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Change Intelligence
Use the Power of CQ to Lead Change That Sticks
Barbara A. Trautlein
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eBook - ePub
Change Intelligence
Use the Power of CQ to Lead Change That Sticks
Barbara A. Trautlein
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About This Book
Whether you're on the front line or in the executive suite, you can build your"Change IntelligenceĀ®"āand create results that matter at all levels of the organization. In today's business world, everyone knows that we all face constant change, whether it's the implementation of a new IT system, a reorganization, or a full merger or acquisition. We also know that the ability to handle such change makes the difference between success and failureāand has a direct effect on the bottom line. Because we understand this, twenty-first century executives, supervisors, and project managers have plenty of methodologies for managing change. Yet, somehow, our failure rate when we try to implement major organizational change is still shockingly high. In this innovative guide, Barbara Trautlein argues that our current approaches are inadequate when they are not used in tandem with a deep understanding of Change IntelligenceĀ®, or CQĀ®āthe skill set that allows you to lead your team or company through vital transformations. You'll explore how to lead change by engaging the Heart, enlightening the Head, and equipping the Hands, which when combined enable you to overcome resistance and achieve results. And once you learn your own Change Leader Style, you'll go on to discover practical strategies for leveraging your strengths and shoring up your weak spots. ?Trautlein, a leading authority on change leadership, keeps the theory light and delves into insightful case studies drawn from her decades of experience working with hundreds of top organizations as well as from her research derived from the global Change Intelligence/CQ AssessmentĀ® database of thousands of change leaders around the world. Her example- and evidence-based approach will help you plainly see how you can start driving real transformationānot by adopting yet another new tool but by bolstering your own capacity for change leadership.
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PART I
CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS
In Part I youāll learn what CQ is and why it mattersāfor your organization, team, and career. Youāll explore the psychological and neurological bases for why we often struggle with change. Zeroing in on the unique change challenges experienced by leaders at different levels in the organizational hierarchy, youāll see how CQ operates in frontline, mid-management, and executive roles. Through learning the stories of real leaders facing major transformations, youāll see how developing change intelligence can help lead change that sticks.
Delving into the case studies will give you a sense of your own CQ and whether you tend to lead change with a focus on the āHeartā (people), āHeadā (purpose), or āHandsā (process). Youāll be invited to engage in self-reflection and observation, to diagnose your own CQ tendencies, strengths, and developmental needs. You will also obtain information about the CQ/Change Intelligence Assessment, the tool you can use to determine which of the seven change leader styles best fits you.
CHAPTER 1
CQ: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME!
Meet three change leaders.
ā¢Glen is the CEO of a manufacturing plant that is the largest employer in a small Midwestern town. The plantās been shut down for two years, but it was just acquired by a new firm and is about to restart operations.
ā¢James is a nursing supervisor in a hospitalās intensive care unit, and heās embarking on an initiative that he hopes will improve the patient experience. At the same time, the healthcare system his hospital is a part of is going through considerable cost cutting and consolidation across its regional operations.
ā¢Ann is the project manager in charge of a large-scale IT systems implementation for the sales team of her global consumer products firm. But the company has a strong history of resisting innovation; if it was ānot invented here,ā most people arenāt interested in using it.
What do each of these scenarios have in common? Major change is coming. What do each of these leaders have in common? They need to lead change effectivelyāfor the benefit of their organization, their team, and their career.
When you hear the word change, is your first thought positive or negative? Are you filled with excitement and anticipation or with fear and loathing?
We often assume that because weāre constantly bombarded with change in our professional and personal lives, we should know how to cope with it. We feel like weāve been through so much change that weāre used to it by now. We tell ourselves we can handle it, and we assume we can help others through most change processes. But from what Iāve seen, the reality is often quite the opposite.
Psychologists have conducted many studies showing that, almost all the time, our first reaction to change is to perceive it as a threatāsomething that causes apprehension, if not outright fear. It can be very difficult for most people to adopt the mindset that change can be positive, and that the new can be better, more enjoyable, and more attractive than the old.
As David Rock, one of the leaders in the emerging field of the neuroscience of leadership, and Jeffrey Schwartz, a leading researcher in neuroplasticity, note in their article āThe Neuroscience of Leadership,ā āchange equals pain: Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort . . . Try to change another personās behavior, even with the best possible justification, and he or she will experience discomfort. The brain sends out powerful messages that something is wrong, and the capacity for higher thought is decreased.ā1
As a leader, you are often called upon to lead change. How can you learn to approach change positively yourself, manage change so that it results in proactive benefits, and lead others to accept and even thrive in change?
Why Do We Still Struggle with Leading Change?
In the modern workplace, change is the only constantāan observation that is no less true because of its frequent repetition. Yet, as Rick Maurer points out in the latest edition of his book Beyond the Wall of Resistance, the failure rate of major changes in organizations has been alarmingly and consistently high since the mid-nineties.2 In another study, researchers discovered that 86 percent of respondents āagreed that ābusiness transformation has become a central way of working.ā [However,] the proportion who believe that business transformation is something at which their company excels . . . is just 30 percent.ā3 Every time one of these change projects fails, leaders and their teams get more discouraged, reducing the chances that the next project will succeed.
Weāre not talking about trifling changes, either. In a recent poll,4 human resource professionals were asked, āWhat is the most significant change your organization will face in the next six months?ā Hereās the breakdown of their answers:
ā¢Organizational restructure: 51 percent
ā¢New leadership: 20 percent
ā¢Acquisition/merger: 13 percent
ā¢New product launch: 10 percent
ā¢New technology: 6 percent
These are all large-scale changes that affect nearly every corner of an organization. Done right, they can enhance a companyās performance dramatically; mishandled, they can turn into costly disasters.
So, while most companies today are highly experienced with change, they are far less experienced with change done right. Why is that? If your company is facing a major change and youāve been asked to play a major role in it, youāre probably wondering that too.
As it turns out, we know a lot about organizational transformation. For over two decades, authors have written hundreds of books on change management. Weāve developed multiple models for leading change, spanning from whole-systems approaches to methods like āpreferred futuringā and āappreciative inquiryā to name but a few. Weāve conducted studies and found that positive change requires, among other things, a commitment from senior management, a āguiding coalition,ā and a ācompelling vision.ā Experts emphasize the āburning platformā: our workplace must be on fire before instinct kicks in and tells us to jump into the cold sea of change. We also know we have to answer the WIFM questionāāWhatās in it for me?āāwhen persuading others to adopt a change. Weāve developed organizational-readiness assessments, leadership-alignment and stakeholder-engagement tools, and communication plans to help us through change.
With all this knowledge and all these methodologies, why do such a high number of major change initiatives fail? Itās not that any of these models or tools are wrong or uselessātheyāre just incomplete.
Successful transformations require more than book knowledge and theory, regardless of how sage and vetted the advice might be. To lead change, change leaders must know themselves. They must ask and be able to answer questions like these: What are my tendencies in leading change? What do I focus on, and what do I miss? What am I good at, and what can I get better at?
This powerful self-knowledge is the first step in developing change intelligence. And as leaders develop their own CQ, they begin to raise the CQ of their teams and the organization as a whole, dramatically increasing the probability of positive, pervasive change that sticks. Only when change leaders are equipped and empowered with this understanding of their personal working style can they guide others through transformation.
CQ: A Prehistory
In the early 1900s, Alfred Binet developed the first tool for understanding our own mental ability: the IQ test. Over the last century, many others developed cognitive tests and tools to help us understand everything from learning disabilities to our personal learning styles. By the 1980s, thanks to psychologist Howard Gardner, weād begun to appreciate the existence of āmultiple intelligences.ā Gardner helped us understand that people can be smart in different ways, beyond the traditional focus on raw intellectual intelligence. Some people excel in visual-spatial intelligence (artists, architects), others in body-kinesthetic intelligence (athletes, dancers), and still others in musical intelligence (composers, singers), to name but a few from Gardnerās original list of intelligences.
Then, in the 1990s, emotional intelligence (EQ) came to the fore. Daniel Goleman popularized the term with his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, and created a model that demonstrated the importance of self-awareness and self-management, as well as social-awareness and relationship-management, in optimal functioning in life and work. Much research has been done on EQ, including the famous study at Bell Labs, which showed that EQ, not IQ, separated superior performers from average ones in the workplace.
Today, thanks to the work of Gardner, Goleman, and many others, we have a wide variety of self-assessments to help people evaluate and develop various aspects of their own āintelligences.ā Weāve seen an explosion in our understanding of how our minds, bodies, and emotions work together. Now, weāre even finding provocative insights into our own behaviorāincluding how our brains react to changeāfrom neuroscience. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz write that āmanagers who understand the recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can lead and influence mindful change: organizational transformation that takes into account the physiological nature of the brain, and the ways in which it predisposes people to resist some forms of leadership and accept others.ā5
The CQ System
Change intelligence, or CQ, is the awareness of oneās own change leadership style and the ability to adapt oneās style to be optimally effective in leading change across a variety of situations. The idea behind the CQ System presented in this book is that each of us has a distinctive method of leading through organizational change. Just as we can measure our IQ, our EQ, and any number of our other intelligences, we can also assess our change intelligence. In doing so, we learn a great deal about how we can leverage our personal change leadership style to lead change far more effectively than before.
As noted earlier, itās not as if business leaders havenāt acknowledged the importance of organizational change. Weāve developed ways to gauge the progress of a change project (such as change management audits) and methods for understanding the people impacted by change (e.g., Who Moved My Cheese?). But until now, thereās been no assessment specifically designed to help change leaders understand themselves, even though this is the crucial starting point of any successful change initiative.
The CQ System Iāve developed enables change leaders to diagnose their change intelligence, equips them with applied developmental strategies, and shows them how to be powerful agents of transformation. Iāve spent the last two decades partnering with clientsāfrom steel mills and sales teams, to refineries and retail, to healthcare and high techāto lead organizational, team, and personal transformations. As a scientist-practitioner, I have conducted global change management research with leaders around the world and incorporated insights from psychology and neuroscience. All of that experience has gone into the creation of the CQ System.
During much of my early career, in the struggling plants of the Rust Belt, I facilitated various types of engagement processes, from self-managed teams and employee involvement to total quality management and lean manufacturing. More often than not, the senior management (and often joint union-management) teams I worked with thought I could come in, do a one-off soft-skills training event, and all of a sudden people would know how to work in a streamlined team environment, or make meaningful cost-saving suggestions, or conduct effective problem-solving sessions. I got in the habit of telling them Iād left my magic teamwork dust at home that day.
Just because we have mouths doesnāt mean we know how to communicate. Just because we have brains doesnāt mean we can solve problems. And just because weāre social animals doesnāt mean we know how to behave as productive, respectful members of a team.
Just a few years ago, when I was in India presenting at a conference on IT leadership and managing change, much of the conversation centered on frustrations IT professionals had as they tried to implement technology transformations. Their complaints ranged from business leaders ānot getting itā and peer managers in other functional areas ānot wanting itā to frontline employees ānot using it.ā The mindset these comments revealed was interesting. These leaders saw change as something they did to others, not with or for them. They saw others as resisting change, when in reality, the āresistersā probably didnāt understand the change, feel committed to it, or see its benefits. I wanted these leaders to turn the mirror back on themselves and see that the negative behaviors they saw in their teams were likely a reflection of a lack of effective cha...