I was talking once to a railway worker who described his life in one of the UK’s railway franchises:  Every so often a new franchise owner would bring in a new set of excited managers to play with the railway set, but the railway set itself never fundamentally changed.  This guy had been doing the same job for forty years since the days of British Rail, and the rotation of management every few years was just a part of life.

A second example:  I was talking to a leader in an engineering company who was complaining that his staff wore overalls with the branding of legacy companies.  This organisation had been through a restructure or a merger more or less every year for about six years, so there were a lot of overalls to choose from!  The leader took the lack of consistent overall-wearing as a sign of divided loyalties, but when we asked them it turned out that the staff really didn’t care about the branding at all – they just found the latest overalls too thin and uncomfortable.

What these two examples highlight is the profound difference in perspective that exists when a new management team takes over an organisation, either due to restructuring or M&A activity.  As far as the leaders are concerned, it’s an exciting new beginning, with new branding and new strategy and new direction.  For the staff it’s often just the latest turn in the management merry-go-round.

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I use my iphone, facebook, email and text all day most days, so I can’t say Im a luddite. I sometimes wonder how could I live without it. When one is so embedded in something it is often no longer possible to objectiviely critique it anymore.

In conversations about the merits of social media, I am curious about what it might rob us of, and try to articulate my unease with it. this often meets with cries of “unbeliever”!

I can’t help thinking that it’s some kind of faustian bargain: it giveth, and it taketh away. Is it costing us more than it’s giving us? And, without the ability to be objective about it, will we ever know?

What do you think?

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Situation grim after outbreak of hostilities STOP
Heated exchanges STOP
Must restore communication lines before combat zone spreads! STOP

- Paul

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What needs to happen in our public and private sectors so that our senior managers can be the great leaders they aspire to be?

- Caitlin Walker
http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/

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I heard this at a recent conference on the public services, and it really resonated with a lot of people in the audience when I drew it up on a wall. Does this resonate with your experience? what is it like for you?

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For some companies, Social Media doesn’t feel very much like the game-changing innovation that the gurus would have us all believe. Instead it’s a dangerous world where control of our brand message has been wrested from us and our reputation is in the hands of a digital crowd whose behaviours we don’t understand.

And what do we do when something goes wrong? Do we engage our customers in a dialogue or do we pull back into our corporate fortress and hope it all goes away?

- Sam

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“Volume=value” is hard-coded into our DNA, because at an animal level volume=survival.  Somewhere deep inside us all is a squirrel for whom a bigger nut hoard is a few days’ less hunger.  You can feel this instinct every time you “Buy one get one free” when you don’t need one let alone two.

I think this might go some way to explaining why change progammes generate so much paper.  I was working on a project recently and was struck by just how much content had been copy/pasted from other sources, often the same ones.  Some sections in draft documents were empty, with directions saying “Copy from xxx and adapt”.  As far as I could tell, the completed documents were never read.

I don’t know that there is an answer to this, but awareness that the paradox exists seems like a good first step.

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A theme we often hear in engagement sessions  with employees is that middle management are more concerned with productivity than quality.  The situation is invariably stated as an either/or – “they” care about productivity, “we” care about quality.  Digging deeper there is invariably misinformation on both sides, but what interests me most in this sketch is how obsession with numbers can drive people away from face-to-face contact, which can only make the situation worse.

whats your experience?

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This picture was inspired by a talk I attended a few months ago by Robert Marshak, an American OD researcher specialising in covert processes in organisations. [click on the image to see a bigger version]

Due to the difficulties of discussing unspoken stuff it often stays under the table. This can severely impact the bottom line, as well as a team’s ability of operate effectively.

Have you had any recent experience of an ‘unspoken’ that got in the way of change?

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‘Unity’, ‘integration’, ‘one single truth’ – these are common themes in the target operating models we’ve recently been helping our clients develop. One motivation for doing this is often the desire to get people working together better, breaking down the ubiquitous “silo mentality”.

There are major challenges to implementing such an operating model, particularly, as is often the case, when the workforce is physically disconnected and remote. When the leadership messages are all about breaking down barriers and working as a single team, if the leaders are not seen to be standing as one themselves then the initiative is likely to fail.

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In a situation of apparent gridlock where everyone is waiting for someone else to change or move first, “When they change the way they do that, I’ll be able to change the way I do this” is a familiar story.

But what are the ‘payoffs’ for thinking this way? What are the limitations? And what would it take to break out of that cycle and to enter the unknown in search of something better?

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The perception that senior managers are not demonstrating the behaviour they are advocating for their workforce is a common problem with engagement in organisational change processes. We always ask the sponsor of our projects “In what ways are you and your team embodying the changes you’d like to see across the organisation?”

By leading through example, leaders can test the efficacy of the behaviours and values they espouse and also share first hand the changes they had to go through to make them everyday work practice.

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In the midst of a change process, the ever-increasing burden of additional projects can get in the way of ‘business as usual’. The response tends to involve forging onwards, battling forth, moving faster and faster, but it is often a war of attrition. Just how far is it possible to carry on like that?

In a world where change is virtually continuous, it seems even more important for people to be allowed the time and space to step back and see if there is a different way.

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We all know that we are expected to look after our teams and take care of them, but do we put the same effort into taking care of our selves? If not why not?

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How can we keeping getting more for less? This metaphor reflects a common experience for many senior managers. All businesses seem to be going through this, and it can feel like an unresolvable paradox. How do you experience this challenge?

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“levers for change” is a common metaphor in organisations. It can often feel like quite a struggle to manage change in times of uncertainty, and we can often work very hard to leverage change. Yet can we really control the uncontrollable?

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No change comes with some kind of discomfort or reaction, as it can often feel like a threat to our status quo. People react in different ways, what kind of patterns of reaction have you seen recently?

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Those of you who provide professional services will know just how challenging – but also how necessary – it can be to take a dose of your own medicine sometimes.

Despite the economic downturn the Delta7 team has grown rapidly over the last three years as our reputation has spread and we’ve been able to help more and more global businesses to engage their people with tough but critical messages about change. In these difficult times, many of our clients are in the process of reshaping their businesses to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing and increasingly global market. For their employees, this stage of the growth process can be profoundly unsettling with a loss of familiar brands, faces, processes and even locations – regardless of the opportunities and new horizons that this change also brings.

Our recent growth presents us with challenges too, as we move past that small team dynamic. With it goes the office we’ve called home since the beginning and some of the informal ways of doing things that are the luxury of a very small business. In short, we – like our clients – are growing up.

Recently one of our clients expressed her surprise that we didn’t have our own ‘Big Picture’ that captured the vision and character of Delta7. It was a great and timely piece of feedback. But why didn’t we? Perhaps it’s because we’re only now that at a stage where a big picture makes sense for us. Maybe it’s because we’re so busy working on pictures and stories for our clients that we run out of time to look back at ourselves and where we’re going. In my view it’s a bit of both of and something else as well: fear. It can be scary putting your vision on the line and then waiting to find out what the rest of the business feels about it.

Steve and Julian, our directors, took a deep breath and created a Big Picture of their shared vision for our growing business. Last week, we got together as a complete team (minus only two on maternity leave) and spent a whole day doing exactly what we help our clients to do: making sense of where we’re going together.

The day was, of course, very visual with everyone picking up a pencil and contributing some visuals to the process. We had fun reviewing where we’d come from; looking at those things that were working for us as well as those that weren’t. And for the things that weren’t working so well, we asked each other the question “So what would work better?” with the result that we were all able to contribute positively to the Big Picture.

Just as it is for our clients, our Big Picture session was a chance to stand back from the day-to-day rush of client work and to spend some time looking at what really matters to us as individuals as well as a business. What we ended up with on the day won’t turn into a painting of a perfect world; our pictures aren’t meant for that. What we created together is a picture that captures the things that matter most to us that we can use to prompt further discussion as and when the need arises.

Making our picture was a milestone in our growth as a business and as a group of people. From this point onwards not only will we be able to show our clients a Big Picture of our own vision and talk about it confidently, but we’ll also feel congruent – in the knowledge that we’ve taken our own medicine and benefitted from it too.

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For a leader to fail to embody the values visible and productively is to fall at the very first hurdle when it comes to culture change. If you don’t do it then not only do you lose your ability to role-model what the values mean in day-to-day behaviour but, worse, you lose credibility from that point on. Without credibility, there’s no trust.

It’s not rocket-science but walking the talk requires first that the values mean something to you and second, that you have the courage, awareness and discipline to modify your default behaviour in accordance with them.

The reason why so many leaders don’t do this is the same reason that so many employees don’t want to do it either. It’s hard and it can be uncomfortable in practice.

Our experience shows that a commitment to walking the talk is a ‘win-win’ situation every time.

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