Blanchard LeaderChat

Leaders need to create fast, flexible, and nimble organizations to meet constantly changing market and customer demands. Otherwise they risk becoming obsolete, according to Dr. Patricia Zigarmi of The Ken Blanchard Companies. How can you tell if your company is in danger of losing its capacity to change? Zigarmi suggests that companies be on the lookout for some early warning signs.

• Resting on your laurels. You see companies ignoring the numbers on their balance sheet, or in their employee turnover or customer satisfaction numbers. These companies treat bad numbers as a blip on the screen rather than as a trend over time.
• Discounting customers’ expectations and competitors’ innovations. These companies stick their head in the sand and seem bent on protecting the way that they have always done things. They are more interested in defending their decisions and their approach than they are in exploring new ideas.
• Discouraging new players and new voices within the company. A tendency to find ways to say that “the next generation doesn’t really understand the situation” or that some people with strong opinions based on experience elsewhere “haven’t been here long enough to really have a voice at the table” is a sure way to stay stagnant.

Pat’s recommendation for keeping your organization change-ready? Increase involvement and influence. To find out more about Pat’s thinking on improving your organization’s capacity to change, check out her interview in this month’s edition of Ignite—our free monthly eNewsletter.

Eventually, it all boils down to one question.  What are you going to do differently?  For an organizational change plan to work, it has to be driven down to the individual level.  Until it does, it remains only a dream.

I was reminded about that as I was staring at a blank Personal Action Card at the end of a day-long planning meeting.  Three hundred employees had just finished a four-hour strategy session to identify ways to decrease costs and increase revenues and now we were individually being asked to commit to four things:

1. What can I do to save money?
2. What can I do to support company growth?
3. What can I do to help someone in another department or workgroup?
4. What can I do to help myself?  

I was surprised at how much trouble I was having at this critical moment in the process.  Earlier in the day I had been very active with ideas on what the organization could do to cut costs and increase revenues, but now that it had gotten to a personal level, I was struggling.

Have you driven your organizational change down to the individual level?  Are people ready to change?  Have they committed to a new course of action?  It’s not really going to happen until they do.

If you want your organization to move forward during tough times, everyone has to feel some ownership in the process and feel that they can make a difference. I was reminded of that fact when I saw an article about Ben Zander, the highly regarded conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.  Both Ben and the orchestra celebrated anniversaries last week.  Ben celebrating his 70th birthday and the Boston Philharmonic celebrating its 30th.

Ben had spoken at our company a couple of years ago at our annual Week of Excellence all-company meeting and encouraged all of us to replace “downward spiral thinking” with “possibility thinking” instead.  Ben also cautioned us not to fall into the trap of thinking that leadership is just for those people at the top of the organization.  For an organization to truly move forward together, everyone has to be involved and feel that they play a role.

To illustrate his point, Ben told the story of an accomplished cellist who joined the Boston Philharmonic but who was disappointed when she found herself ranked as the 11th cellist among the twelve seats available.  Still, she persevered and at Ben’s urging, she volunteered an idea of how to play a certain section of a symphony the Boston Philharmonic was scheduled to perform.

The piece was performed the following week to rave reviews.  After the performance, the cellist came up to Zander excitedly and asked, “You played the piece the way I suggested, didn’t you.”  Ben nodded in agreement and saw the woman’s whole attitude change. 

“From then on,” he continued, “this cellist who sat in the 11th seat played like a completely different person.”  Instead of just being technically correct, her playing took on an added dimension that she hadn’t displayed before.  When Ben asked her about this, she explained that ever since that night when she first saw the possibility that she could influence the orchestra from her modest position in the 11th chair, she felt like she had been leading the orchestra every night since then.

But can a person sitting in the 11th chair of your organization really make a difference?  You bet.

I found this out for myself when I talked with a co-worker who said Ben Zander touched her heart and reminded her that each one of us is important to the bigger goal.

“It creates a feeling in me of my worth in the workplace,” she said. “What I like about this idea is that it makes me feel like I might have an idea that would contribute and that I have value to the company,”

Even under the best of circumstances nearly 70 percent of all change initiatives fail. That’s a shocking rate considering all of the effort that companies put into the process—and how much is riding on a successful outcome—especially these days.

What’s the main reason for failure?

Leaders don’t involve or address the concerns of the people affected by the change.

I was thinking about all of the change that is on the drawing boards of companies—including ours—as we look for ways to stay profitable.  So I went back into my notes to an interview that I conducted with Dr. Patricia Zigarmi, our change expert here at the company.  What Pat shared with me was that if leaders would just focus on three concerns that all people have, they could greatly enhance the probability of change succeeding in their organizations. 

• The first area to address is around information concerns. People want to know what the proposed change is all about, what you are seeing, and why things have to change.
• The second area involves personal concerns. People want to know how the change will be good for them personally—not just good for the company.   They also want to know if they will be able to master the new skills the change requires.
• The third area is around the nitty-gritty implementation concerns such as system alignment, best practices, and the daily mechanics of making the change happen.

 If you’re interested in exploring this a little further, check out the free Change Readiness Quiz at our website.  Once you take the quiz, you can also download the Top 15 Reasons Why Change Efforts Fail