With the New Year just underway, and many of us still determined to follow through on all those resolutions, \u00a0I thought I\u2019d write about what it takes to drive successful, lasting change, whether that change is on a personal or organizational level.<\/p>\n
First of all, understand this: change is hard. Human beings seem to be hardwired to resist it. Before we can really commit ourselves to making a change in how we think or behave, we need to be seriously dissatisfied with things as they are.\u00a0 Think about it for a moment. Have you ever made any significant change in your personal life\u2014whether in a relationship, your weight or fitness level, your career, or just some habit you\u2019d rather not have\u2014without being deeply dissatisfied about that particular issue? People who have achieved the most difficult types of change\u2014recovering from addiction, for example\u2014typically talk about having to \u201chit bottom\u201d before even being able to get started.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s true for individuals is also true for organizations\u2014which should come as no surprise, since organizations are made up of individuals, each \u201cdoing their own thing\u201d in ways that don\u2019t always align very well with the organization\u2019s stated goals or preferred practices. So when the people in an organization generally feel that things are going well\u2014when the sense is that the established ways of doing things are OK\u2014achieving real change is next to impossible.<\/p>\n
It comes down to, \u201cThings could be better but we\u2019re still delivering results. Isn\u2019t continuous improvement good enough? Why make a big change when things aren\u2019t broken?\u201d<\/p>\n
But leadership is about helping people and organizations get to a place they would not\u2014could not\u2014 achieve by themselves. That\u2019s why leaders need to be appropriately paranoid about the future. They need to cultivate an ability to look past today\u2019s success, identify the challenges (and opportunities) that others might not see, and drive the changes necessary to deal with what\u2019s coming down the road.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, that process involves identifying, leveraging\u2014and when necessary, stimulating\u2014dissatisfaction with the status quo. That doesn\u2019t mean that you as a leader run around like Chicken Little shouting that \u201cthe sky is falling.\u201d It certainly doesn\u2019t mean that you shouldn\u2019t recognize what your organization and its people are doing well. But it does mean that you need to point the way from good to great.<\/p>\n
I like to take some of my clients through an exercise I call \u201cStanding in the Future.\u201d I ask them to write a headline and an article for the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, or their professional magazine that will appear five years from now. The article should discuss what your customers and shareholders think of your products, services, and employees? It should talk about how your employees feel about the company, and touch on the impact of the company on the communities where it operates, and on the larger world. Then I ask them to identify three actions that will help them make dramatic progress towards that future in the next year. In all the times I\u2019ve done it, this simple exercise has never failed to produce a very thought provoking discussion.<\/p>\n
With this in mind, I hope you\u2019ll spend some time identifying the changes your organization needs to make, and the changes you need to make in the coming year to help the organization move in that direction. You might try \u201cstanding in the future\u201d and writing an article about what you see that others may not see. Then embrace the dissatisfaction this process may well create. Use it to get mobilized, and let me know the results!<\/p>\n
Happy New Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the New Year just underway, and many of us still determined to follow through on all those resolutions, I thought I’d write about what it takes to drive successful, lasting change, whether that change is on a personal or organizational level. First of all, understand this: change is hard. Human beings seem to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}