Change Leader

Learning to Do What Matters Most

Michael Fullan

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470582138
• eBook ISBN: 9781118106570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

We live in a challenging, complex, inter-connected and unpredictable world beset by a range of seemingly insoluble problems. But, says Michael Fullan—an internationally acclaimed authority on organizational change—we have an increasing understanding of how to tackle complex change. This involves developing a new kind of leader: one who recognizes what is needed to bring about deep and lasting changes in living systems at all levels. These leaders need a deep understanding of what motivates us as human beings and how we tap into and influence other people's self-motivation.

In his previous best-selling books The Six Secrets of Change, Leading in a Culture of Change, and Turnaround Leadership, Michael Fullan examined the concepts and processes of change. In Change Leader he turns his focus to the core practices of leadership that are so vital for leading in today's complex world. He reveals seven core practices for today's leaders, all of which appear to be deceptively simple but actually get to the essence of what differentiates a powerful leader from one who is merely competent:

• Practice Drives Theory
• Be Resolute
• Motivate the Masses
• Collaborate to Compete
• Learn Confidently
• Know Your Impact
• Sustain Simplexity

Throughout the book Fullan argues that powerful leaders have built bedrocks of credibility, have learned how to identify the few things that matter most, and know how to leverage their skills in ways that benefit their entire organization. The author shows leaders how to avoid policies and strategies that focus on shallow and short-term goals and develop leadership skills for long-term success.

With a wealth of illustrative examples from business, education, nonprofit, and government sectors Change Leader provides a much-needed leadership guide for today's turbulent climate.

Chapter One

Practice Drives Theory

Doing Is the Crucible of Change

To some, the notion that practice can be liberating while theory is confining may seem counterintuitive. Current practice does have a lot of built-in conservatism and inertia, but thinking and feeling practitioners are the only ones who can find ways to break through the inertia. To do so, they will need focus, coherence, and persistence—resources they will find far more readily in themselves (the feeling as well as the thinking parts) than in theory. Of course, research and theory can be useful, but only insofar as they help leaders move forward. Once you are free of the constraints of a new theory or past practice, you can explore multiple approaches, experiment, and above all learn from your experience. In this context, practice becomes a powerful tool for change.

Another fundamental reason that we need to ground our learning in practice is the growing research on how the brain works. Four findings stand out for our purposes. First, we are not always in control of our own thoughts because they come from the subconscious. Jacobs (2010) notes that “fMRI scans of our brains show that our perceptions are a function of our feelings, desires, and memories” (p. ix)—and at the risk of being redundant, these phenomena occur without our knowing that this is happening. Let's call these “unpredictable inner drives.” This means that learning about ourselves is a full-time job, and that we literally don't know ourselves unless we work at it. Chapter Five furnishes some ideas and self-learning exercises to help us learn and refine ourselves on an ongoing basis.

Second, if we are unpredictable and to a certain extent unaware of what motivates us, so is everyone else, by definition. Therefore as leaders we need to have what I call “impressive empathy,” and manage others by creating environments that help them learn and grow. “Impressive empathy” includes understanding others who disagree with us—that is what makes it impressive!

Third, while being selfishly driven, so to speak, humans are also wired to connect. So-called “mirror neurons” cause us to be drawn to others (Goleman, 2006). While biologically (brain) driven to begin with, we consciously value the group once our relationships are cultivated. Beyond this most of us want to do good in this life and make a contribution, if we get that far—that is, if our self- and group learning gets that far.

Fourth, and most shockingly encouraging, is that our brain can be reshaped. Through neuroplasticity, we can engage in repeated new actions and thoughts that actually forge and retain new neural pathways. Thus, the brain can change its own structure and function through activity. We can learn, for example, to become more empathetic through repeated practice to the point that our empathy automatically kicks in because it becomes brain-wired (Doidge, 2007).

All of this is exciting and a bit daunting, but keeping with our simplexity principle, the good news is that we can become better leaders, and can help others become better by following a few powerful principles and strategies that are set out in this book. The bottom line is that your best source of learning is day-to-day practice because it is only experience that can engage and reshape the brain.

Key Insight 1

The effective change leader actively participates as a learner in helping the organization improve.

I argue in this book that most good ideas come from first examining good practices of others, especially practices that are getting results in difficult circumstances. The second step is to try out the new ideas yourself. The third entails drawing conclusions from what you have learned, and then expanding on those conclusions. Deliberative doing is the core learning method for effective leaders.

You will discover in this book seven key interrelated ideas and competencies that are essential for leading change through practice and experience: cultivating deliberative practice, being resolute, motivating others through linking to their realities, fostering collaboration, learning confidently, knowing your impact, and sustaining your learning from practice.

The result is that you will become a better change leader, and better at helping others and your organization change and become more effective. Most change initiatives fail. In the course of this book I will show that (1) you can't make people change (force doesn't work); (2) rewards are ineffective (buying superficial short-lived change at best); and (3) inspiration is not the driver we think it is (fails to reach enough people).

What does work is looking inside yourself and your practice as a full-time endeavor—and at the same time learning to relate to other people's realities while fostering collective capacity and identity. This book will show you what is entailed in doing this.

Caveat Emptor

Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the book, let's spend a moment looking at research and theory as they are currently presented to would-be change leaders. Management books by and large would have us start with expert advice—which, as it turns out, is abstract and inconsistent.

A good place to begin is Matthew Stewart's The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong (2009). Stewart was finishing his doctoral dissertation on nineteenth-century German philosophy when he decided he needed a job. By his account, he went on a self-directed crash course of reading business books and the Financial Times, landed a job in an international management consulting firm, and began a rapid rise to high-priced consultant.

We can assume that Stewart's autobiographical sketch is a bit tongue-in-cheek and perhaps hyperbolic, but it rings more true to life than the grand theories. Many consultancy situations, he says, feature the same plot and characters: “the hapless client, the fiercely intelligent consultant, the unexpected insight, and the mutually profitable ending” (p. 17). The gist one gets from reading Stewart's account is that successful management consultants are people who make common sense complicated and then sell it well.

Stewart, of course, is not the first writer to attack the flimsy wisdom of management gurus. In The Witch Doctors, two staff editors from the Economist, Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1996), observed that “management theory” suffers from four defects:

It is constitutionally incapable of self-criticism; its terminology usually confuses rather than educates; it rarely rises above common sense; and it is faddish and bedeviled by contradictions. (p. 13)

If anything, the situation has worsened in the past fifteen years. In 2004, Henry Mintzberg wrote a penetrating critique of MBAs in which he characterized the whole field as specializing in the “wrong people” engaged in promoting the “wrong ways” with the resulting “wrong consequences”—educationally, practically, organizationally, and societally (p. vii).

Mintzberg concludes that MBA graduates should have a skull and crossbones stamped firmly on their foreheads, over the words “Warning: NOT prepared to manage!” (p. 67), and characterizes what he calls “the impression left by MBA education” thusly:

1. Managers are important people who sit above others, disconnected from the work of making products and selling services.

2. Managing is decision making based on systematic analysis.

3. The data for such decision making comes from briefs, cases.

4. Under these managers sit their organizations, neatly separated … into the functions of finance, marketing, accounting, and so forth.

5. To bring these functions together, managers pronounce “strategies.”

6. The best strategies are clear, simple, deliberate, and bold.

7. After these MBA managers have finished formulating their strategies, all the other people—known as “human resources”—must scurry around implementing them.

8. This implementation is, however, no easy matter, because although the managers who have been to business schools embrace change, many of those who haven't resist it.

9. To become such a manager, better still a “leader” who gets to sit on top of everyone else, you must first sit still for two years in business school. That enables you to manage anything. (2004, pp. 67–68)

Being irreverent, Mintzberg no doubt exaggerates, but the gist of his argument is sound—having theoretical analysts trained generically “to manage anything” or to advise others how to manage seems risky to say the least.

Then we have Pfeffer and Sutton's book (2006) Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense. Their conclusion is essentially the same: “The advice managers get from the vast and ever-expanding supply of business books, articles, gurus, and consultants is remarkably inconsistent” (p. 33). They offer chapter and verse examples to make this point stick, but I'll spare you.

What we see time and again is that theory and strategy (abstract concepts) dominate practice and implementation (grounded concepts). Pfeffer and Sutton note that Google generates at least twice as many entries for the word strategy than for the word implementation, concluding that

Judging by mentions on book titles and search engines, figuring out what to do seems to be far more important … than the ability to actually do something—such as operate the business effectively. (2006, p. 135, italics in original)

Pfeffer and Sutton conclude that the least we can do is to slow the rate of adoption of bad practices (that is, taking bad advice). In studying four “good” versus four “bad” bank closings they found that “managers at each successful closing had largely ignored the procedures developed by the retail action team and developed their own practices instead” (p. 231). As they report, “One manager held up a thick book of procedures and policies put together by the retail action teams, and bragged that the key to his success was ignoring everything in the book!” By contrast, Pfeffer and Sutton found that “managers at each bad closing lamented that they had tried to follow the official procedures closely and doing so had hampered their ability to convince customers to transfer to other branches” (p. 231).

Unfortunately, if you think Pfeffer and Sutton might themselves have the answer, think again. Try reconciling their latest books, which they wrote separately. Sutton (2010) says, “be nice”; Pfeffer (2010) wants us to grab power. Sutton confidently claims that “treating people with dignity is what good bosses do” (p. 5). He has learned this “from a huge pile of academic studies during my 30-year career as a researcher and from thousands of observations and conversations with their bosses (and their colleagues) from workplaces of all kinds” (p. 7). Pfeffer proffers that “systematic research confirms that … being politically savvy and seeking power are related to career success and even to managerial performance” (p. 4). Likability is overrated, says Pfeffer; the irony may be too much when Pfeffer warns “beware of the leadership literature” (p. 11). (Of course you can find areas of commonality if you dig, such as that grit [perseverance and resilience] is essential for success, which I have to agree with—see Chapter Two in this book.)

On the education front, take a look at the head-scratching advice on performance or merit pay. Hanushek and Lindseth (2009), an economist and lawyer respectively, advocate performance pay for teachers with this lead-in: “There is growing research to show that rewarding successful teachers is one of the most important steps a school district can take to improve achievement A bipartisan group found that our current compensation system fails our teachers and our children. There it is, pure and simple: pay teachers based on their performance, as do virtually all other professions” (pp. 237–238, italics added).

Contrast that advice with what Pfeffer and Sutton have to say on the subject: “It turns out that merit pay for teachers is an idea that is almost 100 years old and has been the subject of much research.” [They conclude], “Evidence shows … that merit pay consistently fails to improve student performance” (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006, pp. 22–23, italics added).

There you have it, pure and simple—or a hundred years of research? Both conclusions smack of dead certitude. Each draws the opposite conclusion. In truth, you would be better off not to try to determine who is right, but rather to figure out for yourself what is right.

Of course, we can't blame management consultants for everything. And my point is not to discard management theories wholesale—in fact I have learned a lot from them over the years—just don't go seeking answers in books alone. Your own reflective practice is a more important tool. Books can be useful to tweak your reflections, but evidence (and the form in which it comes) is not how good leaders think. “A large percentage of expert advice is flawed,” says Freedman as he compiles page after page of research studies in medicine, science, and business that turn out to be wrong (Freedman, 2010, p. 11). My book provides protection against bad advice because it helps change leaders learn to rely on themselves, including questioning themselves as they learn.

In my experience, effective change leaders—or any people who are successful in any walk of life—don't start with imagining the future. They...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Chapter One: Practice Drives Theory
• Chapter Two: Be Resolute
• Chapter Three: Motivate the Masses
• Chapter Four: Collaborate to Compete
• Chapter Five: Learn Confidently
• Chapter Six: Know Your Impact
• Chapter Seven: Sustain Simplexity
• References
• Index