Speaker #0Welcome to Ask Dr. Change. I'm Dr. Linda Ackerman-Anderson. I'm happy to have you join me today to explore how to seriously uplevel your leadership and consulting to transformational changes, all through conscious change leadership. Welcome. Today's episode is about raising leaders' awareness of the people and process requirements of leading change. The topic. It comes from Margaret Eva, who sent in this question. How do I help leaders to see the people and process, especially process, instead of just content? It's a great question, Margaret Eva, and it's an important one for many change consultants who are not specifically positioned to influence leaders in the jobs you currently hold. For me, leaders need to expand their understanding of leading change beyond just getting the solution. Margaret Eva's question comes off of a model that I have shared with you. I'm going to share it again here. The three critical focus areas of leading change, content, people, and process. And notice the graphic is a three-legged stool because all three legs are required. for your stool to stand, and for your change effort to be successful. So the first leg is the content. It's the what. It refers to what the change effort is actually about. The organizational focus. It could be systems, structure, strategy, business process, product, service, maybe a change in culture, behavior, and skills. That's the what. Like, what are we trying to change here? The next leg of the stool is the people leg. This is a lot of where change management focuses. This is on who has to change and how do we actually deal with them. I like to call this the human drama of the change effort. It's handling all the human dynamics of people's mindsets about the change, their motivation. Are they willing to change? Do they want to change? Are they committed to change? Their emotional reactions, resistance, we get a lot of need to attend to that. Their behavior, their relationships, how well they're engaged in the change. Are you engaging them? Are they engaged in making this be successful? It could be the politics. It could be the cultural dynamics. It could be the needs for development for them to be successful in the future. There's a big roster of... topics around people. And our major motivation here is to have leaders design their change strategy so that it minimizes the negative effects on people and raises the game and the possibility of them contributing their best. Then the third leg of the stool is the process. This is how we're going to make the change, how we're going to get from where we are today to where we need to go. It's the way in which you design the steps for planning, designing the solution, implementing, sustaining the results. It's the A to Z roadmap of change. It includes how you govern. It includes, if you have multiple projects or sub-projects, how you integrate them to accelerate them and pace them and sequence them. It's about your engagement strategy, your communications, and how you make course corrections throughout the change effort. Now, from this perspective, the process is actually primary, which is a part of Margaret Eve's question. So process is designed to get you the best content solution in a way that people both want it and are able to succeed in it. So the process piece is really important here. Because change is a process, it's not an event. It's not just give me a solution and get it in place, which is a lot of what traditional leadership thinks about change. I need to make this change, give it to a project team, appoint a project manager, get the solution designed and put it in place, deploy it. Well, that's a very limited view of what's required to lead change successfully. So. Margaret Eve's question is, how do we get leaders' attention about expanding their awareness so that they can see it's more than just getting the right solution. It's also about the people and the process, which they need to have their fingers on. They can't just delegate it to a team. So my main strategy I want to talk about is assessing the organization's recent history so that you can surface the answers to critical questions. In recent change efforts, the leaders get the results they want. Were the results able to be adopted and sustained? What process was used? Did it work? Was it efficient? What stood in the way of their success? What issues might have been missed? My prediction is the likely issues that an assessment would surface would likely fall into the people and process legs of the stool. These are costly. You may get a great solution, but you won't get it to produce the results it needs over time. So how do you go about getting an assessment underway? What are the critical issues that the organization is currently focusing on? that you may want to surface if we can talk about our track record with change and improve it, that would be a welcome pathway to doing an assessment. So you would be assessing, obviously, various topics related to content, people, and process, and interviewing people who have had a leadership position, as well as the recipients of change and middle management. they have an impact on how change is run in the organization. How can you raise the issue of obtaining better results? Again, through an assessment, it doesn't have to be wide scale. I would suggest more face-to-face rather than a survey so that you can actually get people's thinking, you get people's language that can be put into a thematic report about the people and process issues. that the changes need to embody and expand on than they have in the past. Another question I would ask you to think about is what are your leaders' pain points? What do they listen to? What gets their attention? I often say, what's their currency? And I'm not talking about money. It's like, what really do they pay attention to? If you don't have those answers, who might? Who has access to the leaders? Who has their ear? And do you have access to them to raise the particular possibility of strengthening the way in which changes are led in the organization? So what are their pain points? And do they relate just to we got the wrong solution or people didn't want it or we didn't get sustained benefits or it took too long or it was too costly? And in the context of leading change is helpful, but it's also. important in general strategically to understand what your leaders pay attention to and then how to get the questions to them. Now, another strategy to consider is expanding leaders' awareness of what it takes to lead, especially transformational change, through your executive and leadership development curriculum. Are leaders being taught about leading change? beyond project management? Are they exploring the possibilities for becoming really effective change leaders in the organization? Is it possible to build in change leadership, especially conscious change leadership, skills, strategies, competencies into existing curricula in executive and leadership development? These are important things to understand so that The development of change leadership has legs in various places in the organization, not just through you as a consultant, but other areas, which also I would surface performance leadership, performance management as another avenue to influence putting in change leadership capabilities. So in attending to people in process, it's important to get the attention. and engagement of your project managers and your change managers. How are they positioned? What do they pay attention to? Are they attending to process? Certainly change management is attending to people, but does their attention go beyond resistance, adoption, and training? Because there are so many other people dynamics, again, the human drama that need attention. So it's not just leaders that we may need to expand their awareness. It's also project management people and change management people. The three-legged stool relates to all of them. And so how can each expand the services that they apply when they apply it in the process of leading change so that they can add greater value? Another question I have is how can human resources play a part? We frequently have conversations about human resources becoming much more strategic partners with the executive team around the issues they bring to the table that can support better performance in the organization. How about performance of change, performance of achieving sustained results, and then certainly the development of capabilities at all levels in the organization, from your employee base, your frontline supervisors, middle management, upper management, and senior management. HR can have a very strong play in how they can support the organization to do better with change, to raise its track record. And so how can HR be helpful? And do they have the ear of the senior executives when major changes are being launched? It's important to think about the changes that may be underway now or on the horizon so that now would be the time to attempt to improve them, strengthen the approach, expand the process and the strategy. And so it may be very timely if major changes are happening or being planned in the organization to raise the call for how do we get better results faster and less costly, right? And the Change Leaders Roadmap, Conscious Change Leadership, and the Three-Legged Stool are all avenues to support that outcome. I want you to think about the big picture that's surrounding the changes being made. How else can you influence them? Are there environmental forces that are not being attended to that, again, I'm thinking about the kinds of questions that you can raise that will get leaders' attention? Are there dynamics that are costly in the organization that the leaders are not paying attention to? What questions do you have that you think the executives will want to answer about the content, the solution? about the people dynamics, about the climate, the culture, the relationships, the modeling being done, and how about the process? When does the project team get involved? Is it possible to set up changes earlier in the process so that the leaders play more of an influential role in setting it up for success, which is a process focus? So think in terms of the results. Better results, more sustainable, faster adoption, less expensive, less work to be done, greater capacity. All of these are benefits that may be what the leaders will pay most attention to. So how do we get leaders' attention? That's Margaret Eve's question. How do we get leaders' attention? Again, direct avenue if you can go directly. Or... through an alternative route of someone else who has their attention. I will share with you in the very first major change effort that I ever supported was with Sun Petroleum Products Company. And this is decades ago now in the late 70s. But I had heard the CEO wanted to make a major change in the structure of the organization. The content, paying no attention to people or process. I went to my boss, who was the executive in charge of administration and human resources, and I said, take me to the president. I have critical questions with what I hear he wants to do, and I'm concerned that what he's going to do in his approach will not be successful. My boss was a little taken aback at my chutzpah, I will say, about asking for that. But he went ahead, obviously, with me. and set up time with the CEO. And what was to be a 30-minute conversation about what he wanted to do, I asked questions about people. I asked questions about process because all he was attending to was content. My questions were, how do you think your executives will feel about making this major change in the structure? They're not all going to like it. And he said, oh, they're all good soldiers, they'll do what I want. And I said, I want to caution you. They may be good soldiers, but they also have a lot at stake politically in what you're attempting to do. And how about the process? He said, I'll just tell them what I want to do. I said, who's going to figure out the best solution, the best structure? How can you engage critical people in the organization whose jobs are going to be directly impacted by this to come up with the best structure? Well, that 30-minute conversation turned into two hours. And we were off and running with a massive transformation in the organization. And I was put on special assignment. to deal with the people and process issues that were inevitable in the kind of change that he wanted to make. His focus, again, was content, and mine was people and process. In that particular situation, because I was not familiar with the content of the organization, structure, and the various products, I was double teamed with another executive, not senior executive, but upper middle management. who was very savvy and a couple of years from retirement. So he'd spent his entire life understanding the content in the organization. And we were partnered to lead this two-year massive transformation. And they gave me the license permission to ask the people in process questions because my framing of those questions, this is a critical competency for us. My framing of those questions was... all in the context of weak links, I will say, the possibilities of failure. And I made them realistic to people's positions and names so that the CEO could actually feel, wow, if I don't get engagement of my senior team, I'm going to have major problems here. If I don't get engagement of the upper middle managers whose lives are going to be radically different, we're going to have major problems here. And so The asking of the questions was really critical to get the attention of the CEO of the president. Now, I went through the second strategy of, well, my boss, the VP of admin and HR, had direct contact with the president and his respect. And so that is how I ended up getting there. So you would need to figure out, do you have direct access? Or is there someone else who could lead you there? I will share one other story with you from also from my time at Sun. And it was during this process, this major transformation. One of the executives was having challenges with his team. And he called me and he said, is there a way that you can support me with my team? And I said, well, I have a team assessment. And if you're open to the feedback, then I'm happy to do that assessment, give you and the team feedback and see what we can do. Well, that work was a very positive piece of work. It was challenging for this executive who definitely needed feedback. But I share that with you not because of doing that kind of assessment, but because of the relationship that it built between me and this executive. He trusted me. He knew I would respect the data, give the feedback in a way that he could hear it, and that I would support his team to be more effective and therefore his whole department, which was major, to be more effective in the organization. So we built a strong relationship through a different door, not a direct relationship to start with, but because of that team assessment. From that day on, I could knock on his door at five o'clock in the afternoon and his door was closed, so I had to knock on it. And he would invite me in and look at me and say, okay, what did I do now? And he was open to the coaching about people in process issues because he trusted me. So again, another strategy is what other services might you apply that will build the kinds of relationships that will allow you to knock on the door at five o'clock and be able to provide guidance. on the people and process issues that are showing up in that leader's change efforts or team or whatever. Because of that, he and the other executives became much more savvy about the implications of the people and process issues, dynamics, and requirements in terms of being successful in change. So that's what I wanted to share with you. And again, thank you, Margaret Eva for the question. It's really an important one for us. as we strive to have greater influence and set up our change efforts for success from the beginning. In this episode, I have a pro tip for you, and it is this. How can you stay strategic? How does what you are doing fit and serve the big picture of what the organization is attempting to do? So often we get ourselves mired up in a tool, an assessment, a specific action, a detail, a tactic. And we're working at lower levels, administrative levels of change. And so my encouragement to you is to think big picture. What are the dynamics happening around you? What's required? What might be missed that isn't being seen? What questions need to be asked? This is an important way that you can be seen differently, have more value, be able to contribute on a larger, more strategic level. and therefore be seen and positioned as a more strategic player when change efforts are being launched. So being strategic, I would encourage you to think about what does that mean? How can I do it? Who else can influence my development as a strategic thinker in this organization? What questions aren't being asked? What's being missed that if we could shed light on it would have a significant leveraged impact. So answer those questions for yourself. My personal reflection for you is about how you may be showing up in the face of chaos, in the face of unknown, in the face of maybe having taken the wrong path or a project needing to be course corrected or realigned or even shut down. What does that do for you? What does that do inside of you? What are the messages you're telling yourself? What are those internal voices saying? And how is that demonstrated in your behavior and your reactions out in the world when you're at work? How are you showing up? Now, the reflection there is what's underlying how you're showing up? Is it fear? Is it concern? Is it being out of control? Is it competence? Is it not looking good? What are the underlying dynamics? needs do you have that you want to make sure influence the way in which you're being seen? And so being able to be conscious of how you're showing up, your own mindset, your own behaviors, the way you're handling your relationships, the way you're handling your emotions or others' emotions, all of that is a part of way of being. And so how are you showing up? What is your way of being a spirit. especially when things are not going well. Really important to get on top of that and be able to neutralize the negative emotional triggers that you may be having so you can stay objective and get back on the positive path as quickly as possible. Well, I hope you found some value in this today. Content, people, process, all three need attention. Probably. whether or not directly from you, but from others in the organization, how can you ensure that the leaders understand all three are requirements for their success? Thanks for spending some time with me today. I hope you gained some valuable insights for your work. Please send me your questions and challenges by going to AskDrChange.com.
