the prevalent negative leadership culture. Think of those companies you have dealt with or heard of that are leaders in their markets, but scratch beneath the surface and you may find a culture in terms of which “the way we do things around here” is experienced negatively by those inside the organisation. Perhaps executives get away with being bullies, going after colleagues who they perceive as opponents (or on the other team) even to the extent of sabotaging them and their careers; and companies where the only managers who get ahead are those who kick butt and take names – even if there are more positive leaders who achieve real results without ruining lives. What about those companies where the Financial Director is expected to “massage” the results in order to tell the board what they want to hear? You can be sure that this extends to all other parts of the organisation where people at every level have learned to be creative in their reporting in order to ensure that the higher ups only hear what they want to hear – for to hear the truth would incur intolerable wrath and end careers.

I believe that these examples of negative company culture can be found in most companies – even if only in pockets – and the price will be paid, whether it is in the form of some scandal, broken employees, low morale or declining results.
So what is to be done? In this series of articles, I will discuss what can be done to turn a negative culture around and create a way of doing things around here that is constructive, healthy and worthy of pride, while delivering results. Let’s be clear, culture is driven from the top – be it the leader of an entire business or the leader of a junior team. The leader creates and drives culture. The leader shows the rest what behaviour is desired and what will be rewarded. You cannot change culture from the middle – it has to start at the top.

To start with, it is important to take stock:

1. What is your personal value system? How do you believe people should be treated – colleagues as well as customers? What are your beliefs about how people should go about achieving results? What do you believe it takes to get people to perform – do you have to be tough on people or do you need to be tough on task while being supportive of people?
2. What have you noticed and why does it trouble you? What are the behaviours you have noticed? What language is used? What do you think it is causing or supporting that behaviour?
3. What would you prefer to see? What currently mitigates against this? How are people rewarded and punished, and how does this mitigate against more desirable behaviours? Is your own behaviour consistently congruent with the culture you would like to create? If it isn’t, you need to start with yourself! 
4. Who do you have around you? Whose behaviour exemplifies a more desirable culture? Whose behaviour emulates the undesirable culture that you see? Of these people, who do you think might be behaving in this way in order to survive, rather than because this behaviour squares with their own beliefs and values? Who might you enrol as collaborators with you? Who else? And who else? Who are the opinion-leaders around here? How might you enrol some of them? How will you enrol them? This enables you to create a team that will drive the change you seek to achieve.

Changing culture is not so different from any other change in an organisation. This model from John Kotter and Dan Cohen’s Book, The Heart of Change – Real Life Stories of How People Change their Organisations, illustrates a typical successful change process:​

We are ending the "Leaders are Dealers" series on one of the most critical topics: the effective use and allocation of resources within an organization.  If you would like to catch up on previous articles, please follow this link.

This is a critical leadership role – choosing where to allocate resources and where not to. It must be guided by your strategy – which contains all your key choices (read “Playing to Win” by A.G. Lafley):

• What are you trying to achieve in the business – your winning aspiration?
• Where do you play?
• How do you win?
• What are your core capabilities?
• What management systems are required?

These choices will determine where you will allocate resources – people, money, time and attention – and where not. Choices must be made and you need to have a reference point for making these choices.

Every day leaders must make decisions about how to fund or resource competing and dissimilar initiatives. For most managers, allocating resources is fairly easy. After all, they have a fairly narrow set of objectives to achieve, and they choose based on what will deliver the best financial results. However for a CEO or business owner it can be far more difficult as s/he juggles more complicated financial goals. Does one go for revenue or profitability? One tactic is to ask those requesting such resources what they would take out of their budgets in order to fund the initiative in the event that additional funding were not available. The response is telling – especially if they decide they wouldn’t take anything out because this new initiative is a lower priority than what is in the budget.

Allocating people can be even more difficult. Business success depends on being able to attract and retain the right talent – as well as utilising this talent in the best possible way. This allocation of people needs to work for both the organisation and the individual. This can be tricky. If an employee’s interests lie in one direction, while the organisation needs that person focused elsewhere it can create tension that could result in the employee becoming disaffected. This is a tricky juggling act, and needs to be handled sensitively. Could you free this person up to work in their area of interest on a project basis rather than permanently - if moving them permanently creates additional problems for the business?

To what do you refer when you need to make decisions about allocating funding to initiatives that have not been included in the budget? What tactics help you make an intelligent choice? Do you have a talented employee filling an essential role – but this employee is desperate to do something different? How could you manage this in such a way that you act in the best interests.

Watch this space for the new series, starting in January 2016, and please feel free to contact me any time with queries, suggestions or comments.

Change is an inevitable and often wearisome aspect of organisational life. If you’re not implementing SAP, you’re restructuring. When you’re not restructuring, you’re initiating a new project that your team must work on in addition to their current projects. Or there is a new CEO, and she is doing things differently, and you are moving offices for the third time in four years. Change is not going to go away – it is inevitable, along with death and taxes. While there may be many problems that accompany change, it has been my observation that there are two main issues.

The first is that the change is initiated as a reaction. The economy has slowed down, or a particular initiative has not born the desired fruit, so a change is initiated – perhaps a change in direction or a change in focus. This, in itself, is not the problem. The problem is that these changes take place every few months and seem to be knee-jerk responses that come from fear, rather than being strategic responses to changing market conditions. When this happens several times in a year, or over several years it creates a sense amongst employees that you are lurching from one drama to the next – a bit like a rudderless ship in a storm. It is unsettling and creates uncertainty and insecurity for employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. It does not inspire confidence.

On the other hand, if the business has made and communicated some very clear choices about where it’s going, where it plays (and doesn’t play), how it seeks to win (and which games it will not play) and what it is superbly better at than anyone else, any changes in direction that might be made can be communicated in the context of these choices. These changes will inspire confidence in a way that knee-jerk changes in direction will not – because they can be arrived at and explained with reference to the current, clear strategy. When the North Star is always in sight, changes will be seen in the light of their ability to keep the organisation flying right.

The second problem is that the people side of change is given short shrift – until serious resistance has become apparent – and then there is a whole “change management” intervention. This should have been an integral part of the change in the first place. In any change, people will focus on what they expec to lose. The change may result in a loss of status; it may mean that, whereas you used to be an expert, you are now a novice. It could mean that you lose a certain amount of comfort and predictability, or daily interaction with work buddies. Whatever it is, there will be loss. However, there will also be gain.

The best way to enable people to focus on what they will gain is to involve them in the change process before it even happens. Involve them in discussions in which it becomes clear that not to change is untenable. Let them feel the discomfort of staying the same so intensely that they cannot wait for the change to happen. This is called “constructive discontent” – when the discontent with what is is so intense that we cannot wait for what is to come. This can be done in focus groups and brainstorming sessions – and will pave the way for a far more positive response to the change when it eventually happens.

Read more about change by John Kotter, one of the best known change management experts: http://www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/ .
Think about a change that you are going to have to roll out. Is its alignment with the company strategy clear? If not, how can you create clarity? Who can you talk to? Is it possible that you have knee-jerked out of fear and that you should actually go back to your strategy in order to more clearly think through how to respond to whatever gave rise to this change. How will you get people on board? How will you create constructive discontent so that your people cannot wait to make the change?

How has your leadership style and approach changed as a result of this series of articles?  Please send me feedback and let me know what you would like more of.  For previous articles in this series, follow this link.