change tagged posts

Why “Top down” transformation gets derailed December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence No comments

When it comes to change most leaders believe it is their responsibility to decide on a plan of action and then “sell” employees on the “rightness” of following their plan. Senior leaders huddle up, often with some outside “Expert”, and decide on a new direction. Once THEIR plans are complete they TELL the team and expect everyone to get on board. Seventy percent of the time this approach to change fails miserably...

2. Top down initiatives are viewed as personal attacks December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence One comment

Top down initiatives viewed as personal attacks

When confronted with a need for change either personally or professionally most people don’t differentiate “what they did” from “who they are”. Instead of focusing their creative resources to battle an outside enemy people view a “demand” for change as a judgment against them personally. Lasting transformation within complex social systems cannot and should not be dictated from the top down or outside in...

3. Transformers resist positional power December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership One comment

Successful change initiatives don’t require everyone, but they do need the situational leaders within the ranks. In describing the transformation to an “Employees First” culture of the 50,000 employee multinational IT Company HCLT, CEO Vineet Nayar believes his employees fell into three distinct categories, lost souls (Zom-Bees), fence sitters and transformers. To accomplish their transition he focused on the transformers.

These were not the happy “go along to get along” type but often t...

5. Success lies not in the validity of our answers, but the quality of our questions. December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Astonishing Service, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Deviance No comments

The best solutions are not told or sold, but encouraged and elicited. In the example cited in Transformers resist positional power the HCLT leadership team developed a Facebook style collaborative tool called U&I. Their intention was to share the goals and accomplishments of the organization with all employees. What they discovered was that the “Transformational” team members did not want to be told “what had happened” they wanted to be involved deciding “what would happen”...

6. Lasting change is not about revolution but evolution December 15, 2021 Emotional Intelligence One comment

Our good friend Bill Ferrence, who was manager of Boulder Dam Credit Union for more than 30 years once shared that had taken him twenty years to work through the two legal pads full of notes he had taken from a leadership training seminar conducted by the legendary coach John Wooden, winner of ten NCAA national championships in a twelve year period.

Bill innately understood what Harvard University and the Carnegie foundation later proved...