Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change

Inspire the People and Succeed Where Others Fail

H. James Dallas

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119102205
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119102212
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Conquer the most daunting change initiative with the right people, tools, and strategies.

James Dallas' Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change is an informative, insightful guide to effectively leading the transition through change. While most change management books present case studies about what happened at other companies, this book is based on the author's own experiences managing over 10 transformational and turnaround initiatives, 15 acquisition integrations, and 5 operations/quality shared services centers of excellence. By relating personal lessons learned, how they were subsequently applied, and how you can benefit from them, this book provides a unique first-hand perspective on successful agents of change. You'll learn the qualities and skills required to usher in the new paradigm, and how to break a large initiative into manageable chunks that are more likely to proceed as planned. By crafting your strategy based on proven methods, you're far and away more likely to meet or even exceed your change objectives.

The majority of change initiatives fail because people mistakenly think that a change agent is the same as a project leader. They're not. This book shows you why, and how get the tools, strategies, and people you need at the helm of your initiative to come out the other side much stronger as an organization.

• Learn the critical skills required for effective change management
• Assess the difficulty and politics of a change initiative
• Choose the right people to help implement the change
• See past obstacles and lead effectively in a crisis

Change is occurring within and across all industries, countries, and organizations. They begin with the best of intentions, but most fail to meet their objectives. Don't let your organization be one of the failures. Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change shows you how to plan, lead, and manage a successful transition.

Part I

Priorities

Chapter 1
Set a Course for Change

I truly believe that the ultimate success or failure of any change initiative isn't decided along the way, but right at the outset. Unfortunately, most traditional project management methodologies set you up to fail. They almost invariably start with a focus on the problem statement. They teach you how to do the analytical work required to define the problem (a.k.a. opportunity). By analytical, I mean taking a structured approach to gathering the facts and making them as quantifiable as possible.

Of course, defining the problem is necessary, but the purely analytical approach ignores the most important data you'll need up front in order to succeed. Before you can set a course for change—in other words, set your priorities—you first need to understand the existing priorities of the people who you'll ask to change. That's the most important information you need to lead change successfully. Your priorities will never become their priorities without understanding their starting places, which is exactly why most change initiatives fail. Understanding others' priorities upfront—both their daily issues and the underlying cultural impulses of the organization—will help you craft a far more accurate problem statement.

It starts with a shift in perspective, which is the cognitive equivalent of a person taking his glasses off: get in close and rely on others to see. I started practicing this long before I wore a tie to work for the very simple reason that I was born nearsighted. I could only see in the radius of a few feet, and as a result I learned to use what was in focus to maximum advantage. For example, on the basketball court, I became hyperaware of what the other players around me were doing, a skill that made me MVP even though I could barely see beyond my own arm. (I never played in my glasses.) I could learn more about what was going to happen by watching the people than I could by watching the ball. I also realized that getting close to something—like the chalkboard, for example—was the best way to make sense of it.

So it goes with defining any new initiative. When you get started, go into the engagement with the attitude of a learner, not of an expert. Listen more than you talk. You'll get better answers and invest people right from the start. Once you understand what people's current priorities and practices are, you can begin to set a course to changing them.

The Three Questions

A good friend always said to me, “Data is objective; however, the interpretation of that data is subjective.” More specifically, people look at and interpret data through their own lenses, not yours, so your discovery process starts with them. Their version of the data is as important as the numbers or facts themselves. Therefore, the first data I gather when I come into a new situation is via a survey of everyone involved.

I ask the following three questions to my direct leadership team and to the key internal and external stakeholders, in particular customers, to whom we are providing services or products:

1. What are the top three things we are doing well?
2. What are the top three things we are doing badly?
3. What are the top three things we need to do to fix them?

The questions are simple on the surface, but they provide very powerful insight not only into the problem(s), but also into the existing priorities and how well the team is delivering on them. Note that I ask the questions in person instead of sending out a survey for people to complete. I center the discussion around a meal, and I go to them instead of having them come to me. This helps me get the best answers and starts building engagement early.

Often you'll find that by the team's own metrics, they're doing great. “Our success rate is 80 percent,” they'll tell you. “We have a track record of finishing projects on time and on budget.” But that's just part of the story. You get the other part by interviewing the clients or end users—enough of them so that you can spot outliers and see the pattern. Often, at that point, an entirely different story emerges. While a project may have been finished on time, it didn't meet the end user's needs. In the course of these surveys, you'll find out very quickly where there's alignment and where there isn't.

As you review and interpret answers from the team, you're getting a sense of the people and their individual priorities first. But you're also looking for a guide to the organization's practical problems. Primarily these will be:

• Operational issues. Are we having customer service issues, quality issues, supply chain issues, employee issues, regulatory issues, or ethical issues that are adversely affecting our customer relationships, employee relationships, brand, and so on?
• Lags and shortfalls. Are we behind on meeting the quarterly and annual budgets, behind time- or dollar-wise with key projects, behind on meeting regulatory commitments, and so on?
• Strategic direction. What ideas should we pursue, what impact could they have, what will success look like, and what might be the priorities, politics, and people dynamics involved?

Finally, your interviews will yield one more set of key data: team wins. Keep watch for what the team is truly doing well. You need to know so that you can leverage those strengths and also celebrate them. People feel much more positive about change when they know their value is recognized.

Assessing the Culture

As you collect answers to the three questions, you'll begin to get a sense of the cultural impulses that are driving people's priorities. To change priorities, you have to change the culture. As the saying goes, “Culture eats strategy for lunch and new ideas are the appetizers.” Organizational culture—the shared beliefs and behaviors—often cascades from the top down, so changing priorities usually starts at the leadership level.

Over the years, I have seen three typical cultures of dysfunction again and again when companies or teams within them are in trouble. Figure out which you're dealing with, and tailor action accordingly.

The PowerPoint Mafia

In a PowerPoint mafia, executives and managers focus their time and attention on studies and assessments rather than concrete action. They aren't interested in changing because they think they're already the best. These folks love to hold meetings and prepare detailed slide presentations that lead nowhere. Indeed, their presentations are the best looking and best delivered you will ever see—in fact, that's often how they measure success. The top priorities here are short-term profitability and margins, even at the expense of growth. They are largely ignorant of (or closing their eyes to) changing market dynamics and customer needs.

The reason why I call them a mafia is that they are very skilled at taking anyone out who dares to question their way of life. Indeed, many a change leader has gone the way of Jimmy Hoffa, never to be seen again, because he suggested changing priorities and doing things differently. Even worse, sometimes these organizations see their customers as the enemy. Executives at one company I observed suggested they should stop doing business with their biggest customer, an account worth nearly a billion dollars, because the customer was demanding (and honestly deserved) better value.

PowerPoint mafias tend to be large, previously successful organizations that are now stagnating or adrift. They are riding the wave of a previous innovation that has given the organization a dominant market position; however, growth has started to slow. When you survey people within the organization, you're likely to hear about how they are the industry leader, how profitable they are, and how good their products are. They are oblivious to or dismissive of their competition. They may have things to complain about internally, but when it comes to how to fix those things, they don't have much to say. They're also good at telling you why any given solution you might offer is bound to fail.

Customers of a PowerPoint mafia say things like, “hard to do business with,” “slow to respond,” or “provides solutions without understanding our problems.” They're likely to be searching for alternatives, which can actually be a blessing because it can provide a needed wake-up call. This is true whether you're talking about a company or a specific service group within a company. For example, working with one corporate IT department, we thought we had standardized the company on a leading customer relationship management (CRM) package. In interviewing the internal clients, we found that we had over 30 instances of people “going rogue” and using another CRM program. Who could blame them? They told us they could install it more quickly and run it cheaper than we could at corporate. Overall, it was a better solution, and the CRM company was much more responsive to their needs than we were. That wake-up call was better than any speech I could make to convince people that we had work to do.

When dealing with this kind of culture, change agents need an external fire to light an internal one. Move too early and you'll find yourself in a bag in the river. Wait for those fires—loss of market share to competitors, clients jumping ship—and use them to shift the attitude of leadership. Only at that point will you have their full support and protection in changing priorities and processes.

This culture is in contrast to the next one, in which it takes a big internal fire to change the priorities.

The Firehouse

Within this culture, employees know things are broken and that they are in trouble; however, everyone thinks it's someone else's fault. The top guys aren't leaders, they're firefighters. They don't even want to take the time to meet with you to answer the three questions. They're too busy firefighting—as they see it, heroically saving the organization again and again from the failures of others. You normally find this culture in mature industries or in departments that aren't high on the executive team's list of strategic priorities.

The top priority within this culture is—no surprise—putting out fires. They will recall with fondness the fires they have put out and how hard they worked to do so. They are proud that they are always ready to answer the call. Leaders in this culture can tell you things that need fixing, but the fixes are all tactical and generally related to the latest fire. Unlike the P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It Ain't Easy Being Green
• Part I: Priorities
• Part II: Politics
• Part III: People
• Part IV: Perseverance
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement