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The Art, Science, and Imperfectability of Organizational Change

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

By William Seidman

I’m working with one of our corporate customers to change their culture and business processes.

During ten weeks I’ve worked with 300 managers. The program has made incredible progress but isn’t complete.

I met with some of the key managers; some were disappointed in the progress we (and they) were making.  These managers said although they recognized that the company culture had changed for the better, some people hadn’t fully bought in.

How many people weren’t yet on board? 15 out of 300 — a pretty good ratio (95% success rate)  for any organization!         

Many managers have what I came to describe as an expectation of perfection. In their view, a change can be called successful only if it is total.

We talked about the progress that has been made and the imperfectability of change.

They relaxed and were able to see the good side. In fact, change that lasts is often slow and usually “imperfect,” but progress is definitely possible.

Posted in best practices, company culture, management consulting, organizational change, organizational culture | No Comments »

If Your Company Came with an Instruction Manual You Don’t Need “Strategy to Action in 10 Days”

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

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By William Seidman

Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy  “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations”  directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.

Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.

Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise:  ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”                              

We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.

Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »

How Many Consultants Does It Take To Change a Company?

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

By William Seidman

One — but only if the organization really wants to change. 

At a recent holiday party I chatted with someone who had been an executive in a family-owned ship repair company — successful for fifty years — which had finally failed.

The business had begun to decline quickly because of changing world market conditions. The owners knew their business was in trouble and brought in high-priced consultants to make recommendations.

Each recommendation was rejected as “not understanding our business.” I asked this person if the owners had really wanted to change. His frank response was,  ”Not really.”  They believed that there was a need to change and their numbers reinforced it. But in their hearts,  they really wanted to stay just the same. The desire to do nothing was stronger than the need to change.

I recently had a discussion with an executive of a high tech company about the difference between going toward something and going away from something.

His observation was that going toward something is much more powerful than leaving something.

The ship repair company’s executives were being told to go away from their comfort zone but not, in their minds, toward something promising or exciting. They didn’t have a vision, or even a picture, of what they were moving toward.

They might have been able to successfully change  had they had framed their thinking as going toward something desirable. Moving away from the old ways wasn’t enough. A positive, motivating vision was missing, and the company — like so many others that couldn’t change – is now gone.

Posted in best practices, business, management consulting, organizational change, organizational culture | No Comments »

Headquarters versus The Field: Replace “versus” with “Working With” for Great Results

Monday, December 21st, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working with a company that has both a very strong corporate headquarters culture and a very strong sales and field operations culture.  But these two vitally important parts – headquarters and sales — are often disconnected from one another and, even worse, at odds with what should be shared goals.

Headquarters designs programs that are forward-looking and innovative but, according to the people on the ground, are difficult to deploy.  The result is that the people in sales - in the field - are so focused on daily survival that they tend to produce great short-term financial results, but have neither the time nor the energy to learn new things.

Conflicts between headquarters and sales and operations result in good ideas from headquarters being derided as “fads of the week.” Often the innovative concept is discarded or, if the new idea is tried, immediate revenues may decline.

But when headquarters and the field align around a new idea, the synergy can be powerful.

How to get them to align?  Headquarters needs to be more aware of what’s really going on in the field and adjust programs to fit these conditions.  Headquarters must reduce its constant pressure for immediate numbers. The field has to be given support for learning something new. This takes time and often results in lagging numbers.

Both changes in behavior are difficult for executives to manage because they require everyone to take some risks.

Cooperating for a change can be nerve-wracking for companies since it simultaneously puts immediate revenue and the future at risk. But our experience has shown us that this cooperation ultimately produces great results.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, optimization, organizational change | No Comments »

Brains and Brawn: Integrate the Strengths of Headquarters and Your People in the Field for Maximum Power and Effectiveness

Monday, November 16th, 2009

By William Seidman

Often in large companies, the difference in the perspective and cultures of headquarters and the people in the field can be so large as to be startling. I’ve wondered, Are these people in the same company?

But I realize that each has a particular set of strengths along with some blindspots, and it’s only when they are integrated that the company gets the best results from everyone.

Headquarters tends to think more widely and theoretically. They tend to see a bigger picture and a long-term view. This type of thinking is good for an organization.

However, headquarters loses touch with operational reality very quickly. HQ tends not to understand the customer, their needs, or what it takes to sell and service them. It’s hard to make their ideas into operational reality. Too often, and sometimes unfairly, their work is seen as “more crap from headquarters.”

The field, on the other hand, tends to be great at getting something done. Field sales and service can be very effective at running the business, connecting with the customer and generating sales.

But the field’s narrow and short-term perspective — the world in which they live — doesn’t account for longer term issues. Planning and the long view are absent.

The optimum is to have the intellectual strength of HQ and the operational strength of field sales and service. The best way to attain this, we’ve found, is to have a third party facilitate the discussion. The goal is integration of these two powerful halves, resulting in a high-quality and effective new program.

Posted in best practices, business, leadership, management consulting, organizational culture | No Comments »

Talent, Ideas, and Patience: So Many Great Ideas Take Time to Pay Off

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

 By Rick Grbavac

Jim Clifton, CEO and Chairman of Gallup,  comments in The Gallup Management Journal :

“In the world we’re competing in now, solving problems isn’t about spending money. It’s about understanding and managing ideas and talent — and states of mind. That’s where the new leadership breakthroughs will be. Leaders who can quantify states of mind and make decisions about their constituencies based on that information are the ones who will lead the world.”  

This makes perfect sense to me.  But when he goes on to say that companies have maxed all of the benefits of performance improvement ideas, I think he has been sitting in his office a little too much. I think leaders have a tendency to want to talk about the next shiny ball and have trouble staying with good ideas that just take time to fully pay off. 

The idea of tapping into the ideas, beliefs and actions of the 1 in 10,000 is exactly the right idea.  He just left off the part about getting the other 9,999 to embrace those ideas and truly elevate performance.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational culture | No Comments »

Improving Organizational Performance without Training

Monday, October 19th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m currently working with graduate students at San Diego State University on one of my favorite topics: improving organizational performance.

We’re looking at non-training ways to improve performance.

Now a team in this class is going to study Cerebyte - you can find us on their website, which is a truly interesting place:  “PINOT,” Performance Improvement Non-Training Solutions.

Washington, DC: I’ll present A Scientific Approach to Corporate Cultural Change (That Works-and How!)  to the ISPI Potomac Chapter in Washington, DC,  Nov 10, 2009 at 6:00 pm EST.  Sign up here, and I’ll see you there!

 

 

Posted in best practices, captology, management consulting, organizational assessments, organizational change | No Comments »

Re-energize and Passion-up: When Good Female (and Male) Managers Want Out

Friday, October 9th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

Smart women in management make companies stronger and keeping them requires concentrated programs. This comes from the research that economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett performed in preparing her newest book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down. In tough times, “high-powered women were more than twice as likely as men - 84 percent compared with 40 percent - to be seriously thinking” of leaving their companies.

In her article “Are Your Best Female Employees a Flight Risk?” Hewlett asserts that women were not thinking about leaving to spend more time with their families but, rather, because “they no longer felt challenged by or passionate about their work.” So companies such as Intel and Johnson and Johnson have created programs to address issues directly related to their senior management women. 

The idea in the article that jumped out at me was the idea of women managers losing their passion. I don’t think that this is a problem only for women executives. All knowledge workers from time to time need to re-energize and passion-up. The lull in business activity over the past year weighs heavily on all of us. It is time to re-vision, energize yourself and passion-up for this economic recovery.

Posted in best practices, company culture, employee retention, employee turnover, knowledge workers, management consulting, organizational culture | No Comments »

Transformative Change’s “Ah-ha!” Moment

Monday, September 28th, 2009

By William Seidman

In setting a goal of transformative organizational change, management typically goes out and presents sweeping images of the future, which people tend to regard as meaningful but distant. We continue to work toward these changes until, finally, there’s a moment when it isn’t so distant: the transformation is  palpable or, even, visible.

Then there’s that moment when each person knows the change is real — and it really hits them.

This has happened to me twice in the last few weeks. A service person was going along fine until she hit an “avoid” section of her old program that told her that a key aspect of her program was being obsoleted.

She just froze. She couldn’t believe it.

The other was a senior manager who was reviewing the summary portion of our persuasive technology. When he got to the portion that would be summarized to him, he realized that this was for real. He was going to be holding others accountable for a significant change, but he was going to be accountable, too.

For both of them, there was a moment of terror.

Ultimately, this was good because the terror happened in safe environment and could be worked out.

But the moment of the realization was very clear and specific and not always completely comfortable. It’s an important part of the process and something we prepare for and support.

Posted in business, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, organizational change, training | No Comments »

From Transactional to Transformational: Teaching People to Think Big

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’ve been working  on trying to make a transformation inside two organizations that are focused on the transactional.  In fact, they’ve been completely transactional: driven by tactical, daily transactions - daily orders, daily service requests. They quite literally have been pedaling as fast as they can.

One is a sales organization, the other is a service organization. Each would like to change its culture to one that emphasizes sustained client relationships.  

Organizational psychologist Ron Riggio’s distinction between the transactional and the transformational applies to organizations, too.

The direct customer contact people like the idea of becoming transformational because transformational jobs are much more interesting than transactional jobs.. The managers are having a hard time; most became managers because they were better at transactions than their peers.

Now they are being asked to lead a transformation - and they don’t know what to do; they keep trying to convert things back to transactions, which block the change to a transformational environment.

Our challenge is to help transactional people to become transformational people, because only then can lasting change occur.

Posted in best practices, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

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